Ok So my girl friend brewed her first batch of beer a few weeks ago , She insisted that she do it on her own , So long story short she added the yeast without getting a O.G. reading . 11 days in and this beer is out of control I had to set up 2 over flows etc etc It just makes me think this is going to be a strong beer , but as far as im tracking there is no way to find the abv since I dont have the O.G. Is there some mystery tester and or method to help me find the abv for this beer?
post the recipe and the FG when you get it. There are ways to get a rough idea of what it should have been.
yes but you will need a refractometer and a hydrometer. http://www.brewheads.com/refract-getog.php You enter the final gravity from a hydrometer and the brix from a refractometer and it will give you the OG. Alcohol presence skews a refractometer reading so that's how this works. You can then take this OG reading and subtract it from the FG Hydrometer reading and multiply it by 131 to find an approximate ABV.
Just to say this could be done, not that you want to do it as it is spendy. You could send a sample to a testing lab. For about $25 dollars you would get the ABV and more data.
I believe what LostTraveler is getting at is the following. If your fermentables largely came from extract, then it is very easy to estimate the OG. That, with the FG, will give you the ABV.
Search for Hopunion alpha analytics, or White Labs has a service too. Only have limited net connection right now.
Chances are it's extract, so just post what all was used, it'll be pretty easy to get within .5% or so, along with the FG. Going apeshit in the fermenter doesn't mean it's a high ABV at all.
Better connection. http://www.hopunion.com/28_BeerTesting.cfm?p5=open http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/lab_services.html
Thanks for the info... Not sure if I believe the numbers I got out of brewing a recent sweet stout, so I think I'm going to send it off to the lab for an actual ABV determination to see how far off my estimated ABV is.
What was the recipe? Was it all grain? If you used extract you can figure out how much sugar you added to start with.
it was a wheat extract she used a jar of honey as well as blue berries, lb torrified wheat specialty grains, then 4oz of ??????hops
