just got beer smith...

Been putting my ingredients into BeerSmith for a clone I'm going to do in the next week or so. It's a "close" extract clone for Dechutes Red Chair NWPale Ale. Definitely not an exact recipe, and I know this, but it should be close-ish, and good to drink regardless.

The issue I was looking for help with is in the ingredients in BeerSmith, Pilsen Dried Malt Extract and Carastan Malt do not exist. I manually entered as much info on both ingredients as I could, but I don't have all the info I need and I think it's having a big impact on how accurate the final beer numbers are turning out. I used what I think are close representative malts to fill in the numbers.

Anybody have any feedback or info on this?

Specifically I'm looking for color/SRM, Potential SG, yield, and anything else I might need to input to get these as accurate as possible.

If you need any other info or the recipe, or whatever, just let me know.

Thanks!

There is an option for addons in beer smith which will give you a lot more ingredients. Just click on that and download all of them.

If you go to "File->Add-ons..." and click on the "+ADD" button there are several manufacturers (Briess, Coopers, Weyerman, etc.) to easily add. Under "Type" they are listed as "Grain." Just double-click on the ones you want and they'll be automatically installed. They should then be listed under Grain in BeerSmith when you select your fermentables.

Thanks guys, that was a huge help! I just did that for everything that was in the addons. I got the Breiss malts now. Apparently Carastan is made by Bairds, and it isn't in there.

Thoughts? Is carastan close enough to to caramel/crystal 30 or 40 that I can just use those stats for it?

Northern Brewer has it in stock here if you can wait for shipping. Otherwise a Crystal 20L or 40L malt would make a decent substitute depending on how dark you want it. Since it's basically just a crystal malt, I would copy the stats from Briess Crystal 40L (they should be pretty close to carastan).

Most maltsters have typical malt analyses available online. Google finds them pretty easily with a "maltster malt_type" query.

http://www.countrymaltgroup.com/bairdsmalt.asp

Carastan:
8% moisture (max)
30-40°L
77% potential extract