Beersmith 2.0 Mash Problem!!

So, I've been playing around with the new version and I've run into a problem.

I'm doing a 5 gallon ordinary bitter recipe with a batch sparge mash option Anyway, it has me mash in with 8.75 quarts of water for 7 pounds of grain. Then comes the problem. It has me batch sparge in 5 steps. 5.65 gallons, and then four consecutive additions of 1.13 gallons each. That totals 12.3575 gallons of water!! And in the recipe, it says that i need 10.84 gallons. What gives? It just seems like a lot of water for a bitter recipe.

Oh, and my preboil volume is supposed to be 7 gallons and finish at 5 gallons after a 60 minute boil.

I just want it to show me how much water i need for my sparge in one total step....ughhhh

There should be a checkbox somewhere that allows you to ignore the size of your mashtun when the software calculates sparge additions. V1.4 had this. Did you import your equipment settings, and is the mashtun size correct?

Or, maybe there is some odd default value for the water absorbed by the dry grain. That is in the settings somewhere, too.

Thanks. That definitely fixed the problem!

bellecitybrewer,

Where did you find the fix for your batch sparging problem? I want to set up BS2 for a double batch sparge where each sparge is of equal volumes. How do we do that?

Wow, I fiddled around w/ BS2 for about 3 hours tonight and couldn't consistently get BS2 to spit out a double batch sparge mash schedule. In some recipes it would but then in another recipe of mine it wouldn't. Why is that? What are we supposed to set the field for "percentage of mash tun to fill up with each sparge" to? I don't really understand that one.

Help.

Anyone?

In v1.4 I used to set the percentage to 75% and it would start to split them at that point. It all depends on your tun size, mash ratio and batch size

Beavdowg said:

Anyone?

Click to expand...

Open up your recipe and next to the mash option there's a box that say's " edit mash profile" when you put your pointer over it. Click it and make sure the "drain mash tun before sparging" box is checked. It doesn't solve the split sparges but it corrects your water volume.

Beavdog, I had the same problem, once i started putting the percentage at 50 and below the double batch started to work.

I use a sparge arm that acts like a sprinkler and i dont drain out before sparging. I was taught to have the mash tun drain as fast as the sparge water is coming into it and to keep water over top of grains at all times. I never heard of draining it out first and leaving just grains to sparge. So i wonder if im gonna get the right amount of sparge water in bs2 as i should. Any thaughts on that?