Volume when bottling trouble

It sounds like you may have lost track of exactly how much beer was in your fermentor. Your last opportunity to check the amount of the liquid and to top-off with water would have been in your bottling bucket. (That is usually the best place to do it because you no longer have any trub taking up space in the container.) If you didn't get at least 48-52 bottles then you've got a beer that is more concentrated than what you are expecting, which means a higher ABV. Was your FG higher than expected per your recipe? Have you compared your OG with the FG and calculated the approximate ABV? You'll still have beer, but it might approach an imperial version of what you wanted, and the balance of the beer may have been affected too.

 

Trub, yeast cake, dry hopping using whole leaf hops all lead to less volume than you started. Most people that create their own recipes know this so they make a 5.5 gallon batch. A quart gets left behind in the kettle and another quart in the fermentor giving you 5 gallons.

Examples of said people with recipes a bit over 5 gallons;
http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/the-best-american-barleywine.226911/

http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/tropics.210213/

http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/chocolate-oatmeal-porter-ag.199893/

 

I shoot for 5.5 gallon batches for most beers, and 6 for heavily hopped ones to get a full 5 gallons of beer.

 

Sometimes it's tough to end up with the right amount of finished liquid for your recipe after the boil. If you boil pot is large enough for a full boil, you'll typically start with 5.5 gallons or more so that you allow for steam boiling off to get you down to the 5 gallon level.

Then the other problem is that your boil pot will have some trub, and some of that will get into your fermentor, but it's always difficult to say how much equivalent liquid space is taken by this stuff. Then if you dry hop, especially with whole flower hops, those things soak up more liquid.

The best approach is to try to get what you think is 5 gallons in your fermentor, and then when you are ready to bottle you'll be trying your best to leave all trub behind so that you get 100% liquid in your bottling bucket. This will be a little short of 5 gallons because your trub was taking up some space in the fermentor, and you left that stuff behind. Now, since you still need to add your priming sugar, and it is most easily mixed/dissolved into the beer if it is in liquid form, the common method is to boil the amount of priming sugar that you need in some more water, and this water typically is the amount of liquid that I need to get up to the 5 gallon mark. (At least this is the way I do it.)

If you are going to keg, someone else will have to give you advice about getting close to your 5 gallons, because I don't keg. It's probable that you can still move to your bottling bucket to be able to measure your 5 gallons, and then transfer to the keg, but that's just a guess, and it may be one transfer too many and needless.

 

If your recipe was for 5 gallons and you have 5.5 gallons, then your gravity reading will be slightly low because your beer is a little too watery. Per my posting above, you do need to try to get close, but only 10% too high won't be a drastic flaw for your beer.

 

You could do this if you want honey in your beer. But as a way of recovering volume, I'd advise against it.
Honey + Water <> Wort.

 

Most of us lean away from secondaries. We go from primary to package (bottling bucket or keg). You would add priming sugar at this point if you're bottling. Honey? Save this for primary and prime with something predictable like table sugar.

 

I think @JustinMackey was talking about adding honey to secondary (not bottle priming). I mention this because I wouldn't want him to thing that he should add priming sugar to the secondary (if he's still going to do one).

 

Did you use a lot of hops for this beer? I made this mistake once on a IIPA. Didn't compensate for all the hops added, and had about 1.5 gallons lost due to hop trub when I transferred to secondary. Ended up with about 3.5 gallons of super concentrated, overly hoppy beer.