How to fix watered down beer

Get advice on making beer from raw ingredients (malt, hops, water and yeast)
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dbromberg
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How to fix watered down beer

Post by dbromberg » Sun Nov 25, 2018 7:26 pm

So I made a pretty bad calculation mistake and ended up wayyyy oversparging our beer to the point where the beer which was supposed to be around 7-8% ABV is more like 4.8%. It's overly sweet (probably because there were too few hops for that quantity of water), very watery, and lacks body. The yeast is still active in the fermenter.

I have a little bit of extra time before the beer needs to be ready, and was wondering what people thought about in terms of saving the beer. One idea I had was to make a mash of the same ingredients, maybe even extra malts or malt sugars, skip the sparge, boil for a bit, adding more hops, and then cool that and mix that in with the existing beer. I'm using Voss kveik yeast which seems to be pretty hardy, so I don't imagine it will have trouble waking up again? I'll probably try to increase the temperature in the fermenter when I do this as well.

What do people think of this idea? Are there other suggestions you would make?

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Hanglow
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Re: How to fix watered down beer

Post by Hanglow » Sun Nov 25, 2018 7:31 pm

Yeah, or just get a kg or two of extract, do a mini boil with it and a bunch of hops and add that if you want a shorter day

aamcle
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Re: How to fix watered down beer

Post by aamcle » Sun Nov 25, 2018 8:19 pm

+1 for Hanglow's suggestion.

Aa mcle

guypettigrew
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Re: How to fix watered down beer

Post by guypettigrew » Sun Nov 25, 2018 8:58 pm

Some questions.

How (why) did you over sparge? Didn't you know how much volume you'd lose during the boil?

4.8% is a good ABV for most session beers. If you used enough hops to get the right level of bitterness for a 7-8% beer then a lower ABV beer should be over hopped. What recipe did you use? What mash temperature, how much wort did you get from the mash and how long did you boil it for?

If the beer is sweet it means the yeast hasn't yet finished converting all the sugars.

More info needed, then help will follow!

Guy

jsebright
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Re: How to fix watered down beer

Post by jsebright » Sun Nov 25, 2018 10:54 pm

Why not make a strong, bitter version of the beer and blend in a few proportions to make a few different beers of varying strengths and bitterness.

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