Estimating og?

Does anyone have a way of guessing what an og might be before boiling? I've got 90 oz of sorghum syrup from a nearby Amish community. I know it's pure sorghum but looks slightly thinner than briess. I'm trying to guesstimate what might equal a lb of briess. Thanks

use hopville.com - start a new recipe and select Briess LME as the ingredient, select 90 oz as the qty. don't forget to set the batch size, default is 5 gallons.

Ya I got that but this isn't briess extract. It's an actual syrup made from sorghum that has a different consistency

oh, sorry, i thought you were using briess as your approximation.

hopville has "sorghum syrup" as an ingredient and lists is as having 37 PPG. so 90 oz = 7.5 lbs in 5 gals = 1.056 OG. assuming a 15% boil-off for one hour and you boil one hour, you'll need to start your boil with 5.75 gallons, which in turn works out to 1.048 due to the dilution of the extra 0.75 gallons. these number will change if: you're doing more than a 5 gal batch, your evaporation rate is different than 15%, you boil for more or less than an hour, and what the actual PPG of your sorghum syrup is.

for that last point, you could dilute some in water and use a hydrometer to figure out its SG, then calculate out what that means for the whole 90 oz.

Not sure what hopville's 'sorghum syrup' is, but I do know that sorghum syrup and the stuff you get from briess are completely different things. The syrup is basically molasses (it is made from cooking down the sap of the plant), and doesn't have the proteins or nutrients of the extract.

I would also recommend diluting a measured amount of it with a known quantity of water to determine the PPG. A small amount should be fine, and of course you can always use that in your boil...