Too much water?
 

I'm doing a 5 gal wheat batch and doing a 90 min boil. BeerSmith says my preboil vol should be 6.79 gals.

But BeerSmith says "Est post boil vol 5.98 gal and est post boil grav 1.052". How can I have a 5 gal batch at 5.98 gal.


Here's the thing....my last 2 brews, using BeerSmith as usual, and I've gotten anywhere from 1/2 to a full gal over my target. Using partial mash here.


Am I missing something?

5.98gal - trub loss - cooling loss = 5.5ish on my system

beersmith is calculating values based on your equipment profile. Is your equipment profile and all the values it contains correct?

this is what I use. it gets pretty close each time with a little variance.

+1 to this, if you do not have all your equipment profile numbers dialed in then all calculations will be off-pay particular attention to dead space in the kettle and MLT as well as boil off, absorption and trub/primary loss

I've never had issues before, so this is interesting.

Since I have a refractometer, I'm going to shoot by pre-boil target grav so I don't F it up.

I'll have to do an equipment check run later. Got 2 beers to brew today.

Yes, particularly pay attention to post boil losses, but don't even think of entering them into BeerSmith in the trub loss field. Leave them out (set to 0) and scale the batch size to account for them. This will make your life much easier. Setting Lauter losses to 0 is popular for all grainers as well, but that adds some complexity for not much convenience.

I actually just uncovered a bug in BeerSmith related to extract brewing. It does not handle trub loss correctly. It will increase your boil volume (top off water?) to account for the loss, but not reduce your displayed OG due to the sugars left in the kettle. I may not have the water addition named correctly, since I don't do extract, but the bug is real. I only discovered the extract bug while proving BeerSmith handles trub loss for all grain incorrectly as well. Hopefully BeerSmith will improve its useability regarding losses and efficiency.

That is what is most important, getting it right in the kettle. That is why I suggest accounting for post boil losses by scaling the recipe (use the scale tool). BeerSmith has issues with how it defines efficiency and it will cause you headaches, especially if you switch to all grain.