OG was WAY too low

The ingredients will all be the same, you just use all the water at the start.

if you really wanted to beer-dork out you can calculate the hop utilization rates at different volumes/gravities and correct it, but most beginner extract beer kits are pretty forgiving of that and you truly don't know how it was calculated to begin with.

 

Awesome, thanks.

 

I had a house like that, we took apart a faucet, found a fitting that would thread on where the faucet went and went from there. It takes the sink out of commission for an hour but its cool, you adapt.

 

It is that simple. I started doing it with my second batch ever, thinking "this is dumb, I'm just going to use all the water from the start".

And I did, and it worked.

 

All you do is unscrew the aerator and screw in the chiller hose. Hell, the adapter comes with the kit from AHS.

 

“The water coming out of our faucets in this town isn't too cold...how would that work out with a wort chiller?” I will teach you some basic thermodynamics: your wort can only get as cool as the water temperature. So, if the tap water is now 72°F then the absolute coolest that your wort can be will be 72°F (and it will likely be a bit warmer than that).

If you want your wort to be even cooler you will need to adopt some ‘extra’ cooling strategies; perhaps a small ice bath to get it down some more?

Cheers!

 

“We do the ice bath thing now, and that works pretty well for 3 gallons of liquid. Obviously would take longer with 5 gallons.”

What I was trying to express in my previous post is that you do a ‘two step’ chilling process. First use the wort chiller to get your 5 gallons as cool as you possibly can (maybe a temperature in the 70’s?). You can then use a smaller scale ice bath to get your wort from a ‘warm’ temperature (e.g., high 70’s?) down to a cooler temperature.

Cheers!

 

not really answering your question, but a way to troubleshoot it would be to take preboil gravity readings, and have a big pile of DME on hand. If you are short on gravity for where you should be, toss in the calculated amount of DME before the boil (easy calculation; see: Designing great Beers) and no more low OG.

 

Right, that works for all-grain brewing, but wouldn't your pre-boil reading for an extract beer be 1.000? Maybe you'd get a couple points if you extract sugars from steeping specialty grains. Or are you saying to add the extract before boiling and taking a reading from that? If you're doing a partial boil, that would throw the reading off.

 

I think the OP's problem was pretty clearly a measurement problem, not a true gravity problem. Adding more DME (at any point) would not have been the solution. But I think your advice is sound for All Grain brewing.

 

touche, my fault for not reading the post entirely.