one gallon batches, yeah this isn't right.

i have also started a thread on beersmith's forums:

http://www.beersmith.com/forum/index.php/topic,11688.0.html

but i get a lot more responses here, so i wanted to run it by you people. if you haven't clicked on the link, i just started doing one gallon batches as experiments for new ideas, and it hasn't been going well. my beer yesterday was a flaming disaster. I brewed a one gallon smash with 2.6 lbs of Vienna. going by beersmith's calcs, my pre-boil volume was 3.4 gal which I hit. OG on this beer is supposed to be 1.060, and my pre-boil gravity was supposed to be 1.039. I hit a preboil gravity of 1.020. that is not even close to the ballpark let alone near it. my efficiency for this brew was 35%. that's not even possible, the usual for me is 69%. why does beersmith show the estimated mash eff for this at 156%??? i know mash eff goes up as the batches get smaller, but can you really hit 156% efficiency in the real world? when i made this, the grain to water % was very low, the chance of having doughballs or something like that was none. it was a very very thin mash. something just seems off here.

one poster on beersmith questioned why my volumes are so high. it does look strange but it is correct. I have a 1.25 gal trub/chiller loss, and boil off 1.1 gallon an hour. so that's a 2.4 gallon loss out of a 3.4 gallon boil, leaving one gallon. all of this is in my equipment profile, so it should all be accounted for by BS correct?

There i a "one gallon brewers unite" thread on here sorry no link.
The guys on there are very knowledgeable, and can definitely help. Good luck


Smoke signals

Did you actually end up with a gallon? My one gallon brews have much lower trub losses and boil off rates because I use a smaller pan and the trub loss is relative to the volume of grain/water, a percentage of total volume. For instance, my preboil volume for a 60 min boil was 1.8 gal for my last 1 gal brew, and I got exactly a gallon. If your equipment is causing insane dead space or crazy boil off (relative to 1 gal final volume), I would suggest using your normal stock pot (mine is 3gal) on the stove for 1 gal batches. I've been using BIAB usually (smallish bag, just for the ease) and with a single batch sparge getting 70% efficiency. You would have definitely needed much more grain for what you were doing, as I got 1.042 OG out of 2.4 lbs Vienna in the example batch.

Sorry, my eff. on that batch was 65, but most have been 65-72.

i hear ya impulse, i have a little used smaller pot that i was thinking about making my 1 gallon brewpot. but the question remains, whether i have 1 gallon boiloff or 10 gallons, 1 gallon dead space or 100 gallons, it shouldn't make any diff if it is entered into your equipment setup, right? it should be accounted for.

Ah, software issue. I make my batch size in my software the amount it should be including trub, 1.2 gal in my example. But I use Brew Pal so I don't know if that's a good workaround in Beersmith. It always worked for me better than equipment calculations (except boil off %, which seems to calculate correctly). I have no dead space, and just guess at trub loss based on past experience/intuition .

youreanimpulse said:

Ah, software issue. I make my batch size in my software the amount it should be including trub, 1.2 gal in my example. But I use Brew Pal so I don't know if that's a good workaround in Beersmith. It always worked for me better than equipment calculations (except boil off %, which seems to calculate correctly). I have no dead space, and just guess at trub loss based on past experience/intuition .

Click to expand...

I think you can do that in beersmith by either entering it as a kettle trub loss directly, or a fermenter loss before bottling.

youreanimpulse said:

Ah, software issue. I make my batch size in my software the amount it should be including trub, 1.2 gal in my example. But I use Brew Pal so I don't know if that's a good workaround in Beersmith. It always worked for me better than equipment calculations (except boil off %, which seems to calculate correctly). I have no dead space, and just guess at trub loss based on past experience/intuition .

Click to expand...

I think you could do that in beersmith by either entering it as a kettle trub loss directly, or a fermenter loss before bottling. The batch size in beersmith is the amount into the fermenter though, so you need to up the batch size to match the bottling volume plus fermenter loss.

this thread somehow branched out/moved into a bunch of different threads but was finally wrapped up here:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/1-gallon-brewers-unite-311884/index463.html

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