daveotero
Well-Known Member
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?
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?