Gravity Conundrum Part Deux

[Selbs]

I'm astonished by a gravity reading from my beer this past weekend. Its an Imperial IPA, and our gravity was 1.082 at the mashout.

From there, we did a 90-minute boil, and added 2 pounds of light brown sugar in the last 5 minutes, which are consistent with what we've done to other recent brews, but our gravity reading just prior to pitching the yeast was 1.088, which seemed quite surprising. We've consistently added 30 to 40 points using this approach on previous batches, so I was astonished to see such a slight increase in the final gravity. The only difference I can think of is that we varied the base grains a bit, changing our ratios of 2-row to Maris Otter (from 13:10 to 10:13), but beyond that, everything else went to spec.

Any ideas on why we got such a low point increase from where we started or where I should be looking for answers?

Cheers!

 

[MalFet]

It's worth actually calculating this stuff out, but in any case it is almost certain that one of your gravity readings was incorrect, possibly because the wort was not sufficiently mixed.

 

[Bobby_M]

It's likely your first reading was from the higher gravity area of a non-homogeneous mixture. In other words, there was lower gravity wort in the vessel, but not where you sampled from.

 

[Selbs]

I hadn't thought about that. To ensure that I don't run into something this like this in the future, what recommendation would you have on extracting the mashout sample?

 

[Rip]

As the late great Bob Marley once said, "Stir it up!".


- M