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I was looking at one of the recipes and saw this..

Mash Steps:

1. Mash in - add 3.44 gal of water at 169.4 F 60 min
2. Mash out - add 2.20 gal of water at 194 F 10 min

Fly Sparge with 2.45 gal of water at 168.1 F


This is supposed to be a 5 gallon batch with a boil volume of 6.52 gal.

if you add all of the mash in, out and sparge, it becomes 8.09 gal of wort.

What is beersmith saying? also, what is "fly" sparge?
 
So, basically what it's telling you to do is add in the 3.44 gallons to hit whatever mash temperature you are looking for, and that will be the only water in there for the actual mash. The mash out step is Beersmith having you add x amount of water at x temperature to bring the temperature in the mash tun up to about 168 degrees. This is the temperature that is generally considered best for sparging (draining the mash tun of that sweet, sweet nectar).

Fly sparging is a sparging process where you slowly drain the wort from the bottom of your mash tun while simultaneously slowly adding water into the top of your mash tun, so that the water level never really decreases. I would suggest reading into fly sparging your own. It requires some extra equipment. So all of that water isn't in the tun at the same time, and you don't actually collect all of that for your boil kettle, so that's why it seems like too much water.

Instead of fly sparging, a lot of people batch sparge (which I'm going to assume is what you either do or are looking to do). Again, a quick search will tell you about batch sparging if you aren't already familiar. You just need to change a couple of settings in Beersmith for it to calculate batch sparging for you. When your'e in your recipe, click on the Mash tab then under "Mash Profile" you just need to change your mash type. If you have "Single Infusion, Medium Body" selected, for example, just change it to "Single Infusion, Medium Body, Batch Sparge" and it will switch you to batch sparge. I would also recommend clicking the little check mark to the right of that, and under "Batch Sparge Options" checking "Drain mash tun before sparging"

Hope that helps.
 
What is also being overlooked here is water absorption. For every ten pounds of grain that you have in the mash, you can expect the grain to absorb about a gallon (can't remember the exact amount) of water. So you will actually add more water volume (strike water, mash out water, sparge water) than you will get for the volume of wort in your boil kettle.

Mark
 
Also, under your equipment profile, you can dial in the evaporation rate of your boil. Beersmith is factoring in all of these losses to leave you with the net volume of wort you want.
 
Speaking of evap, I'm starting to think the default isn't right for me. I'm consistently hitting the preboil estimated gravity, but I'm a little low on the og, and seem to be ending up with extra wort.
Anyone else.experience this?
 
Speaking of evap, I'm starting to think the default isn't right for me. I'm consistently hitting the preboil estimated gravity, but I'm a little low on the og, and seem to be ending up with extra wort.
Anyone else.experience this?

Evaporation rate is partially a function of the width of your vessel and other factors, but the most important is how active your boil is. With my system and rate of boil I typically experience an evap rate of 17% an hour, which I gather is quite high, but for me is consistent so I can factor it in.

On your equipment profile page just tinker with the 'amount boiled off', to reflect your actual experience and you'll see what your evap rate has been. Use that value any time you build a new profile
 

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