First recipe....disaster??

Hey guys,


Well I just finished my first recipe I made on my own, a honey-wheat ale. The OG was SUPPOSED to be .049 and when I took it, to my surprise, it was a measly .022. I have no idea what went wrong and I'm afraid my first beer recipe is going to be awful. Any comments/ advice?

Thanks

If you could post your recipe it might be easier for all to understand what if anything went wrong.

Like AFAJ brewguy said you need to post your recipe, but I'm guessing you either used top off wather (eg boiled 3 gallons and used 2 gallons of regular water to get your 5 gallons) this method is ok with extract, but if you don't mix well after you do it OG you're reading will be low becaues the top is all water. Another possibility is the wort was still too hot to take the reading. Hot wort I believe reads a lower gravity than it should but I don't have my correction chart here so I could have that backwards. Most hydrometers are calibrated to read 60f liquid though, anything else needs corrected for the temperature.

1 lbs Caramel 10L Malt
.5 lbs Honey Malt
5 lbs Wheat LME
1 lb Honey before pitch
1 oz Mt. Hood @ 60 minutes
1 oz Simcoe @ 5 minutes from end of boil
Wyeast 1010 - American Wheat Ale

I already know what happened I think, I have been used to using kits and they always say use 2 gallons of water for wort and then add 3 gallons water after. So this is what I did, needless to say the beer is just going to be watered down. I plan on using extracts for a while until I can move to AG, and advice for the future? Also, is there anything I can do to help the watered down beer?

Thanks guys

it's not a watered down beer. your original gravity is 1.051, according to promash. probably higher, if you had any boil-off.

you can't mess this up with extract...you get what you get.

i'm guessing you didn't mix up well enough before taking your reading. don't worry, it'll be just fine.

Yep, it's got to be an incomplete mix. Two ways to miss the calculated OG with extract brewing:

volume of liquid in the fermenter is something other than 5 gallons
or
didn't get all of the extract into the kettle or boiled over loosing some of what was in there.

Just assume the 1.051 and go from there. The stirring action of fermentation will mix it up for you, so your gravity readings will be accurate later.

wow, I can't believe im hearing that this beer is going to end up okay. I thought for sure it was going to end up watery. Still though, should I do anything different next time with my water volumes? I don't want this to be a re-occuring thing. Thanks a lot for the help I really appreciate it, im keeping my fingers crossed for my first recipe!

what to do differently? for extract batches, use math to figure your OG. It's just really darn hard to get the top off water to mix in. circular mixing doesn't work. you could try to move the mixer back and forth for a while. That'll help and it'll oxygenate the wort better than stirring, but you still can't rely on the reading 100%

when i use a bucket, i stir the crap out of it with my wine thief before i take a sample.

if i'm using a carboy, i'll mix it up as best i can and take the sample.

like shaffer said, tho, it doesn't matter...just use the math. you get so many points by adding so much extract, there's no way you can get it wrong as long as you know:

how much sugar/extract you added AND
exactly how much liquid you have in the fermenter



EDIT: I would also recommend some software. promash has helped me out with problems like this on a number of occasions.

My last batch to get it to mix I put my 3 Gallons of water into my Primary bucket, then dumped the hot wort onto that, stirred, then dumped back and forth to my brew kettle a couple times.

Well im using beer alchemy as long as I can before I have to buy it. So you guys are saying just use what the calculators give me for OG because accurate reading in extract brewing is so hard get? In this case, I should trust the Beer Alchemy OG of 1.050....