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pretty darn closely, but I find my final volume way underestimates trub loss, dryhopping, fining, transfer, etc. I've reached a point where it will tell me my O.G. That said, we completely ignore other aspects of it that we find unreliable, or unnecessary. Like off by 15 points fail.Ī final word: we've been able to get Beersmith close enough that it saves me doing most of the calculations by hand and it's handy to see ingredients by percent. And it will pretty much fail to accurately do things like, say, a 5.5 bbl batch using just the first runnings of 700lbs of malt for a barleywine. But for a starting point I'd say plug in what specs you have and start with say, 83% efficiency and see where you go from there.Ī final word: we've been able to get Beersmith close enough that it saves me doing most of the calculations by hand and it's handy to see ingredients by percent. So we changed it over for the next time and so on. For example, our efficiency was way higher on our first batch than beersmith predicted because our vorlauf and lauter plates apparently rock and because we had more boiloff than expected.
![water profile beersmith water profile beersmith](http://d3pddo38v7j30h.cloudfront.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/WaterProfile.png)
Then it becomes an iterative process of comparing what you calculated to what you got. So plug those numbers into BeerSmith, then measure any other volumes you need with 5 gallon buckets of water during your water run.
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Say your kettle is 10 bbls working but only 12.5 total, and Beersmith says you need to kettle up to 13bbls to start then things are going to be exciting. Your fabricator should be giving you spec drawings with things like nominal working volume vs total volume and so on. What's the total kettle volume? How big is your mash tun? How much dead space is under your lauter grates? Everyone is different. For that, you would probably be better off using BrunWater to calculate for you.There's no such thing as a stock "10 bbl SYSTEM". This, however, will not do what you are specifically doing with your process which is treating all the water to a common profile. So one way to set up the water profile is to base your salt addition on the initial infusion volume and add the sparge volume in the "dilute with" line on the water profile tool. There is no right or wrong, but BS2 seems to be set up to perform salt additions much in the same way I do. Other brewers I have talked to split the salts between the batch and sparge (like you seem to be doing). I add other salts for profile matching to the wort just before the boil.
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When I use my mash tun system and thus do a batch sparge, I add all the salts to the initial infusion water and leave the sparge water unadulterated. There are so many ways people have managed water salt additions and so many recommendations around it. So, if you base your salt additions on 8.5 gallons of water, but add only 3.5 into the initial infusion, BeerSmith will scale the salt additions by 3.5/8.5 = 41%. If you are using the salts strictly for pH control (which I am pretty sure BeerSmith assumes), then the salts will all be scaled for the initial infusion volume.
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