See, I've been fretting about this problem for months...FINALLY put it up on
the group. And only THEN did revelation strike me (in the shower, actually,
which seems to be where I do my best thinking). The answer is two-fold:
pilot error and stratification. My sparge takes over an hour to complete,
and the flow into the brewpot is so slow that the sweet liquor doesn't mix.
The first part of the runoff is highly sugared . . . and settles to the
bottom. The later runoff has very little sugar, and there's no current in
the brewpot to interrupt the gradient. Then, when I draw off a sample from
the pot's valve, located at the bottom of the pot, I get a sample of the
high-sugar end of the gradient. So the answer is simple: stir it up before
drawing the sample.

My thanks to those who offered help--sorry I couldn't provide anything more
exciting than a bit of stupidity!

TJG




"TJG" <tjgordon1@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:4sKdnYxLJKoJ7TjYnZ2dnUVZ_sWdnZ2d@comcast.com...[color=blue]
> I've been brewing 25+ years, and all-grain brewing about 3 years. I have
> an intermittent problem with specific gravity readings and hope somebody
> can help. On occasion, perhaps 25% of the time, my sweet liquor after
> sparging will read very high--much higher than expected. Case in point: an
> ale mash using about 10 lbs of Maris Otter malt in 2.5 gal water produced
> a liquor reading 1.080! I repeated the reading twice, and all three times
> got the same reading. Of course that affects the hop extraction, and I had
> no choice but to hop according to that reading. After boiling, however,
> when the wort was going into the fermenter, the s.g. read 1.048--about
> what I'd expect for the amount of grain used. MOST of the time the
> readings for extracted liquor and wort are within a very few points of one
> another, but on occasion I get this huge differential. Does anybody have
> any ideas? I'd sure appreciate some input! Thanks--
>
> TJG
>[/color]