Estimating abv

Hello,

During my most recent brew day, my daughter broke the hydrometer, hence no way to measure OG. I bought a new hydrometer and took FG and I have a recipe which I modified and am wondering if anyone can help guestimate based on ingredients.

I used the Smashing Pumpkin recipe from Northern Brewer as my starting point:

http://www.northernbrewer.com/documentation/beerkits/SmashingPumpkinEX.pdf

which has an estimated OG of 1.054. Here's what my recipe was:

6 lb. DME amber
3 lb. DME light
1 lb. Briess caramel
2 oz. cluster hops
2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
24 oz. canned pumpkin
Safale US dry yeast

I steeped the canned pumpkin and Briess for 45 minutes, boiled DME amber and hopes for 60 minutes, added DME light at 30 minutes, spice at end, cooled and pitched. FG was 1.016

Thanks for any help!

Cheers,

Nathan

Being as u used extract, there is little reason to think u were very far from their OG estimate provided you used their recommended water volumes and boiling times.

Cheers!

As a rule of thumb, 1 lbs DME in 1 gallon of water should give you 1.045 SG...but this does not work for your recipe estimate...with 9 lbs of DME you should hit around 1.081.

Yeah but he altered the amount of ingredients.

I punched it into beer alchemy and got 1.075OG and should finish around 1.018FG

Not sure what the pumpkin would add to it.

GilSwillBasementBrews said:

Yeah but he altered the amount of ingredients.

I punched it into beer alchemy and got 1.075OG and should finish around 1.018FG

Not sure what the pumpkin would add to it.

Click to expand...

Yeah, just down loaded the recipe. I see now.

I think it was 6.3lb Amber LME not DME.

Awesome, thanks for the help. Ya, the canned pumpkin is another question mark for me; no idea how much fermentable sugar is there. Would 1.080 be a good ballpark guess?

Yeah that's probably pretty close. A quick google search results I found some said 4 ppg or 8ppg so 1.004-1.008 from the pumpkin 1.080 sounds pretty good estimate from my point of view.