Help!! Initial SG reading 1080

[Jeff D]

Hi there,

This is my 5th brew and for the first and probably the last time I bought Coopers Canadian Blonde from the supermarket because I was too lazy to drive through a lot of Easter traffic to get to my local home brew store. After purchasing said product, I searched for some comments/recipes and most were not encouraging, however, i found one recipe that this fellow said was great and consisted of the following, which i followed.

1 can Coopers Canadian Blonde
1kg Coopers Brew enhancer #1
500gm Coopers Light Dry Malt extract
300gm honey

I used left over honey from fridge which now in hindsight may produce infection. Anyway, I mixed this horrible looking gloop together, added the yeast and took a SG reading.......Yikes 1080!!!

As a newcomer to home brewing, I have some doubts about this current brew. According to a alcohol conversion table, if the final SG is around 1010 which most of my previous brews have been this will produce approx 9.6% alcohol.
Will this kill me? Blow up all my bottles? Taste crap?
Can i add more water now (it has been fermenting for 15 hrs and bubbles every 2 sec) or should I throw it away?

Any help or comments would be most welcome

[Kevnlis]

I assure you the beer will not kill you, in all of my years of HB I have never met a person who died from it

On a more serious note, what was the volume of the brew? It would have to be about 14-15L for that gravity reading to be correct. Either way it should be a fairly nice brew, might do well with some Cascade finishing hops.

[Chris]

It'll be fine. If it actually is 1080 I'll be very suprised. Odds are that you didn't mix the malt and water together well enough. The malt settled a bit on the bottlom, and you got a quite concentrated false reading. I'd estimate 5%abv without doing the maths.

It should be fine. Relax. Have a homebrew.

[Trough Lolly]

....yep, a bit more stirring may have been in order. That said, the yeast will hopefully take care of any malt accumulated on the floor of the fermenter, through the rolling fermentation action - which is a real visual bonus when you have a carboy to ferment your wort!

Cheers,
TL

[Jeff D]

Thanks for the advice, I'll keep going with it.

I filled it to 23 ltr mark, but did notice that it was much harder to dissolve than the other brews I have done. Also noticed a lot of early sediment formed on bottom of the wort, so maybe this has affected the readings.

Cheers

Jeff