Extremely high starting gravity

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So I’m making hard tea, and my starting gravity turned out very high.

I’ll walk you through my steps to see if you can point out my errors. I have done a lot of distillation before, and some beer brewing, but this is my first try of this type of fermentation.

What I did:
Made 1 gallon of concentrated green tea
Mixed 6.5 lbs of cane sugar with it (I’m highly allergic to corn sugar, so I cannot use that, which is the primary reason for me even trying this)
Added another 5 gallons of water
Cooled it down
Added yeast nutrients

Gravity reading came out at 1.087
 
gravity reader.


well, unless you're watching your waist....

i'm curious what kind of gravity reader you're using?6.5lbs sugar in 6 gallons gives me an og of 1.050 in beersmith, which, fermented to 0.995 would be around 7%, could finish at 990 though...you wouldn't happen to have a refractometer. and hydrometer would you?
 
6.5 lb of sucrose (cane or beet sugar) mixed with 6 gal of water would give a solution of 11.51°P. The calculation looks like this:

100°P * 6.5 lb / (6.5 lb + 6 gal * 8.33 lb/gal) = 11.51°P​
11.51°P is an SG of 1.0463. There is no way that your actual SG was 1.087. Your solution was likely stratified, and your measured sample was from a zone of high sugar concentration.

Brew on :mug:
 
well, unless you're watching your waist....

i'm curious what kind of gravity reader you're using?6.5lbs sugar in 6 gallons gives me an og of 1.050 in beersmith, which, fermented to 0.995 would be around 7%, could finish at 990 though...you wouldn't happen to have a refractometer. and hydrometer would you?
Just a regular hydrometer
 
6.5 lb of sucrose (cane or beet sugar) mixed with 6 gal of water would give a solution of 11.51°P. The calculation looks like this:

100°P * 6.5 lb / (6.5 lb + 6 gal * 8.33 lb/gal) = 11.51°P​
11.51°P is an SG of 1.0463. There is no way that your actual SG was 1.087. Your solution was likely stratified, and your measured sample was from a zone of high sugar concentration.

Brew on :mug:
I did the stoichiometry on it, and I got 6.8% plus minus error. So I agree something must have gone wrong measuring. Maybe because I added the sugar and the yeast nutrients to the tea concentrate. I added everything to water after, but I didn’t really stir it much.
 
Any idea what the gravity of the concentrated green tea was before the sugar? It’s the only other thing that could be pushing up your OG, but I have no experience with fermented tea so huge guess here. Everyone seems to be in agreement that 1.050 is about tops for what you should have seen.
 
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