White House Honey Ale - Looowww OG?!

[tzzler44]

Hello all! I'm at law school right now and thought it would be appropriate to do the White House Honey Ale (recipe: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/09/01/ale-chief-white-house-beer-recipe) and have some friends over after final exams for some libations.

The brew itself went smoothly. I had to substitute WLP013 for the Windsor Dry Yeast that the recipe called for because my LHBS didn't have the Windsor.

Took my OG reading at 1.036, which seemed super low to me at the time, but I thought I'd see what happened after primary. It sat for a week at 68*F. I racked to secondary and the gravity was at 1.016. Which comes to about 2.6% abv. Why is this so low?! BeerSmith predicted a 5-6% abv.

I tasted at racking to secondary and it's a bit tangy with a decent aroma, could taste fine after bottling and some time but does anyone have any idea what happened?

 

[kh54s10]

Your link to the site gives "page not found"

If it was a kit that used top up water, you used all the ingredients and achieved the proper volume your OG was what the kit predicted. It is often difficult to mix the wort thoroughly. Your sample was probably just too much of the top up water.

Take the kits OG and plug it into the calculator and get an approximation of the true ABV.

 

[TheZymurgist]

Did you top off with water after the boil, or did you do a full boil? If you added top-off water, you may not have mixed it thoroughly enough which would throw off your gravity reading.

 

[tzzler44]

It wasn't from a kit. When I added the top-off water at the end it was nearly 2 gallons and i whipped it pretty thoroughly to aerate it. The boil wasn't volcanic but was definitely roiling.

I fixed the link, sorry about that!