Wheat beer advice please.

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Bobstrolz

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I started an AG American wheat beer last week. OG was measured at 1.044. The recipe said it should be 1.058. I have a 500g pack of Muntons wheat DME. Should I add it to the fermenter or just wait and see how the beer turns out?
PS. Recipe (Home Brew Beer by Greg Hughes) says final gravity should be 1.013 and est ABV 5.9%.
 
Personally I would leave well alone. You will probably find the FG goes down lower and you will still have a reasonable ABV.
Then review why the OG came out much lower than expected.
 
Thanks, will do. This is only my second attempt at all-grain and I'm not totally happy with the fly sparging. Going to make some English barley wine tomorrow but I will be trying the batch sparge method.
 
How are you doing your sparging? I have fly sparged, using a rotating sparge arm, for all of my AG brew with good results.

Could you put up details of your recipe and mash temps etc to see if we can spot anything else.

Cheers
 
If it was a full boil than it's more than likely an efficiency ordeal more likely with the sparge, but even the crush or mash time could have effected this.

I'm uncertain if mash temp influences the SG or not.

I generally like my ABV to be above 4.8% and so I'd likely add some DME to bring it closer to 1.050, but that's me.
 
Recipe was;
3kg wheat malt
2.5kg lager malt
300g carapils malt.
Mash temp was 65 degrees for 90 mins.
Sparge water was 75 degrees but the sparge arm wouldn't rotate (lack of water pressure?) so finished sparging with perforated Al foil over the mash.
Total sparge time approx 1 hour.
17g of citra hops at start of 70 min boil. 26g of citra at turn off.
 
It sounds like a sparge efficiency problem I'd think, though I've only been doing partial mashes since Jan '13 and I'm not that knowledgeable yet.

I've added honey to the fermentor after a week of fermentation when it dies down. Worked great but you can't get an honest SG number. Regardless it tasted great and worked, and it would bring your ABV up.

The one issue is that honey has a small chance (unless pasteurized) of wild yeast which means that if you keep the yeast strain going it could eventually take hold well enough to change it.
 

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