Those two sound very suspect.
lol
It looked very suspect to me and it tasted... well... not flattering
I don't know any calculations to figure it out, but if you only got 2.5 gallons worth of wort above 1.000 then you didn't get hardly any conversion. Did you do BIAB, or did you do a mash tun pouring the sparge water over the top (a fly sparge)?
No, I got over 5 Gallons of wort above 1.000 but - german house wife in me - hmmm... this looks "watery" I need to "reduce" it. So I boiled a total of 3 hours instead of 90 min to get rid of water
While I was doing this I knew this was just another step in my major screw up scheme
I did not use anything bagged or pre packaged (german pride, you know) ... I used naked grains in an austere tun.
Fly sparging, my friend, seamed a bit to advanced for my firts attempt so I simply batch sparged... yet I guess since I messed up the mash with way too much water (instead of adding 12 quarts I prolly ended up adding 25 quarts)
and I knew that this wasn't gonna turn out well but I was torn between a temperature too low or adding hot water... and the house wife brain thought of... ach, sauce too thin, just let it simmer forever and it will reduce to a fine glaze... well...
A 1.025 OG will maybe end up being 2% or so. Very sessionable! haha
Drinking Kronenbourg blanc and Einstök white ale atm so I don't care about season and "it is always sunny in Philadelphia" you just need to turn the heat up and look out the window
Anyways, I'm wondering if your hydrometer is off. Have you calibrated it in water? It should say what temp that it should calibrate to, usually 60F, although the one I bought over here is 20C.
Did calibrate Hydrometer and thermometer - yet I am wondering where the 102 reading for the temperature came from... might have to do that again or make sure it doesnt touch the bottom of the kettle...
my hydrometer reads 20°C for Calibration on the inside slip and it read exactly 1.000 in 20°C warm water.
I would do as the other guy suggested and try a double crush, and I would also stir a couple of times during the mash.
ok. and I will use the exact amount of water and see that I get the temp right and keep it steady.
Bought my self a cooler today to mash in hoping the insulation will keep the temperature.
Another problem, though, with the 1.000 reading during the sparging, could be that you were pouring the water over the grain bed wrong (if you were doing a fly sparge). This could lead to channeling, which means you were basically only getting water out, which would read 1.000.
i dumped it in with a lot of "spin" making sure it made nice waves in the grains
If you were doing any other kind of sparge, then your problem is how much conversion you got.
I truly believe my problem is with the water I dumped in the mash and my Vorlauf looked not nice enough to keep it so I kept pouring back aprox a galon or more Vorlauf until I realized it does not look better only more watery...
so I knew I did something wrong there.
hat I poured back a normal amount of vorlauf, my first at least 3 Gallons should have been fairly okay...
as I said, re-bought everything today and will redo it one of these day maybe tomorrow keeping track of the water usage in the very first place!
Thanks for helping me getting this better sorted...