Add more malt in the secondary?

[skagit991]

So, i recently made a brown ale, all grain, and totally missed the mark on my FG. Not really sure what happened, mash temp off, bad measurement, old grain, ect. The ABV is only going to be 3.8%, its been in the secondary for about a week. I am considering boiling a lb of DME in a quart or two of water and adding it to the secondary to bump the FG. What do I have to lose? Any thoughts?

 

[Calder]

You can do that if you want. Make sure you boil it for at least 10 minutes to get the O2 out of the water. Pour gently into fermenter and do not aerate.

 

[RobertRGeorge]

Boiling the malt with hops helps coagulate the protein, so if you don't boil with hops you may get protein haze later. Solution to that problem: drink the beer out of a stein. Also, do you have room in your secondary for another 1 or 2 quarts of water? How bout drawing off some of the beer, boiling the malt in it, and adding back. There might be enough hop extract in there to solve the haze problem too.

Also, adding a pound of dme in a half gallon of water will probably not move the final ABV as much as you might want.

 

[sloose]

my English strong bitter started off the same way.. i missed my numbers completely.. 12lbs of grain (10lbs maris otter, 1lb white wheat malt 1lb crystal 20) was supposed to give me a FG of 1065 ... I ended up with 1.045 .. It didnt ferment down as far as i wanted with the s04 either, but i continued on with the brew.

i ended u;p with a damned tasty and malty beer, very biscuitty. I like it a lot (not my favorite mind you, i like beers on the dry side), and I'm glad i didnt mess with it.

the moral of my screwed up story is, you might end up with a tasty beer as-is by not messing with it.

 

[skagit991]

Thanks for the info everyone. After pondering it for a while I decided to leave it alone and call it a session beer. I dont think that I have had a beer in the 3% range since drinking Bud in high school. Thank god I stopped that!!!