gravity reading

[NewBrewerCK]

How often in your experience are gravity readings seeming incorrect? I mashed 13.5 pounds of Golden Promise 2-row, 1/2 pound british wheat, 10oz 55 crystal malt, 4oz belgian aromatic, 2 oz roasted barley, and 1 oz peat-smoked malt. This brought my recipe to a projected OG of 1.082 (with 5.5 gallons in the primary). Target single infusion temp was 150. I started at 155 and this stayed for 1 hour and this slowly went to 144 at 90 minutes. Nothing out of the ordinary happened that I know of. When taking the reading the sample was 80 degrees. this was adjusted for by adding .002 to the reading. My only question - do you let the cold break settle before taking the measurement? I let it settle - my measure was 1.063 (adjusted). Any ideas?

[corkybstewart]

I don't know how you calculated your expected OG but 1.082 sounds way high for 14 lbs of base malt and another pound of specialty. I don't have a calculator handy but My Happy Wife pale ale comes in at 1.052 with 11 pounds of malt. !.062 sounds about right.

[NewBrewerCK]

One small error in my previous post - it was 14.5# of golden promise. I got the recipe from the Clone Brews book for the Skull Splitter. It says that the OG should be 1.085 to 1.088. I also input my stuff at the tastybrew.com calculator and it wasn't far off. Also if you take 75% efficiency of 2-row base malt you get around 27 ppg, therefore 27 (ppg) x 14.5 (pounds base malt) / 5.5 (gallons wort) = 76 or 1.076 gravity. This does not include the specialty grains or wheat which I imagine would bring the gravity to around 1.082.

[Vienna Lager]

I am with Corky, one of my session beers comes in at 1.045 with 19 lbs of base grains and some speciality grains thrown in of not more than about 1 lb. for a 10 gal batch. A 5 gal. batch would be 9.5 lbs. of base and about 1/2 lb. of speciality.

Conventional thinking tells me that the speciality grains in the amounts you are using NewBrew don't add a lot of gravity points.