Low Original Gravity

Paz-CCFC

I'm after mixing in the ingredients for the Coopers Wheat beer, pretty much according to this video (except I put in just over 300g of dextrose as per the Coopers instructions, whereas your man put in 500g). I put in the yeast and all, and I've just gotten the original gravity and it's only 1034. It seems pretty low to me - my first bacth had a redaing of 1043, if I remember correctly. I topped up to 23 litres with cold water (more than the video, but the amount that Coopers suggests for lager to help cool it down, cause it was a bit warmer than it should ideally be). The temparture was 26-28 degrees when I added the yeast, it's gone down to 24-26 now.

At this early stage, is there much I can do? Would putting in some more dextrose or giving the batch a stir do anything? Or would it adversly affect the yeast?

Sky King

Diluting with water will lower your OG, adding dextrose will increase it and have the effect of making your beer stronger.

(or such is my understanding of the situation anyway!).

Paz-CCFC

Sky King wrote: »

Diluting with water will lower your OG, adding dextrose will increase it and have the effect of making your beer stronger.

(or such is my understanding of the situation anyway!).

That's my understanding as well, but I believe it's also affected by things such as the amount of wort and malt in it. So, it might not be as simple as adding extra dextrose to counteract the fact that there's too much water.

Do you know how it'd affect the brew if I put and mixed in extra dextrose now that the yeast has already been added?

Martyn1989

I think the most likely problem is you didnt mix your wort enough and got a watery sample OR you havn't taken into account that your hydrometer will only read correctly at 20C (as is the case with any hydrometer Ive gotten)

Here is a link to a hydrometer temperature correction http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/hydrometer.html?14343177
After putting in your results the OG would actually be 1.037.

I wouldn't be overly concerned about it but if you are you can add some extra sugar boiled to sanitise into the beer (just be very careful as the beer is very susceptable to infection)

Fat Joe

I would always go with 1kg of sugar albeit spraymalt, dextrose or 1 can of liquid malt extract as a minimum for any of the one can kits, Coopers included. Secondly remember your fermenter scale can be a bit off. These are just buckets with printed measurements on them. They are by no means exact. As a rule I would top all my kit beers up to 21lt. Gets desired gravity everytime there abouts, at least it is never too low. I would say your reading is accurate and is a combination of too much water and not enough sugar.

Baneblade

if you are using the hydrometer that came with the coopers kit check what it reads in just water, the one i got was a bit off it was at 0.995 in water. I picked up a second one and that correctly had 1.000