am I being dumb? og readings thrown me.

Ok, so I thought I'd try brewing up some simple ginger beer. An alcaholic version of ginger beer/ale. My girlfreind loves it, but the commercial ones are so expensive!
Anyway, found a couple of very simple recipes, mainly ginger, lemon, sugar and some lactose.

Now I've tried a couple of recipies, one using lactose, another using all sugar but pasturizing early to save some sweetness.

Problem occured when taking og readings, at least I think its a problem. All recipies gave an aproxx 5% alcahol content. I scaled them down from 5 gal to 1 gal, and each 1 gallon batch had around 200g of sugar in, but my og readings for all were just over 1.010. This puzzles me greatly, or is this to be expected?

Was the sugar completely dissolved and/or mixed when you took the sample?

Sugar has a potential of 1.046; meaning 1 lb of sugar in 1 gallon should give an OG of 1.046.

Now, 200 g = 0.44 lb, so 46 * 0.44 = 20. IOW, your OG should be ~ 1.020, and you are not going to get 5% ABV out of these recipes. Are you sure you scaled correctly?

I also don't know why you were getting 1.010. You are 10 points low. Did you correct for temperature? Were your volumes correct?

The recipe called for 500g sugar so I scaled to 100g.
I'm not too worried about the abv, as its my first attempt, as long as they taste nice!
Just very puzzled of og.
Now I think, I didn't corect for tempratuire, took readings at aound 30c.
I'm going to double check recipes.

Thankyou for the handy formula btw!

Ok, I read the recipe wrong. Didn't add enough sugar.
Ill know for next time!