Gravity anomaly or perhaps mystery!

[GMH]

Hi all.

Brewed 20l of a porter-ish style beer last night using the following:

2kg Light DME
350g Crystal
350g Chocolate
200g Light brown sugar
200g Golden syrup (it was in the cupboard looking at me and I thought, 'why not'…)
Hopped with Bramling-X
US-05 to ferment

Now Beer Smith reckons this should give me a gravity of 1.045, but the reading I took when it went into the FV was 1.054 (temperature corrected to 55). Everything was topped up to the right level etc.

Messing around with the amounts this change would amount to another 500g of DME or more than twice the amount of sugar that I put in – the DME being in 1kg bags makes that a hard mistake to make, whilst I’m quite sure that I couldn’t get 800g of the sugars into the pot I was weighing them in!

Unless I inadvertently extracted more from the steeping grains (changing the recipe to 'all-grain' makes the numbers add up for some reason, but I steeped for the usual 30 minutes at around 65C) I am stumped. Either I have done something stupid without noticing or BS is talking BS!

I would appreciate any thoughts on the matter.

G

[GrowlingDogBeer]

I just put the ingredients into BeerMate, I left out the Golden Syrup as it doesn't seeem to appear in the list of things to choose from.

I got an OG of 1.049, so adding the syrup as well I would say 1.054 would be about right.

What did you have your Brew Length set to in Beer Smith, is it possible you had it set to 23L, which would give you 1.045 with them ingredients.

[boingy]

I just checked the numbers with ProMash and the numbers agreed with your BeerSmith ones. It does seem a bit odd. I think It's probably a combination of extra sugars from a fairly decent mash of 30 minutes at 65C (did you maintain this temperature or did it drop over the 30 minutes?) and possibly a slightly inaccurate hydrometer.

The beer will be fine but a bit stronger than you planned. You could dilute the wort down a bit in the FV if you wanted to get closer to the target OG (= more beer!)

[GMH]

Steve - batch size is set to 20l so I don't think that's it. Interesting that BeerMate comes to different conclusions though!

Boingy - The temperature was pretty stable and probably didn't get much lower than 63C at any point. I guess it is quite hard to determine the potential gravity of a product like sugar as it must vary a lot. I guess you are right about the hydrometer, though it has roughly measured up with BS in the past. I was once told that there was no difference between mashing and steeping a fully converted grain, but changing the recipe to 'all-grain' in BS raises the gravity considerably - perhaps it's just the perceived flavour that doesn't differ? You would think that those extra points would do something though.

Never mind - a stronger beer never did anyone any harm!!! The proof of the pudding and all that...

Thanks for your input chaps