Beer Smith Volumes

Just brewed a Wee Heavy Scotch Ale this weekend, really looking forward to the first tasting. Ran into an unforeseen issue though.

My last all-grain went very smoothly following http://www.brew365.com/mash_sparge_water_calculator.php and came away with exactly 5 gals. I followed Beer Smith’s guidelines for this brew with a 14.63lb griss bill requiring a total of approx 9.71gal of water: 5.71gal of water for Mash at 154F (because of my setup I need an extra gallon due to my false bottom and filter so I took 1gal from the sparge step and added to Mash for a 6.71gal mash) and then a 3gal Sparge.

What I ended up with was my 7gal brew kettle filled to the top with wort which is exactly where I need it to have a 5gal brew. But I then collected an additional gallon of wort into a separate kettle that was wasted because if added it would throw my levels off. It appears BeerSmith had me add an extra gallon of water in the sparge process that I ended up wasting (should have added 2gal not 3gal). This explains why my OG was off by 8: the estimated OG was 1.082, my measured OG was 1.074. The sugar collected in the extra gallon would have let me hit my numbers. Beer Smith seems to be giving me water levels too high. Has anyone experienced this or is it user error?

There are a lot of dead space numbers you need to check in BeerSmith vs your equipment. I also found the grain absorption to be a bit low for my BIAB setup, so had to lower that. And you need to check your boil off rate.

It took me a few times of getting all of the numbers set up, but once I got it dailed in, my numbers are usually dead on.