OG very low..What Happened?

[HardcoreLegend]

I just brewed this Steam style beer tonight with the following recipe:

.5 lbs. Crystal Malt 60

[BillyBock]

Check your hydrometer in distilled water, maybe it's not calibrated? Did you perform a full boil? If so, another possibility is that maybe you didn't boil off enough and ended up with diluted wort. If you topped off with water, maybe you added too much? If this recipe was 5 gals, your gravity of 41 would indicate you had almost 6 gals in the fermenter. Hope this gives you something to chew on.

v/r
Bill

[HardcoreLegend]

Hydrometer is OK. 5 gals of brew in the fermenter. My bucket has marks on the side to tell what the volume is.

[Brewer2001]

HLC,

Malt constituants vary from malt to malt and season to season. Homebrewers are not furnished with the spec. sheets, so we get what we get. Extract should meet a specific range, but may not be the same from batch to batch. You could always buy more DME than you need to adjust the OG or boil with less water and add top-up to OG not volume.

Good brewing,

Tom F.

P.S. I have been working a pro gig for about a week now, no pay yet....still hoping.

[fitz]

One could be the fermentable present for extracting in the grains. It could be a variance of fermentables from any of the extracts of DME. It could have been the volume at which you boiled at(less water=less fermentables released. Anyway you look at it, it will have a lower gravity, and lower alcohol, but I have had some good brews that started out in the 38s or 39s don't sweat a lower starting gravity.