Gravity and Volume Questions

[explosivebeer]

I just made a batch of EdWort's Haus Pale Ale last night. After doing my mash and sparges, I cooled a sample of wort down to 75*f and it measured in at 1.046.

I completely forgot to take into account the fact that the volume was between 6.0-6.5 gallons and I wanted to get the gravity up to the expected 1.051 so I added 3/4 cup brown sugar (that's all the brown sugar I had on hand) because it sounded interesting at the time.

Everything else went according to schedule, although I ended up boiling off half a gallon too much. I now have exactly five gallons at 1.056.

Most of my recipes have gone without major problems so I don't know how to adjust for them when they do happen. I think my gravity was actually fine but I'm just curious what effect the added brown sugar is going to have.

And has anyone added distilled water to their carboy to get the volume back, or does that cause problems of its own?

Thanks for any advice you may have!

 

[AdIn]

I don't think 3/4 cup of sugar is going to make any taste impact on 5 gallons batch. Water wise - few times I added store-bought water to the cooled wort when I had to bring OG down to spec. There is no problem associated with it as long as your water is clean.

 

[ohiobrewtus]

I have never added water back into a fermenter to hit a target volume. I would recommend that you let it finish fermenting and then proceed to secondary then bottling/kegging as normal.

Chalk it up to learning. Who knows, maybe you'll like residual sweetness that the brown sugar is likely to leave and you'll have created your own haus brew.

 

[explosivebeer]

I have never added water back into a fermenter to hit a target volume. I would recommend that you let it finish fermenting and then proceed to secondary then bottling/kegging as normal.

Chalk it up to learning. Who knows, maybe you'll like residual sweetness that the brown sugar is likely to leave and you'll have created your own haus brew.

Yeah that was definitely part of my thought process. Even though this recipe is tried and true, it's hard for me to resist altering it, if for no other reason than to make it unique. Then again, since I'm a relative newbie, getting a solid baseline of understanding and experience before deviating too far from standards would probably be a good idea. But what fun is that?

 

[Got Trub?]

I would leave it as is and chalk it up to experience. I applaud the fact that you measure your preboil gravity and adjust it to hit your target gravity. The goal there is to maintain your gravity to bittering ratio. You cannot fix that now so leave it. The sugar you added will not impact the flavour much unless it was really dark brown sugar and will dry your beer out a bit while adding a little extra alcohol.

GT