Just pitched my first A.G. should I add water?

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natefitz

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So, I finally made the leap which would have been financially impossible for this broke-ass college student without FlyGuy's great cooler conversion.:rockin:

I was trying to make a 3 gallon batch because I have a crappy electric stove and I can't quite swing a burner yet. (see above)

I figured all my water volumes with beersmith and I hit my O.G. on the dot, but I ended up with a measly 2.3 gallons in the primary.

My question is this: can I add more water to the primary after I have pitched, or should I suck it up and just try not to drink it all at once?

Any advice would be much appreciated, somehow every time I brew I end up with some new issue that eats away at my brain until I crack the first one open.

-Thanks
 
natefitz said:
My question is this: can I add more water to the primary after I have pitched, or should I suck it up and just try not to drink it all at once?

I'm pretty much a brewnoob but no, don't add water. The gravity is a measurement of the sugar concentration in the wort . If you add water you dilute the wort and the OG goes down -as does the ABV and body of the final product (you basically just dilute the beer).

My take on this is that the primary objective is to get close to the OG and bitterness in the recepie. Having that said, if you overshoot the OG you may add water to the boil but that will also mean you need to adjust the hop additions for the larger volume. If your OG comes out short you can make that up by adding extract to up the OG.

H
 
If you it OG then ading water will dillute it make it a lower ABV and have much less boddy.
Stick with the volume and savour it or you could make another batch then add that to the fermenter.

When did you did the calcs did you set boil volume to 3 gallons or batch size to 3 gallons?
What size is your pot?
 
When did you did the calcs did you set boil volume to 3 gallons or batch size to 3 gallons?
What size is your pot?

Yeah, I checked that the batch size was 3 gal. My pot is 5 gallons, but I start my boil in two different pots to get it up to temp, then combine into my 5 gal pot.

I was thinking that I could have gotten more than expected boil off because it takes a while to get up to boil, but .7 gallons still seems like a lot to be off.

-Thanks for the replies
 
So, the actual recipe that I had put into beersmith ended up getting slightly changed when LHBS didn't have the exact grains I needed. So, I just corrected the recipe for what I actually used and the new recipe is asking for even less batch and sparge water than I used.
 
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