Thanks for the quick response; I understand that much head space is not good but I wanted your advice before I acted. It is still fermenting at this point so I figured I had a day to await your response.
I guess my question is about the original recipe. I scaled it back for a 3 gallon recipe, but of course when I remove the fruit bag I'm not going to have 3 gallons anymore. I just didn't expect it to be this much short. So really the recipe for 3 gallons actually only gets you 2.25 gallons.
At this point I figure I'm at about 9L, so I'm about 2.3L short. I did the pearson's square calculation and if I used 100% water to top up I would end up with a 12% abv wine, which is not bad (undiluted it would be 15%). I think what I'll do is top up with 1.5L of bordailles rouge wine and the rest with water. That should be a good compromise.
I don't want to buy any more carboys; I make mostly kits and only did this recipe to fill the one 3 gallon carboy I have that I used to make a dessert wine kit with.
I guess my question is about the original recipe. I scaled it back for a 3 gallon recipe, but of course when I remove the fruit bag I'm not going to have 3 gallons anymore. I just didn't expect it to be this much short. So really the recipe for 3 gallons actually only gets you 2.25 gallons.
At this point I figure I'm at about 9L, so I'm about 2.3L short. I did the pearson's square calculation and if I used 100% water to top up I would end up with a 12% abv wine, which is not bad (undiluted it would be 15%). I think what I'll do is top up with 1.5L of bordailles rouge wine and the rest with water. That should be a good compromise.
I don't want to buy any more carboys; I make mostly kits and only did this recipe to fill the one 3 gallon carboy I have that I used to make a dessert wine kit with.