Belgian Wit gravity question

Ok, so a friend and I brewed some Wit yesterday (Blue Balls!) and everything went pretty good. I even tried late extract additions and everything. CounterFlow Chiller worked like a champ, etc.

I checked the gravity and got a reading of 1.070.... uh... is that right? So I look it up and see it's supposed to be like 1.038. Check again. 1.060.

I check several times and finally got it to settle down at 1.055. Still high, but why would it be variable like that? My temp was around 70 degrees.

I had a lot of orange peel floating around in there. Would that even affect it??

did you take a sample for your OG readings? or did you take it in the bucket/carboy?

A sample should have minimized your orangepeel effecting the reading.

The one I just did was 1.048 OG and that was one check, one sample. So I would think getting those different readings is a fluke or something.

Did you mix the top off water and the wort for 10 minutes?
if not, it wasn't a uniform mixture and your hydro reading is wrong.

post the recipe...its impossible to miss your gravity on an extract recipe unless you don't add enough/too much top off water.

Yes, we ended up addign about 2 gallons after the boil. After mixing the readings were consistent, but still much higher than the 1.038 shown on the recipe.

3# Extra Light DME
3# Wheat DME
1 oz. Willamette (60mins)
.75 oz. Coriander (10 mins)
7/8 oz. orange peel (10 mins)

I made this recipe for my last batch and I'm sure the OG was spot on that time. pretty simple. Only difference is this time I added 75% of the DME with about 15 mins left.

malkore said:

Did you mix the top off water and the wort for 10 minutes?
if not, it wasn't a uniform mixture and your hydro reading is wrong.

Click to expand...

+2 that's one of the main reasons for hydrometer readings to be completely off.

Looking at your recipe, I don't see how you could have exceeded 1.040 OG at 5 gallons volume.

your hydro reading is simply wrong because the whole thing wasn't mixed up enough. not a 'true, uniform' solution so your sample was 'thick' so the reading was 'too high'.

just assume you hit 1.038.

Ok. At any rate, it was the same recipe as the previous batch, which hit the target exactly. After 24-36 hours, there was no activity in the airlock. 12 hours later, it was bubbling nicely. another 12 hours, and the airlock was just about ready to blow off, and there was krausen running down the carboy. Wish I'd thought ahead to put on a blow-off tube. It's looking good!