Hello and what a start...

[Terror]

Let me start by saying hello. I own an IT consulting company here in Salem OR. I was trying to get into homebrewing a couple years ago. I had read a book and was doing some research online. I was about ready to get some equipment when my wife found out she was pregnant with triplets. They are now 15 months old and I am ready to try again. I got a couple books for Christmas and went down to the local homebrew store and picked up a starter kit he put together and a couple other items he recommended. He recommended starting with a brew kit and just getting the steps down to start with so sent me home with a 3.75lb can of coopers real ale and a 3lb bag of Amber ale malt extract.

I spent last night cleaning and sterilizing. We have chlorine in our water so I was boiling water up as well. I was ready to give it a go today and that is where my fun started. I thought I had enough water in my carboy to be able to poor some just boiled water in it. I was wrong, cracked the bottom right off it. Luckily it was going to be a spare 5 gallon carboy to be a secondary fermenter so I was still on. I got the coopers and extract on the heat and was beginning to bring to boil. I wanted to look something up real quick so I stepped away for about 4 minutes. I got called back to the kitchen by the smoke detector as the wort had come to a boil in the time I had gone and boiled over. What a mess.

I ran back to the home brew store picked the ingredients again, cleaned up and tried again. Everything seemed to go fine but my OG is showing 1.1 as the first reading after getting the wort in the carboy and topping it up to 5 gallons. That seems crazy high. I added the yeast in and put an overflow top on it. With the ingredients I used can anyone point to what led to such a high OG reading?

Edit: temp was 65F at reading.

 

[Black Island Brewer]

The usual culprit when you are doing partial boils is incomplete mixing of the boiled wort and added water in the fermentor. I use a "mix and stir" to oxygenate my wort, and when I did partial boils, found this did a great job of mixing the water in to get a better gravity reading. I assume you dumped the first boil and didn't just add the second kit to what you had...

 

[Terror]

Yes I did toss the first boil. It has been fermenting for about 12 hours at this point. Without already mixing and stiring, should I do that now and try to get an new reading or just leave it at this point and live and learn?

 

[Black Island Brewer]

Yes I did toss the first boil. It has been fermenting for about 12 hours at this point. Without already mixing and stiring, should I do that now and try to get an new reading or just leave it at this point and live and learn?

Just let it be. The nice thing about brewing extract is that as long as your weights and volumes are correct, your gravity will pretty much be what it was predicted to be. The final gravity is more important at this point, for determining when it is done fermenting. Just quick numbers in my head (well, on a calculator), your liquid extract should be around 36 points per pound, so 3.75 would be 135 points total, and your dry extract is around 40 points per pound, or 120 points total, so your batch would have 255 points, divided by 5 gallons, OG should be 1.051 or thereabouts - different extracts vary slightly. If you used more or less than 5 gallons, you'd adjust accordingly. Malt extract tends to not ferment out as dry as all-grain (depending in the mash temp), so my best guess is your FG might be around 1.014, depending on the yeast. Taste it when you are checking the gravity, and if there is sweetness, let it keep going. If fermentation sticks (gravity doesn't change for 3 days) and it's still sweet, you can try to restart fermentation (don't worry about THAT until you have to), but if it's tasting good, then bottle it!