Low alcohol...what did I miss?

[Reindeer]

I've done several kits, but this is the first I've brewed without buying a box of pre-selected ingredients. My initial gravity was only 1.025, which should have alerted me that there was an issue, but I didn't think about it at all until I checked it a week later. After 2 weeks at about 70deg in the primary I'm only at 2.0%. So...where did I go wrong? Did I not have enough fermentables? I kinda based this on a witbier recipe I found on here. I was hoping to be around 4%.

0.5 lbs oak smoked pale wheat
0.5 lbs floor malted bohemian pail wheat
0.5 lbs German munich malt
0.25 lbs flaked oats
Steeped at 20 min @ 170 deg

Added 1 lbs Pilsen light DME and 1 lbs Bavarian wheat DME @ 60 min
Added 1/4 oz Belgian bitter orange peel, 3/4 tsp crushed coriander, and 1/2 oz EKG hops at 15 min.
Added 3 lbs Bavarian wheat DME at 10 min
Added 1/2 oz EKG hops and 1/2 oz orange peel @ 1 min.

I used Wyeast 3944 Belgian Wit yeast, I did make a yeast starter.



Nice thick krausen, looks great in the carboy, just hope it tastes ok...

 

[Yooper]

Steeping the grains for only 20 minutes (wheat and munich require more like an hour) at 170 (too hot) means you'll get color and flavor from them but no fermentable sugars. Next time, if you use wheat and Munich and oats and such, make sure to hold them at 150-155 for an hour. In any case, you used 5 pounds of DME in a 5 pound batch from what I can understand. That means you OG was at least 1.042.
You should have got a little from the grains as well, but not very much so you can estimate your OG for 5 gallons as 1.045ish.
In other words, your reading is completely wrong. It could be that you added top off water and got mostly water in the reading, or you took the reading before adding the extract, etc, but it doesn't really matter. Your OG was definitely NOT 1.025.

 

[hbtasdfg]

the way to think about it is you will never end much below 1.000 no matter what, and usually 1.005-1.015, so if you start at 1.025 you just have way too low an amount of fermentables to ever get over 2% or so.

was the original recipe for maybe half the amount of gallons (recipe for 2.5 gallons but you made 5 and didn't change the recipe)?

 

[hbtasdfg]

You can probably salvage it if you add more fermentables you need another about 3 lbs of malt extract dissolved in just enough water to dissolve and briefly boiled then cooled if it's 5 gallons. you might use a mix of malts and honey and stuff try to get some interesting flavors going on

 

[skunkfunk]

Do you have a refractometer? You can get an approximate ABV if you know the current brix and gravity.

 

[boydster]

Steeping the grains for only 20 minutes (wheat and munich require more like an hour) at 170 (too hot) means you'll get color and flavor from them but no fermentable sugars. Next time, if you use wheat and Munich and oats and such, make sure to hold them at 150-155 for an hour. In any case, you used 5 pounds of DME in a 5 pound batch from what I can understand. That means you OG was at least 1.042.
You should have got a little from the grains as well, but not very much so you can estimate your OG for 5 gallons as 1.045ish.
In other words, your reading is completely wrong. It could be that you added top off water and got mostly water in the reading, or you took the reading before adding the extract, etc, but it doesn't really matter. Your OG was definitely NOT 1.025.

^^^ This. Plug your fermentables into some brewing software and it will give you an estimated OG. Since it is an extract batch, as long as you used the right amount of water, you will be right at the estimated OG - you are adding a known amount of sugar to a known amount of water, so efficiency is not a variable and the OG is just a simple calculation.