I boiled 3.5 gallons of wort my recipe is 6 pounds of light dme and then 1.5 of specialty grain. I lost about a half a gallon during the boil and once I added it to the fermenter I top it up to the 5 gallon mark. Did add too much water?
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It really depends on the beer you want. Right now your probably somewhere around 6%. I used beer alchemy and use caramel60 as a specialty as I don't know what you used and on my system I would come in around 1.061OG and finish around 1.015 and that would give me 6.2%ABV. if you wanted a stronger beer you added too much water. If you wanted a lower gravity beer you would add a little more. You will get better hop utilization if you can boil the full volume and not have to top off as much or at all.
I based that off 85% efficiency as I usually am hitting around there on my system but your results will likely be different. I think you'll be fine with what you have though.
I based that off 85% efficiency as I usually am hitting around there on my system but your results will likely be different. I think you'll be fine with what you have though.
I like to get 2 full cases of bottles filled so when I was doing extract batches I would fill the fermenter to about the 5 1/4 mark knowing that I would lose a bit of beer to the yeast cake.
aiptasia
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OP: Yes, your beer will probably be fine if it was for a five gallon batch. The only way to really know is to take a gravity reading and see if it's close to the target gravity range for the recipe.
If you want to ensure that you always have two cases of beer out of each batch, scale your recipes to 5.5 or even 6 gallon batches. I always have beer left over and wind up filling up some small grolsch growlers with the remainder, which is fine with me.
For new styles of beer I haven't tackled yet, or when working with unfamiliar ingredients, i'm taking to brewing 1 gallon batches. That way, if I don't like the recipe or need to work on dialing it in, I can do that without much investment in equipment or ingredients. Then, once it's perfected, I can scale it to a larger batch with a little simple math.
If you want to ensure that you always have two cases of beer out of each batch, scale your recipes to 5.5 or even 6 gallon batches. I always have beer left over and wind up filling up some small grolsch growlers with the remainder, which is fine with me.
For new styles of beer I haven't tackled yet, or when working with unfamiliar ingredients, i'm taking to brewing 1 gallon batches. That way, if I don't like the recipe or need to work on dialing it in, I can do that without much investment in equipment or ingredients. Then, once it's perfected, I can scale it to a larger batch with a little simple math.
biohaz7331
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I have also noticed that if I Want my keg to be closer to the top I have to top of just a tad above 5 gallons because there is always the slight loss to the trub. I also just got whirlfloc to try out and I will see how much less trub I get, which may help you get closer to a total of 5 gallons.
I did pretty much the same thing with the amber I brewed a couple months ago and it came out fine. I'm fairly new to this still but i jumped right in and never used a kit but purely off of hat I research ( hours and months of research) but so far my beers have been great, just get iffy about things
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