Maybe you drove your pH too far down, it is a stumper, though.
That's a good suggestion, which is why I'm in the process of obtaining a pH meter, FINALLY.
Here's the recipe I used:
14 lbs White Wheat Malt
8 lbs Pale Malt (2Row American)
1 lbs Crystal 40L
8 oz Carared
8 oz Honey Malt
Nearly a pound of rice hulls
I mashed this in with 162F water at a ratio of 1.25 qts/lb and obtained a mash temp of 150. This was easily maintained with the amount of grain and water in the tun, which was a 10 gallon igloo with a false bottom.
Beersmith told me to expect an OG of 1.110, which I usually obtain or get better due to my lengthy mash times (I go until I get a full conversion). I got a full conversion, (although I'm wondering if I missed something now, a mystery like this will leave you to question everything but I'm pretty sure I got a full conversion)
Measured OG, taking into account temperature, came out at 1.072. That's a pretty large margin of error. I even added some 170F water to the wort and ran it back through, nothing better.
At this point I'm thinking that my sparge wasn't normal as per my usual procedure. Usually I bring up the mash temperature to 165F for the sparge by adding some water from my HLT, however with this grain bill I didn't have the room that I normally do in order to do this so I had to start pulling wort at about 155F. I'm thinking, after talking to some people, that I might have been dealing with some channeling or maybe my mashout temp wasn't high enough to dissolve all the sugars.
I then went on the assumption that I didn't have a full conversion, which looking back now was probably not the problem. I added about 8 more pounds of grain and re-mashed. This grain, I'm quite certain, didn't convert. 2 hours of boiling down the first wort to bring up the gravity (boiled off about 2 gallons) and mashing the second time yielded no conversion.
By this time it was 11 o'clock and I just said 'F-it' and pulled the second wort off and added it to the first wort. The end product was (funnily enough) a 1.116 post boil hopped wort that is fermenting nicely, and 4 gallons of 1.060 that is also fermenting well.
At this point I know that I have beer, but it was one hell of a process. I hope it's not awesome because I have no idea how to do this again, lol! But it should be interesting with the lengthy boil and such.
Damn this got long winded, but here's the recipe and what happened. Any input would be appreciated.