trusting my software

Not a big deal but I thought it was worth sharing. I was doing a 5 gallon batch of an amber ale. Beersmith call for a total of 8.2 gallons of water (this is to include all my losses until I reach the fermenter). After sparging I still had 72oz of water set aside that did not get used and my boil pot achieved 6 gallons without it, so i discarded the additional water. When all was said and done I ended up roughly 1/2 gallon short in my fermenter. All this to say I should have trusted Beersmith and I would have been dead on start to finish. FYI - this ale looks amazing and I won't let one drop go to waste

I too have found Beersmith to be pretty dead-on. In addition to really accurate boil-off/ water usage estimates, my mash temps are always within 1-2 degrees if I input my equipment temps correctly.

Enjoy the beer, I'm sure it will be great!

Cheers

The BIAB volume and temp calculations in v2 are totally messed up, at least for me. I mean, just totally whacky and wrong. No way they could possibly be right. So I ended up writing my own calculators for that stuff to actually hit my targets.

weirdboy said:

The BIAB volume and temp calculations in v2 are totally messed up, at least for me. I mean, just totally whacky and wrong. No way they could possibly be right. So I ended up writing my own calculators for that stuff to actually hit my targets.

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Did my first BIAB and used beersmith for the first time this weekend. I ended up with too much water. For a few reasons I didn't feel like boiling it off, so I just lowered my OG and increased my batch size; The wort tasted great as it was. This was a small 2.5 gallon trial batch and I ended up with 3 gallons. Not sure if it was beersmith's fault or noob error. I still like the software, it, or me, just may need tweaking.

No it doesn't calculate the volumes correctly for BIAB. It is not a matter of tweaking; something is wrong with the calculations. In mine I wrote a recipe for a 5 gallon batch, and it calculated out volumes to end up with 6.25 gallons post boil. Also the temperatures were completely and utterly wrong...strike water temp was something like 5-10 degrees too high for my target mash temp.

I learned my lesson and do the calculations myself now if I'm doing BIAB. It is fine for a regular 2 or 3 vessel setup, but for BIAB it is just broken.