Starting gravity too low!?!?

First batch was a honey brown ale. Did full boil with the full amount of LME.

Target initial gravity was suppose to be around 1.050.

I read it at 1.031.

Is this bad?? What could have caused it to read so low??? Not enuf wort in the flask?? too much water or boil too long??

I am pretty darn sure i read the hydrometer right, just where it liquid meets the hydrometer.

Your thoughts???

heertsy said:

First batch was a honey brown ale. Did full boil with the full amount of LME.

Target initial gravity was suppose to be around 1.050.

I read it at 1.031.

Is this bad?? What could have caused it to read so low??? Not enuf wort in the flask?? too much water or boil too long??

I am pretty darn sure i read the hydrometer right, just where it liquid meets the hydrometer.

Your thoughts???

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Did you take the reading when the wort was still hot? that will make a HUGe difference in the reading

Nope, just right before i pitched the yeast, wort was probably around 72-74 degrees.

It always help if you give full details.

Ingredients, methods, time etc.

If you are doing extract and you used all the extract and the correct volumes of water then you can't miss the expected gravity.

It will be your method giving you an inaccurate reading.

The most common fault is not mixing the extract and water sufficiently.

Honey brown ale: Ingredients 6 lb LME. 2 kind of hops, East Kent Goldings and Challenger. 1 lb honey added at the end of boil. Grains were a combo of 4 different kinds, sorry but i can't remember the 4 different kinds in it. Got the kit from Northern Brewer.

I brought water up to 170 degrees, then shut off, and steeped grains for 30 minutes. Turned heat back on and left grains in until i reached 170 degrees again, then took out.

Got a boil going, then did a FULL boil adding ingredients accordingly for 60 minutes.

I know i stirred the LME in real good because their wasn't much "sludge" at all in my pot after boiling. I stirred it in pretty darn good, i couldn't feel any stickiness on the bottom of the pot at any time.

Use a wort chiller to cool down, took about 25 minutes.

Transfered to bucket and used a whip stir aerator for about 5 minutes.

THEN took initial reading. Filled up the flask about halfway, read right where the hydrometer met the liquid.....it read at about 31.....which tranlates to 1.031.

Maybe i did just somehow read it wrong, or didn't let it float long enuf. I hope i just read it wrong.

Well if you end with 5 gallon and have used 6# of lme and 1# of honey then your brew (given the honey and LME are as expected) can not be anything other than around 1050.

At 6 gallon it should be around 1040+

play here : http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator?8900893#tag

Orfy- Thanks for your help. BTW, i started with a little of 6 gallons of water, ended up with about 5 1/2 gallons of wort, so i did go over my target gallons (5) a bit.

Either way, i am gonna pour more wort in the flask next time and let it sit for 1/2 hour. I did notice i forgot to take a little piece of sponge out of the bottom of the flask when i used it, but i doubt that would screw up th reading, would it?

Calibrating anything that you use to measure is really important. Sounds like a bad hydrometer.

Try filling your flask up with normal tap water and then place in your hydrometer. It should read 1.000 if not you'll need to compensate for the difference. Also the only way the sponge should affect your reading is if the hydrometer was sitting right on top of it.