Disparity between estimated original gravity and actual original gravity

Hello! I am a total newbie to the brewing process. This is my fourth batch, all extract, and I just discovered beersmith and thought I'd give it a whirl. What a godsend this program is!

So I'm brewing a honey porter. The estimated OG is 1.052, but my actual measured OG was 1.091

Now I wasn't expecting everything to come out exactly like the program said, but that seems like a bit of a leap outside normal expected variation (or is it?). I've included a screenshot of the beersmith program with the recipe up (the scroll bar cuts off the last ingrediant, which is 3 pounds of honey)

I'm just wondering if I did anything horribly wrong along the way. The grains I steeped while the water was heating up for 20 minutes. The honey I added at the end of the boil after flame off. Since I added the honey so late should I have compensated in some way to get a more accurate estimate of the OG?

It's in the carboy right now fermenting. When it goes into the secondary I plan to add vanilla beans. I really hope it turns out well because this is my first attempt at branching out with a recipe to make it my own, so anything I could do to maintain more control over the estimates in the future would be great.

Yeah .... something's definitely off. I (meaning no offense) think you may have mis-weighed or measured something.  I recently made a mead with 5lbs of honey and lots of grain and only got an ACTUAL MEASURED  OG of 77, with Beersmith's estimate being 76...... prettty close. The only other possibility would be a bad Hydrometer. Try with a second one if you have one.

I couldn't help but notice that you already have an measured FG even though you are still fermenting.

Well, I suppose now it's too late to find out if we miscalculated something, because if we did then it appears correctly in our notes. But I won't rule out the possibility that we screwed up when weighing our grains or something like that.

Testing another hydrometer is however something we can do, and I am a bit suspicious of the thing.

And I was just playing around with the FG measurement.

EDIT: just determined a likely cause... I've been doing the OG readings improperly, taking the wort sample before mixing in the water that brings it up to 5 gallons, so it was definitely a more dense sample than it should have been.

Wanderer said:

just determined a likely cause... I've been doing the OG readings improperly, taking the wort sample before mixing in the water that brings it up to 5 gallons, so it was definitely a more dense sample than it should have been.

Click to expand...

Learning is a good thing - now you know how to fine-tune the final OG when you're boiling a concentrated wort.  If you have three gallons of 1.090, and your target is a 1.052 OG, some math will get you there.  Or, if your priority is exactly 5.0 gallons, you can do that and accept the gravity might be slightly off.