Starting Gravity Too Low?

[Johnnyooze]

My light american lager extract recipe was

7Lbs light LME
8 oz light crystal malt 10L
4 oz honey malt

1 oz cascade @ 60
.5 oz cascade @ 20 (with irish moss)
.5 oz cascade @ 5 (with bitter orange peel)
nottingham dried yeast

I didnt follow any recipe i just went into my LHBS and just grabbed what sounded good together. Im not going for a strong beer so i knew by only having 7 lbs of extract the starting gravity wouldnt bee too high. But when the wort was at 75 and ready to pitch the gravity was only 1.034. I made sure i had exactly 5 gallons and i did everything like ive done before (steeping for 30 min and adding the extract when temp hit 170). One thing is, i took the gravity by putting the hydrometer directly in the bucket of wort, i didnt pull a sample into a test jar. would that have yielded a different gravity? thanks!

 

[hotrodtrash]

did you mix it thoroughly?

 

[ajf]

If you did mix it thoroughly, and your weights and measures were correct, your gravity would have been about 1.053 - 1.055.
My guess is insufficient mixing.

-a.

 

[Johnnyooze]

thats a good point. The last batch i did was a recipe and instructions, followed excactly, and the same thing happened. starting gravity was way down, but the terminal gravity was at 1.012. right on the money. I would take the number right after i mixed water with the wort to bring the volume to 5 Gallons. It was mixed pretty good with alot of foam. Ill try a different approach with my next batch and see if anything changes. Thanks!