Question / advice

[Paulkaranik]

Brewed my 5th extract batch the other day. First time fermenting in a glass carboy. Previously have been fermenting out of a plastic bucket with spigot.

This batch was a pacific coast IPA, I followed the recipe very closely (I thought) . Before pitching my yeast I took a gravity reading and it read 1.021, about 32 under my target OG. I took the reading from close to the surface of the wort. I swished the carboy around a little before taking my reading. It is now day 2 of fermentation and it looks beautiful..

My question is do you think the inaccurate reading is most likely because I didnt mix the carboy around enough/take the reading from the wrong spot or more likely that I did something wrong during the boiling process?

Any info / experience would be much appreciated!

 

[PberBob]

If you did a partial boil and topped off to fill the carboy, then you can have dilute wort on top. If you use a refractometer and don’t dry it off first then you can get a low reading that way too. Looks good now.
Good luck.

 

[Paulkaranik]

If you did a partial boil and topped off to fill the carboy, then you can have dilute wort on top. If you use a refractometer and don’t dry it off first then you can get a low reading that way too. Looks good now.
Good luck.

Thank you. Yes I boiled just under 3 gallons (probably 2 after boil) and topped off to 5.

 

[doug293cz]

Brewed my 5th extract batch the other day. First time fermenting in a glass carboy. Previously have been fermenting out of a plastic bucket with spigot.

This batch was a pacific coast IPA, I followed the recipe very closely (I thought) . Before pitching my yeast I took a gravity reading and it read 1.021, about 32 under my target OG. I took the reading from close to the surface of the wort. I swished the carboy around a little before taking my reading. It is now day 2 of fermentation and it looks beautiful..

My question is do you think the inaccurate reading is most likely because I didnt mix the carboy around enough/take the reading from the wrong spot or more likely that I did something wrong during the boiling process?

Any info / experience would be much appreciated!

It's just about impossible to come up with an OG that much below recipe when you are doing extract. I'm guessing that you did a reduced volume boil, and then added top up water in the fermenter. Is this correct? It takes much more to homogenize high SG wort and water/low SG wort than swishing the carboy around. Unless your volumes were way off, or you forgot to add some of the extract, you were likely very close to the target OG.

Let the beer ride. It will be fine.

Edit: May question was answered before I finished typing it.

Brew on

 

[myndflyte]

Yeah you really got to mix well when topping off to get an accurate reading. That being said, since you used extract, you can reasonably calculate what your starting gravity should be based on how much extract you used and your total volume.