Beersmith Gravity Estimate

Raising or lowering the "Lost to Boil Trub and Chiller" does not effect the Gravity Estimate number, but increasing the Batch Size does. Since you are in effect throwing out potential beer, loosing wort to "Boil Trub and Chiller" should effect efficiency, but also change the estimated gravity. The loss is the same as making a larger Batch Size and tossing some.

Some of it is break and hop material that wouldn’t effect gravity, but a lot of it is fermentable wort. Brewers who pour everything from their boil into the fermenter could set the number low, but if you are trying to leave most of this material behind Beersmiths calculations are effected.

What settings are you using to compensate for the loss? My thought is to set the loss number low, but increase the batch size and not expect to get that volume.

If you think about it, "Lost to Boil Trub and Chiller" should not affect your gravity. If you have 5.5 gallons of wort at 1.048 and lose .5 gallons to your chiller, you'll have 5 gallons of wort at 1.048. Efficiency, yes. Gravity, no.

It took me quite a bit of fine tuning of the settings to get BeerSmith to reflect my system, but the key component to get it to predict the right gravity was to lower the Evaporation Rate (I dropped it to 7%/Hour).

AnOldUR said:

I agree. So the question is, when calculating estimated gravity, does Beersmith use the amount you put in the "loss" block as having the potential to increase gravity. It appears as if it does not because the gravity doesn’t change when you change the loss value. That means that any loss that does have potential will not be accounted for in the gravity estimate. To compensate for this you’d have to increase the batch size to account for this loss even though you won’t get that much wort.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you're saying. The "Lost to Trub and Chiller" field will not affect your gravity estimate (and it shouldn't).

If you check the "Calculate Boil Volume Automatically" box, any adjustments you make to "Lost to Trub and Chiller" will increase or decrease your "Boil Volume", which makes perfect sense.

If your gravity readings don't coincide with what BeerSmith predicts, adjust the "Evaporation Rate" field. You also need to adjust the "Lauter Tun Deadspace" field to make sure the predicted "Pre-boil Gravity" matches reality.

Taking careful measurements of your volumes and gravity readings (pre-boil and post-boil), you should be able to get BeerSmith to match (and predict) what you're getting from your process.

OK, I've been thinking about this a bit more.

The first step in getting the OG to match is to adjust your brewhouse efficiency. When you click on the "Brewhouse Efficiency" button, it will give you fields to put in your "Actual OG", "Actual Boil Volume", "Volume into Boiler" and "OG into Boiler". Use those fields to put in exactly what you get from a batch and it will calculate your "Actual Efficiency".

Then copy that number into the "Brewhouse Efficiency" field on the recipe and your "Orig Gravity Estimate" will then match up what you actually got. After that, you can adjust your "Lauter Tun Deadspace", "Evaporation Rate" and "Lost to Boil Trub and Chiller" fields to get your volumes to match.