Loss of beer

What does the "1/2" refer to? Half the total volume, half-inch, half-gallon? Does your fermentor have a spigot and, if yes, is the area below it dry?

Probably not, unless the answer to the next quote is yes. It can present a whole host of seemingly odd happenings.

Welcome to BA

 

If you don't see 1.5 - 2 gallons of wort/beer outside of your fermentor, I'd guess you miscounted when topping off.

Depending on where you're at in fermentation you might be able to add more boiled/cooled water to bump up the volume.
Caveat:
I (me, personally) am hesitant to disturb the beer when fermentation is in its most active phase. There are others here who can guide you better in that respect.

 

Too many beers,,,,,,,,, wellllll hard to say, lol.

Perhaps you might have not remembered correctly. RIS beers, for me do ferment violently and one can experience beer loss due to blowing off of fermenting beer.

But if you did not see any spilt beer, I'd guess you lost none and have what you have.

I'd take a hydrometer sample and see what gravity you have. Perhaps you boiled longer than you recall and have some super sugary wort working.

Good luck and welcome.

 

@Safetyguytodd how did you prime the beer before bottling?
Maybe you batch primed (a water/sugar solution added to the 3 - 3.5 gallons), or maybe you used carbonation drops (small compressed sugar tabs you add to each bottle).

As @GormBrewhouse said hydrometer samples would be good; one before you pitched the yeast and another before adding sugar for bottling. The latter would tell you how much priming solution to add to your beer for proper carbonation. An interweb search for "priming calculator" will return many results.....plug in your numbers and compare the calculator results with what went in your beer. I'd suggest following up on that.

 

Welcome to the BA site, Todd, and to the Homebrewing forum and to this great hobby.

Something is wrong if you know you had 5 gallons in the fermenter but ended up with 3-3.5 gallons to bottle. A typical RIS will have a very active fermentation with some wort/beer being forced thru your airlock if your fermenter doesn't have enough head space, but that's a lot of liquid to lose. Was there a lot of krausen lost that way? If not, you mis-estimated your volume somewhere.

Since you have already bottled, how many 12-oz bottles did you get? There should be around 10 per gallon.

RIS beers typically take longer than two weeks to finish fermenting, so I'm curious how you knew when to bottle? You didn't mention taking any specific gravity readings, and doing that at the end of fermentation not only would have told you that fermentation was finished, in your case, it might also have told you that your beer didn't have enough water in it, especially if you brewed an extract recipe. (Was this extract brewing?) Did you use a hydrometer to take any readings for your final gravity?

If my questions raise any concern that you bottled the beer too early, then let me raise a yellow flag of caution. If there might have been too much unfermented sugar in your beer, and then you added priming sugar to that, you likely have too much fermentation still occurring in your bottles and building up too much pressure. Are your bottles in a place where no damage will occur if a bottle bursts from the pressure? Handle these bottles with care until you know that over-carbonation is not occurring.

To help determine if you have too much carbonation, you might want to open a bottle now for a status check. (How many days since you bottled?) To be on the safe side, be next to a sink and expect a gusher. You should also have a glass ready to pour. Handle that bottle with care!I

EDIT: @riptorn raised similar questions while I was composing my post.

 

It's a good thing you took the time to be more thorough and raise the flag, PadreGanso.

Not only is there the possibility of unfermented sugars from the wort but, if OP batch-primed with a sugar pack that was included in a kit or an amount measured out as prescribed by the recipe, that amount was likely meant for 5-gallons. Definitely a potential safety concern.