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Urgent Advice

Posted: Sunday Jun 22, 2008 8:36 pm
by gibbocore
It appears i have had a small leak in my immersion chiller, it has resulted in walking back into the laundry after half an hour and i now have about 12-14 liters of extra water in my wort. Its resulted in a fg drop from around 1058 -> 1028. Will boiling this back off affect the hopping in any way, it was an oktoberfest with a pretty small aroma addition on flameout?

Help me please, i'm holding back the tears.

Re: Urgent Advice

Posted: Sunday Jun 22, 2008 9:11 pm
by KEG
yikes.. a boil that long would darken the beer a bit, but that might be a good thing for an oktoberfest.. also, it'll totally kill any aroma/flavour hop additions, so you'd need to replace them. bitterness should remain.

alternately, was it AG or extract? could you make a double batch by adding more extract to it (i.e boil only a few litres with extra bittering hops and a small amount of extract, and add the rest of the extract/aroma hops near the end of the boil?).

Re: Urgent Advice

Posted: Sunday Jun 22, 2008 9:17 pm
by gibbocore
Nah it was an AG. Cheers mate, just have to sit up for like 3 hours now. :(

Re: Urgent Advice

Posted: Monday Jun 23, 2008 10:17 am
by gibbocore
got my FG back, and now my oktoberfest looks like a porter. Will i have lost much malt flavour? Its currently no chilling, is it still worth pitching?

Re: Urgent Advice

Posted: Monday Jun 23, 2008 10:27 am
by Trough Lolly
If you boiled the lot to try to improve the FG (at the expense of the hops you used) you also dodged a possible infection bullet from the immersion chiller.
It's unlikely, but there may have been contaminants in the chiller and by boiling your resultant wort, you hopefully have taken care of that risk.

At least finding the leak in an immersion chiller is easy - try finding a leak in a counterflow chiller! :shock:

Cheers,
TL

Re: Urgent Advice

Posted: Monday Jun 23, 2008 12:03 pm
by gibbocore
so you recon i should still pitch my budvar stqarter

Re: Urgent Advice

Posted: Monday Jun 23, 2008 12:22 pm
by KEG
go for it.. it'll have more caramelised/toffee flavours, but hey, that's not necessarily a bad thing. gonna add more aroma hops?

Re: Urgent Advice

Posted: Monday Jun 23, 2008 12:28 pm
by gibbocore
yeah i think i will. I'll toss another Handful of hallertau in when i get home. Then it's off to the brew fridge.