Low original gravity...what to do?

I just brewed a 10 gallon batch of a light blonde. I had an expected after boil gravity of 1.046. I hit 1.031 unfortunately. My beer was anticipated to have about a 4.4% ABV but looking now I'll hit 3.0%. Should I boil some LDME in a bit of water and add to the fermentor? Boil some table sugar? How much? Thanks.

You can boil up about 3 lbs of light DME in maybe 1/2 gallon of water...that'll get you where you need to be.
Post your AG process, maybe we can help you do better next time.

I don't think I would do anything. A 3% blonde sounds like a nice quaffable beer, however, adding a couple pounds of extract would be the thing to do if you want raise the gravity.

I use brewpal on my iphone and I'm pretty sure that it continually has me adding more sparge water that I need. For a 10 gallon batch, 17.25lbs of grain, I used 5.5 gallons of strike water...and it wanted me to sparge 10.25 gallons. I sparged 9 and still ended up with more than 10 gallons of beer, and an awful gravity reading to boot.

Thanks for the help guys.

Did you take a reading pre boil? I usually stop my sparge and begin my boil when either

a: Brix is getting under 3

or

b: I have collected enough to boil for 90 mins and still have desired volume.

Either way, If you take a preboil reading you can plug it into an efficiency calculator and adjust pre boil, using 1 pound of dme to gain you 9 points.

VTBrewer said:

...using 1 pound of dme to gain you 9 points.

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He's doing a 10 gallon batch, so 1 lb would only gain him half as many points.

I did take a pre boil reading and it was awful low as well...like 1.023 or 1.024 or so. I knew I had a serious issue with my gravity readings. I figured I could extend the boil quite a bit but considering it was getting dark and freezing cold, I only boiled for about 80 minutes to help my OG as much as I could. Overall, a terrible ending result today.

annasdadhockey said:

He's doing a 10 gallon batch, so 1 lb would only gain him half as many points.

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All the cool kids got the 10 gallon stuff.

Thanks, should have caught that, little rusty.

I guess you should have boiled it down more. In the end, you always want to boil to volume, to make sure you get the right concentrations of sugar. After sparging, I always measure how much wort I got, (I use a yardstick, and have a spreadsheet that tells me how many inches per gallon). I then calculate boil time based on the wort volume. If I need 120 minutes of boil to hit my target volume into the fermenter, I just wait for 60 minutes before starting my hops additions.

It's a little more propane used, but it ensures I get consistent efficiency and consistent product.

Read designing great beers thats where I got all my formulas and plug it in excel now I know what my pre-boil gravity should be and if I missed it I know how to correct it.