Topping Off the Carboy

[burninator]

I have a Flanders red-ish beer going right now in a 6.5 gallon carboy with about a gallon of headspace. It's been in primary for 6 months. I've done a beer like this before for 10 months without any ill effects, but I'm thinking about topping this one off to protect against oxygen exposure and to get more beer at the end of it all.

So what's everyone's preferred method for doing this, if you do it at all?

Brew up a gallon or two of similar wort and pitch it right in?

Brew and ferment a similar beer and then top off?

Throw in whatever finished beer you have lying around, as long as it's good?

My current thought is that I'll be brewing a dark mild soon, and I might pull off a gallon of that to top off. The color will be similar (a bit darker, of course), but the OG will be much lower (around 1.030).

 

[Agate]

I have an unreasonable obsession with topping up carboys, so my preferred option is #3, top up with what you have on hand that's kind of close. That being said, I think a Flanders is good with a little oxygen exposure to develop some acetic character.

I have a year old Flanders red that I've refused to top up, just to see what happens. But it makes me twitchy every time I look at it.

 

[worlddivides]

Although all the major breweries just top up (generally in wooden barrels) with some of the new batch of wort for the exact same beer (or at least, the exact same base wort for a sour or non-sour beer), that's not really realistic for home brewers unless you brew at an extremely high frequency and tend to brew a ton of sours.

Personally, I think just boiling some dried malt extract and no hops in water should be fine enough (probably with an aim to make the gravity as close to the original gravity of the sour beer you're topping up as possible, though I'm sure that doesn't really matter). I mean, if you only need to put between 1/10th and 1/2 of a gallon in the fermenter to top it up, why would you bother going through an entire brew day?

Saying that, I've only topped up with... wait for it... wait for it... bottle dregs! (and that's not even 1/10th of a gallon by far). Heh. So I'm not talking from experience. Just from practicality. I'd definitely like to hear what other people do.

 

[crane]

For my beers that go into my barrel I brew up a few extra gallons and store them in 1 gallon jugs for topping off. It works out great cause my barrel holds a little over 8 gallons and I regularly brew 11 gallon batches. So after primary, I fill the barrel and once the barrel is full I start filling the 1 gallon jugs. Whenever I check on the barrel I grab a jug and top it off.

Edit: I have only run a few clean beers through my barrel yet (about to pull a Russian imperial stout out and funk it up with a Flanders red). I got to thinking about the oxygen exposure to the beer in the 1 gallon jugs once they are half empty. So this next time around I will probably bottle the extra beer without carbonating it. When I go to top off the barrel I can grab a bottle or 2 and pour them in while the rest of my top off beer stays undisturbed in the other bottles.

 

[Agate]

@crane, that's a really good idea! Even if you carb it to a low level, the co2 in the top-off beer would be a good way to purge the headspace. I assume you're using your barrel for primary fermentation, then?

I've done that with a Berliner weisse that I found less than interesting, poured it into the carboy once primary fermentation slows down. I haven't tasted that beer yet (trb golden with melange), but I figured it would be a fairly neutral addition.

 

[burninator]

Really interesting, @crane. I was going to split off a few gallons of an upcoming brew to ferment clean, then bottle a portion and maybe use the rest of that or part of the sour portion to top off.

It sounds like most people are topping off with beer, not wort. I'm going to give it a taste before I determine whether to use clean beer or sour beer. I think I'd like to maintain the color, or maybe make it a bit darker, which is why I'm considering topping off with dark mild, rather than a pale saison. The gravity is less important to me, and I really wouldn't mind dialing it back with 2 or 3 quarts of very low OG beer.

@Agate That's been my thinking with this beer, as well. It's in a HDPE carboy, and the beer is just below the shoulder, so surface area is maximized. This is the second generation of this cake, and at 5 months, the beer was already very sour.

 

[sweetcell]

i've topped off with both beer and wort - depended on how soon i was hoping it would be done. if the beer had 6 months or more to go, i went with (extract-based) wort under the assumption that the brett will have plenty of time to ferment it out completely. if less than 6 months, i used finished beer thinking that there is less there for the bugs to work through so it should be done sooner.

 

[burninator]

i've topped off with both beer and wort - depended on how soon i was hoping it would be done. if the beer had 6 months or more to go, i went with (extract-based) wort under the assumption that the brett will have plenty of time to ferment it out completely. if less than 6 months, i used finished beer thinking that there is less there for the bugs to work through so it should be done sooner.

This perfectly addresses where I am, currently, in my thinking on this. Having brewed the dark mild, as intended, I don't think the flavors will blend well into my sour red.

I did taste the red over the weekend (7.5 months in primary), and it's really good. This is the second generation of this yeast cake, and it's soured quickly and thoroughly. It's soured so well, in fact, that I'm thinking of blending in a gallon of unsoured wort. So I might brew up a small batch of red base, ferment with US-05 or whatever I have on hand, and then use the finished beer to top off the carboy. I'd like to bottle this in the next few months, but I don't have a firm timetable. It's done when it's done.

What do you think?

 

[sweetcell]

I did taste the red over the weekend (7.5 months in primary), and it's really good. This is the second generation of this yeast cake, and it's soured quickly and thoroughly. It's soured so well, in fact, that I'm thinking of blending in a gallon of unsoured wort. So I might brew up a small batch of red base, ferment with US-05 or whatever I have on hand, and then use the finished beer to top off the carboy. I'd like to bottle this in the next few months, but I don't have a firm timetable. It's done when it's done.

What do you think?

sounds like you've got a solid plan!

i would try to dry out the fresh beer as much as possible, as to not give the bugs in the sour anything to eat (and create more acid). mash low & long, cut back on crystal malts, ramp up temps during fermentation, over-pitch, or even use a more attenuative yeast like 3711/belle saison.

let us know how it turns out!

 

[burninator]

sounds like you've got a solid plan!

i would try to dry out the fresh beer as much as possible, as to not give the bugs in the sour anything to eat (and create more acid). mash low & long, cut back on crystal malts, ramp up temps during fermentation, over-pitch, or even use a more attenuative yeast like 3711/belle saison.

let us know how it turns out!

Good tip. I have a wild saison-ish yeast that ate a table saison down to 1.000. Should do the trick.

Maybe I'll do a few gallons and bottle some of it "clean".

 

[NTexBrewer]

For my beers that go into my barrel I brew up a few extra gallons and store them in 1 gallon jugs for topping off. It works out great cause my barrel holds a little over 8 gallons and I regularly brew 11 gallon batches. So after primary, I fill the barrel and once the barrel is full I start filling the 1 gallon jugs. Whenever I check on the barrel I grab a jug and top it off.

Edit: I have only run a few clean beers through my barrel yet (about to pull a Russian imperial stout out and funk it up with a Flanders red). I got to thinking about the oxygen exposure to the beer in the 1 gallon jugs once they are half empty. So this next time around I will probably bottle the extra beer without carbonating it. When I go to top off the barrel I can grab a bottle or 2 and pour them in while the rest of my top off beer stays undisturbed in the other bottles.

I have a 10L barrel that is still in the clean beer phase. I have found that bottling the extra beer in 500ml swing top bottles uncarbonated works great. My barrel loses about this much in a months time. The other advantage of doing this is I have an unoaked version to compare to my oaked beer. when I sample and top off the beer.

If you were sampling a sour beer this would still be a good exercise as you will have a comparison of the clean beer compared to the sour beer and could even blend the two samples if the beer is too sour/funky etc to get an idea if that will make the beer better.