Beersmith Equipment Profile Question

I just downloaded Beersmith the other night, but after reading FAQs and other forum posts, I'm still a little confused as to how to dial in my equipment profile for Beersmith.

I am a new brewer, with only 2 batches under my belt right now, so only doing extract at the moment. I don't understand how to indicate to BS that I am using a 30 quart (7.5G) kettle right now.

I assume, from looking at the pre-built profiles, that I would put 15G as my mash tun volume? And then for mash tun weight do I put the physical weight of my BK?

I apologize if this is a repeat post, but I couldn't really find a dummy's guide to setting this up properly. Most of the documentation I have found is geared more towards AG brewing, and it seems like you need to hack the equipment profiles a bit to match extract properly.

You mentioned in your post that you are doing Extract Brewing. As long as you are doing extract brewing, you should not need to input much for the Equipment Profile. This is particularly true for the Mash Tun parameters -- because you are not using a Mash Tun. Simply indicate the size of kettle that you are using and you will be fine. You can do this by choosing a kettle profile from the program, and adjusting it for your purposes.
The reason that you can get away with this is because you are not really worried about Mash Tun volume, pounds of grain in the mash, water volume, the amount of heat that the mash tun will suck out of the hot mash when you mash in, the amount of water left in the mash tun (dead space) after the mash is drained, etc. All of that has to do with All Grain brewing, and you can adjust these parameters when you step into All Grain.
However, when entering your recipes, you will want to make sure that you indicate that the recipe is an extract recipe. I think you have three choices, extract, partial mash, and all grain. So, as long as you are extract brewing, and I think that this is a good way to begin and will give you an opportunity to become more familiar with the program, you will not really need the equipment profile. When you move up to partial mashing and all grain brewing, the equipment profile becomes much more important in allowing BeerSmith to calculate strike water temps, etc. I hope that this helps.

Mark

You can do this by choosing a kettle profile from the program

Click to expand...

Ok this is maybe where I am getting hung up then. The documentation (that I found at least) didn't make reference to this.

Even on BS's site, it doesn't even make reference to a kettle size at all:
http://beersmith.com/equipment-setup/

I'll have to poke around to see where to set that when I get home.

BeerSmith has a bug related to extract recipes in the current release (2.1?), but is supposed to fixed in the next one.

It does not handle trub losses correctly, and will steer you into diluting your proper OG wort with extra water, but still tell you that your OG is correct. It is easy to verify, just use the same amount of extract in a recipe, but increase your trub loss. Magically you get more volume and the same OG.

The workaround, and the way I would do it permanently, especially for all grain, is to scale your batch size up to account for losses- be they trub, hop absorption, kettle dead space, etc. This makes adapting and sharing recipes much easier.