vitaminb

Recipes 

Hi everyone,
I'm brand new to the forum and fairly new to brewing. I primarily brew all grain and have been mostly keeping to 1 gallon batches until I get the hang of it.
I've been using beersmith to keep track of my batches and also to convert larger batches down to 1 gallon.
The thing that's been confusing me is that when I use the beersmith converter sometimes it puts my pre-boil water volume way higher than I'm sure it should be. For example, I entered the below (from basicbrewing.com) recipe into beersmith and tried to convert and it says I should have a pre-boil volume of 2.36 gallons. That can't be right, can it? When I did recipes before I'd pretty much stick to a quart of water per pound of grain during mash, then add about a gallon of water before boiling. That would give me around 1.25 gallons which would boil down to 1 gallon.
What am I missing here?

11 lbsPremium 2-Row Malt; Great Western
.7 ozCascade - 5.5 AA% pellets; boiled 60 min
.7 ozCascade - 5.5 AA% pellets; boiled 39 min
.7 ozCascade - 5.5 AA% pellets; boiled 15 min
White Labs WLP013 London Ale
Notes
Mash at 148 deg for 1 hr. Sparge at 170 deg to collect 6 gallons. Follow hop schedule for 1/3 additions. Original recipe was around 28 to 32 IBU's. A simple yet complex drinkable beer that started the craft brewing craze we enjoy today. You can listen to Jack McAuliffe share his recipe on Basicbrewing.com.
Enjoy and Cheers to Jack!

D_Nyholm

Recipes 

Depends on your boil off. I made some 1 gallon batches and boiled off about .75 gallons in the hour. If you start at 2.36 and boiled off .75 like me you would have 1.5 gallons of wort. After transferring to primary, I could see about 1.25 in primary which should leave you a little more than a gallon to bottle depending on your losses. Looks for the setting for boil off and enter your systems requirements and it will give you the correct volumes.

I hope that recipe isn't scaled yet as 11 lbs of 2 row in 1 gallon would surely be strong!

bradthebrewer

Recipes 

I'm not to familiar with the specifics of BeerSmith but I had a similar issues with another application due to a "top up" amount being set.

vitaminb

Recipes 

Ha, yeah that was pre-scaled, don't worry. Okay I see. So I guess beer smith is probably calculating everything in order to try to get me a full gallon at the end of the entire process. Since all I have is a one gallon carboy, however, I need to adjust things so my pre-fermentation volume is a gallon. Then, the final volume will just have to be what it is...
Thanks for the insight!!

vitaminb

Recipes 

Also, my "loss to trub/chiller" was set to .75 gallons. This is simply loss from transferring from my kettle to the carboy right? If so, I hope I'm not losing 3/4 a gallon during this process or else there might be a terrible mess in my kitchen!

MTate37

Recipes 

I'm having a hard time getting my head wrapped around boil off for gallon batches. For my first I started with 1.75 G and ended up with about 3.75 quarts. For my second I started with 2 G and still ended up with 3.75 quarts. I used the amounts Beersmith gave me for my third gallon batch so I started with a little under 2.25 G after mash and sparge and ended up with close to 1.5 G.

All three boils were one hour, same pot and same place on the dial on the stove.