I want you all to know what a good noob I am.

[Wisluggo]

I had a question about not hitting my og, and came here and read several posts and found my answer that it is normal for top off brewers to not have an accurate reading.

Aren't I a good noob!?!

Thanks for all the info HBT.

 

[MalFet]

*pats Wisluggo on the head*

 

[fishkid]

Excellent. Next time, if you're more interested in hitting your target OG than you are your target volume you can use this simple math to figure our how much water to add to achieve your desired OG, check out this older post from none other than our other thread resident, MalFet.

Sure!

You've got a fixed quantity of sugars in your kettle, and you want to figure out how much water you need to add to reach a specific concentration (gravity) appropriate to your recipe.

1) Take a gravity reading and ignore the leading one and the decimal. Say it comes out 1.040, that means you've got 40 points of sugars per gallon in your wort.

2) Multiply your concentration of sugar by the volume of wort you have. So if you have six gallons of 40 points-per-gallon wort, you've got a total of 240 points worth of sugar.

3) Divide this number by your target gravity (again, lopping off the leading one and the decimal). Say your recipe calls for 1.030. Divide 240 by 30, and you get 8. That means that your total volume needs to be 8 gallons at the end of your boil.

4) In order to figure out how much you need pre-boil, you'll have to just know your system's evaporation rate. You'll get a sense of this as you do a few batches, but in the meantime you can always just (gradually) add a little bit of water if you think you're going to overshoot your boil off.

Make sense? Say so if not.

Quoted from this thread,
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/first-all-grain-brew-completed-but-questions-219536/