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I brewed an IPA intended to blow my hop socks off and missed my target OG by 20 points.

DETAILS: Built this recipe in BeerSmith with an intended OG of 1.070 and IBU projected at 156. I pitched a 1000 ml starter of 001 right at the peak of action and my 4+ gallons are fermenting to the point my fermentation chamber cant stop it from climbing above 71, I like to ferment my IPA at 64 and havent had a problem keeping it close to that in the past.

QUESTION: It's been 3 days and the temp looks like it has peaked, if I brew a one gallon batch and top it off at this point will the yeast still be able to clean up the warm fermentation flavors? Is there something else I should be concerned about when trying this? has anyone had experience with this

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  • No idea what the effect would be, but I encourage you to try it. It sounds pretty reasonable to me, and could be a clever fix.
    – BBS
    Commented May 20, 2015 at 20:01
  • Make sure to siphon the blend carefully into the fermentor so that it doesn't oxidize while splashing.
    – Matthew Moisen
    Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 21:29

2 Answers 2

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WLP001 that ferments warm has a tendency to throw diacetyl and fusel alcohols. The former will be "cleaned up" by the yeast already in the beer, the latter won't be cleaned up by anything … it will only be diluted by the extra gallon.

At the same time, I don't think it will particularly harm your beer to add ~1gl of simlar wort at this point. But I don't think it'll help much either.

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  • So your suggesting adding an additional gallon of wort wont help correct the gravity to bitterness ratio? maybe I'm not understanding how dilution works. My thought was to brew this gallon batch with enough sugars that when blended with the original 4 gallons the entire 5 gallons would have had an OG of 1.070. Yes I am aware of the effect of temperature on WLP001 and how the logarithmic and stationary phases of fermentation work. I think the latter part of your second sentence is misleading, and editing the crap out of peoples questions is rude, especially when you dont proofread your answer.
    – Ryan Shdo
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 5:05
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    Yes, if you want to use a super-strong gallon of wort to adjust the bu:gu ratio and dilute the bitterness, I believe that will work. As for editing: I'm a moderator, here, so I don't really have qualms about making the text of questions follow a common format, and use common english words (like "details" instead of "deets").
    – jsled
    Commented May 22, 2015 at 13:27
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I have added DME to a beer (strangely enough, also an IPA) to get the OG to where it should be. I added the DME two or three days after pitching yeast.

Note: The DME was mixed with filtered water and boiled for 10 minutes to kill any bugs. This was then covered and cooled and then added to the fermenting beer.

I believe BeerSmith has a tool that tells you how strong a wort you need to make.

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