What's going on here?

[divrack]

I brewed a ryepa type thing last night, first thing I noticed was it was very hard to get all the grain in the tun, but it was a lot in the recipe.. this lead to a thick mash that got stuck, and ended up being a very long sparge.
Anyway I never took a reading, which isn't unusual as my proscess is pretty dialled in, but out of curiosity I took one this morning with the fermentation already going. Holy makarel, it was at .08, instead of the expected .05ish.

Now I do measure out grain with a pan and so I know that the rye is possibly a bit heavier, but even accounting for this it seems to be saying an efficiency of 95 percent plus.

The other possibility is that the wort is stratified in the conical but I chucked the weaker runnings onto the stronger quite roughly...

Anyway, if the reading is right I'll have to dilute by a third meaning the hops will be way off.
Big hop tea?
What's is the consensus?

 

[divrack]

I brewed a ryepa type thing last night, first thing I noticed was it was very hard to get all the grain in the tun, but it was a lot in the recipe.. this lead to a thick mash that got stuck, and ended up being a very long sparge.
Anyway I never took a reading, which isn't unusual as my proscess is pretty dialled in, but out of curiosity I took one this morning with the fermentation already going. Holy makarel, it was at .08, instead of the expected .05ish.

Now I do measure out grain with a pan and so I know that the rye is possibly a bit heavier, but even accounting for this it seems to be saying an efficiency of 95 percent plus.

The other possibility is that the wort is stratified in the conical but I chucked the weaker runnings onto the stronger quite roughly...

Anyway, if the reading is right I'll have to dilute by a third meaning the hops will be way off.
Big hop tea?
What's is the consensus?

I've now taken a wine thief sample from probably about the middle which is far closer to expected reading although still fairly high. I guess the top will be low?
Anyway I suppose this is mystery solved, but certainly seems quite interesting a data point about how stratified two combined worts can remain even with splashing and active fermentation happening.
Makes me wonder what effects this might have on the yeast.
I'll post this finding separately without all the guff

 

[mongoose33]

I've been having interesting readings lately with my beers--yesterday, a Rye beer, all I could get the refractometer to indicate was 1.055, which I didn't think was right. It was roughly 1.055 coming out of the mash tun, which after the boil should have been higher. Now, my TILT indicates it's 1.065--which is dead on for what I'd expect. I'm going to draw a hydrometer sample and see how close the TILT is to that.

So I don't know--I think there is stratification in the wort, and it just depends on how well mixed it all is.

I don't know how much, if anything, the RYE has to do with this. I had 3# of Rye malt and 4 oz of flaked rye in the grain bill, along with 8 oz of chocolate wheat and 10# of Maris Otter.