Messed up! Need advice for OG.

[GundyGang1]

Ok, I made a honey wheat last night and my OG was off. Here's what I did wrong:

I forgot to add .5lbs of 10l, which I had to buy separate, so just forgot. Found that out and added .5lbs of dark brown sugar to the boil to make up for ABV lose.

OG came in around 1.03, when it should have been around 1.049.

Fermentation already started (pitched too much yeast too), so my question is should I throw in some more sugar to a secondary to pull up the gravity?

I use beersmith and my equipment profile was not accurate, adding to much water, so hopefully this won't happen again, but for now, suggestions? I'd leave it, but 1.03 seems too low....

 

[GrogNerd]

if you're doing extract, as long as you hit your volumes, your OG should be exactly what the recipe says it should.

with all grain, you are extracting the sugars yourself with a mash and there is great variability to how efficient that extraction is. with extract, the mash is done for you, all the sugars you need are available and you needn't worry about low gravity.

if you added top-off water before you took your gravity reading, you could have stratification; the higher gravity wort/water is at the bottom of your FV, while the lower gravity water/wort is at the top, where you took your reading from.

crystal/caramel adds very little fermentable sugar, it's more for color & flavor, so if your reading is that far off, it's doubtful that was the cause

RDWHAHB. you're making beer. it might not be the exact beer you were trying for, but good luck with it!

 

[GundyGang1]

It's AG. The beer itself looked good, I'm just worried that the ABV will be way to low, like below 2%.

 

[GrogNerd]

if not an extract batch, was it a full boil? use ANY top-off water? that would be the cause of stratification.

if you have some extract and it's been less than 24 hours since pitching, I would boil up enough extract + some water to get the full batch up to your target OG, then add it to your already fermenting beer. don't really have to worry about sloshing within that 24 hours, but keep it to a minimum. and mixing isn't all that important, the yeast will find the sugar

 

[GundyGang1]

Got some DME and going to add to primary. Thanks guys! Since I over pitched and it's already fermenting, I think this will work for the most part.

 

[GundyGang1]

Thanks for the replies! I steeped .5lbs of caramel 10l in .5 gallons, then boiled and added 2lbs of DME... Added that to fermenter and it went nuts, but it's quited down now. Took a reading and am at 1.008. Going to give it a few more days.

My new question is: How the heck to I calculate OG off of that???

SG was 1.03 in 5.5 gallons. I was aiming for 1.049, so I added above...