first brew issues

Alright, just finished my first boil yesterday and its bubbling away now.

I made a ginger ale following the recipe in this thread (https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f76/ginger-ale-24326/), with a few changes. I only used 1.5 lbs. of ginger. 1/3 at 30 min, 1/3 at 15 min, and saving 1/3 for the secondary. I was also trying to keep the process a little simpler and just steeped the cara-plis in my 3 gallon boil for 30 min with no sparge. This being my first brew I knew there would be a few stumbles, the first one being the complete inadequacy of my crappy little $5 scale. I had bought a 4 pound bag of DME from my LHBS for the starter and the brew. I used a 1/3 cup for the starter and as I couldn't weight out 3 pounds with my crappy scale I just eyeballed it and added most of the remaining DME. I added the rest of extract and sugars as called for and the brew went fine. The only other note worth mentioning is that my glass top stove had a hard time keeping a solid boil and I had to keep the lid on most of the time. I would lose boil for about 5 min after the major additions that required lots of stirring.

This it why I was pretty surprised, and a little disappointed when I measured my OG and it came up quite low at 1.042 at 62F. I'm not sure what could have happened to all the sugar and malt I added. Could the soft and inconstant boil cause the low sugar content?

Should I add a solution of table sugar or more extract to the primary to match the expected OG? Any idea what happened?

Welcome Dave!

Did you add any other liquid to the fermenter other than your ~3 gallons of wort that you boiled? And you followed the rest of that recipe and hit 3# honey, 3.5# LME, 1# sugar in addition to the 1# carapils? For a volume of 5G, it should be hitting the OG for the recipe, so there might be something else happening here (not enough fermentables added, too much water added to fermenter...etc). How much volume do you have right now?

Not knowing exactly how much of the DME was actually added will hurt your calculations. In your case, you said that 1/3 of a cup of DME was used for the starter and then you added most of the leftover DME. How much is most? Did you add a full 3.5 lbs. of DME to the batch like the recipe calls for?

Also, no mention of topping off. If you did top off up to 5 gallons, it could be as simple as the batch wasn't mixed good enough, resulting in a lower reading. All the heavy, sugar-laden water is going to drop to the bottom if not stirred good enough. It is very possible that you did hit your OG, but just didn't stir enough to get it mixed thoroughly.

The boil could also be the culprit, but on a lesser scale. If the recipe calls for a full 60 minute boil, but the stovetop couldn't keep up with a full boil, there will be less evaporation meaning that the batch will not be as concentrated as it would be if you were able to boil for the full 60 minutes.

Regardless, you should be just fine with this brew. It won't be exactly how the recipe indended, but who really cares? If it's already in the primary, I personally wouldn't even bother with trying to bring up the gravity by adding more DME or sugar. Everytime you open the primary in the early stages of fermentation, you're taking a risk of introducing the batch to an infection. As long as the final product is tasty, that's all that really matters. Good luck with all of your future brews!

Hey guys, thanks for the welcome and thorough responses. This forum is awesome!

It could be that I didn't add a full 3.5 lbs. of DME, But I'm pretty sure I got close. I don't think it could account for the full 10 point difference. I very well could be wrong though.

I had previously measured 5 gallons of water in the primary but I didn't mark the line as it was really close to an existing reference point on the outside of the pail. This is the main thing I've been second guessing myself about. I think if I would have topped off to 6 gallons by accident the pale would be a lot more full. Right now I've got about 3 to 4 inches of vertical space between the top of the 6 gallon plastic bucket primary and the wort/beer level. Does that sound right?

I pretty sure it was mixed well enough. I poured back and forth between the primary and the brew pot 3 times to aerate right before I took the sample.

Whatever happened, I don't think I'm gonna worry about it. It seems to be happy in the primary now and Ill just let it be. Hopefully it will be tasty in about 5 weeks.