OG a bit high

Extract/Partial Mash Brewing
1

Hi,
Just brewed a batch of stout and the OG is a bit higher than the recipe suggests. Recipe - 1.042; mine - 1.047. I know this won’t make much of a difference but was wondering if I went a little high on topping it off. Thoughts?

2

Since you’re topping off, I assume this is an extract batch? There’s a good chance the water wasn’t fully mixed and you read an artificially high OG. If you added all the fermentables and topped off to the correct volume, your OG should be right where predicted.

3

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, extract batch. I had to add about 1/4 of a gallon of h2o to my chilled wort to hit my 5 gallon mark. I think it was mixed pretty good but that may be the case. Thanks for the reply.

4

Maybe it’s word semantics of what means higher and what means lower, but wouldn’t adding too much water cause it to be lower ie closer to 1.000 because it would dilute the wort?

5

Closer to 1.000 is more dilluted. Got it. I did a very poor job of asking this question.

6

If you were shooting for 1.042 and your OG was 1.047 then it was high but only by a little.

I agree with the others above. It was probably due to stratification of the wort.

It’s harder than you think to get the heavier wort and your top off water mixed.

If you ended up with 5 gallons it’s almost guaranteed that your OG will be what is predicted with an extract brew.

Either way 5 points is no big deal. You may just end up with a 4.7ish ABV stout rather than 4.2. Still in style and likely will still be good. :cheers:

7

Better a little higher than a little diluted. Thanks so much!

8

I’ve seen huge variances from stratification. A 1.060 can read 1.090 or 1.020. While I wouldn’t rule out stratification for this case, I would confirm the gallon marks on the bucket itself. For topping off extract it is much more important that those marks are accurate, and I’ve seen buckets where they’re off by more than a quart.

9

+1

From the suggestions of this forum I checked my bucket and it was off about an inch at the 5 gallon mark. I also had a few batches were the OG seemed off, and this was probably a factor.