Og ready way off

I'm brewing a stout and my pre-boil reading is way off. Beersmith says my og should be 1.044. My og is reading 1.036. How bad is this. Should I panic.

All grain or extract?
Recipe?

No panic it's not far off and you have a chance to make it closer if you like post boil with careful top off to final volume.

All grain

All-Grain (assuming 75% efficiency):

6.5 or 7 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)
1.5 lb White Wheat Malt (2.4 SRM)
1.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt 60L
0.75 lb Chocolate Malt (350.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Roasted Barley (300.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Lactose (Boil 10 min)

0.75 oz German Magnum [13.40 %] (60 min) - 27.0 IBU

1.00 Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 10 min)
1.00 tsp Yeast Nutrient (Boil 5 min)

Mash 60 min @ 152

Ferment 1 month @ 67 degrees F
I carbonated 2 volumes, but I suppose you could go higher

Only thing i can think off is that conversion in the mash was not complete.
Did the temperture flucuate? what did you mash in? how much runoff and sparge water did you have?

Also with that grain bill you should see around 1.052 OG on a 5 gallon batch assuming 72% efficiency

Make sure you adjust for temp difference also.

Mash in with 4 gallon at 152 for 60 min. With 20 minutes left Boil my temperature dropped to 145. I added he and over shot my temp to 160. I stirred until Mech lowered back to 152.

I fly sparged with 6 gallon and collected 8 gallon.

EDIT: See yoppers suggestion below - an oversight on my part ENDEDIT

I've read that wheat malt can lead to low efficiencies due to not full extraction - this may or may not have contributed to you missing your numbers. Some folks will mash longer; some will preboil the grains; some will grind extra; all to help with good conversion when using them. I recently used about 1.5 lbs of wheat malt and had it tripled milled which still wasn't fine enough for my liking so I pulsed it a few times in my food processor prior to using and I ended up hitting the numbers I was after.

Did you cool the preboil sample to under 90 degrees or so? It's really important to do that if you're using a hydrometer, as readings over about 100 degrees (even with conversion tables) are notoriously inaccurate and so useless.

I use a refractmeter

moboy said:

I use a refractmeter

Click to expand...

ah, darn! I was hoping it was such a simple fix!

Can fix or is it ruined

If you're shooting for a 5-5.25 gallon batch and you collected 8 gallons preboil and your boil time is only 60 minutes then that would account for your loss of efficiency. I can't see you losing 2.5+ gallons to evaporation in 1 hour. It's most definitely not ruined. Simply boil until you reach your correct starting gravity, regardless of volume (might take an addition 30-60 minutes). Your only hop additions are 60 minutes (bittering) so you might get a couple extra IBUs from them by boiling longer but probably not even noticable; in other words, no late hop additions to ruin by boiling longer.

BTW, what was your brix reading?