BeerSmith Issues

So I have been experiencing some issues since switching to BeerSmith. My water volumes always seem to generate more wort than expected. Additionally, my FGs have all been too high.

I am brewing all grain, however I do not have one large brew kettle. I use (2) four-gallon kettles, so I doubled my boil off rate to account for the increased surface level. Everything else is the same as when I was doing the water calculations by hand.

I'm wondering if maybe I'm sparging too quickly. I batch sparge.

Any insight is much appreciated.

How have your OG measurements been running?

Cheers!

In the equipment profile make sure your lauter tun dead space is correct. You may not have much loss in the system and I think it defaults to one gallon. Are you using a cooler?

As far as the FG, that's most likely a fermentation issue. Was your OG low? With more unexpected water the og would be low and maybe the yeast didn't have enough fermentable sugars to get going to work it all the way out. How long did it ferment?

I've found that doing water tests to calculate the boil off and dead space volumes to be very useful when honing in Beer Smith.

day_trippr said:

How have your OG measurements been running?

Cheers!

Click to expand...

Adjusting for temperature, the OG #'s have been right where expected.

Jsuds said:

In the equipment profile make sure your lauter tun dead space is correct. You may not have much loss in the system and I think it defaults to one gallon. Are you using a cooler?

As far as the FG, that's most likely a fermentation issue. Was your OG low? With more unexpected water the og would be low and maybe the yeast didn't have enough fermentable sugars to get going to work it all the way out. How long did it ferment?

I've found that doing water tests to calculate the boil off and dead space volumes to be very useful when honing in Beer Smith.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the response.

The lauter tun dead space is set to 0.25 gallons. This seems a bit high, due to the fact that I'm using a braided hose, not a false bottom. I am using a 5 gallon cooler.

Adjusted for temperature, the OG seems to be correct. Once I got to 5.25 gallons in my carboy, I just had to dump out the remaining wort due to lack of room. I use the wet t-shirt method to control fermentation temps. Temp stayed at about 64 and it fermented for approximately 4 days.

I did a water test for the boil off amount. I just boiled 3.5 gallons in one of my kettles for 60 minutes. Then I doubled the boil off volume since I'm using 2 kettles.

When you batch sparge, how long should you let each batch sit before draining the lauter tun? I'm wondering if I'm getting impatient and not letting it sit. I typically just fill, stir and drain. I'm wondering if the short sparge turnaround time is not allowing the grain to absorb the appropriate amt of water, leading to higher water volumes.

mlevings12 said:

[...]
When you batch sparge, how long should you let each batch sit before draining the lauter tun? I'm wondering if I'm getting impatient and not letting it sit. I typically just fill, stir and drain. I'm wondering if the short sparge turnaround time is not allowing the grain to absorb the appropriate amt of water, leading to higher water volumes.

Click to expand...

Unlikely a water absorption issue considering by the time you get to sparging the grains should already be totally saturated. But you should let the batch sparge sit for 15-20 minutes to leach as much sugar as possible out of the grain. Your "batch rinsing" is likely driving down efficiency.

All that said, if your OGs are on target in spite of poor sparging and actually dumping wort, I don't see that you have a Beersmith problem

Cheers!

day_trippr said:

All that said, if your OGs are on target in spite of poor sparging and actually dumping wort, I don't see that you have a Beersmith problem

Cheers!

Click to expand...

Ahhhh! The ever present user error issue. Thanks for the input.

So the final question....for now is this:

My current #'s are yielding an est. ABV of 3.8%, a bit low for the style. Do you think I could add some Light DME to kick up the fermentation and get my FG down a little lower?

Thanks again!

mlevings12 said:

So the final question....for now is this:

My current #'s are yielding an est. ABV of 3.8%, a bit low for the style. Do you think I could add some Light DME to kick up the fermentation and get my FG down a little lower?

Thanks again!

Click to expand...

Practically speaking, DME should be added no later than flame out. Adding it to cooled wort will result in a lumpy mess. In any case, while added DME will raise the ABV, it won't lower the FG, it will more likely raise it - it's not 100% fermentable...

Cheers!

What is the gravity now? You said it's been four days, it could sit for a bit longer and you could see if you get a lower fg.
As far as the dme, adding it at this point is a little tricky.

One of my earlier batches was way low on gravity and thought it was going to end up too light, bitter and and dry. It turned out to be a perfectly drinkable beer. No gold medals but I was surprised how well it turned out. I would let it ride and take all your energy from salvaging this batch into making sure the next runs more smoothly.

Jsuds said:

What is the gravity now? You said it's been four days, it could sit for a bit longer and you could see if you get a lower fg.
As far as the dme, adding it at this point is a little tricky.

Click to expand...

Well, the fermentation seemed to last about 4 days. It's actually been in the fermenter for 12 as of this evening. The OG was 1.055 and the FG seems to have stopped at 1.026. What about boiling some cornsugar and adding that?

Seems like at this point the best thing to do might just be to bottle it and let it ride. Worst case scenario is end up with an oatmeal stout that is a little sweet, right?

Yeah, it'll probably be fine. Honey is actually supposed to be added after primary so that's another option.

And when the worst case scenario results in beer, things can't be too bad right?

rdwhahb!

Jsuds said:

And when the worst case scenario results in beer, things can't be too bad right?

rdwhahb!

Click to expand...

Nicely said!

Well, after additional reading I decided to go with the honey to increase the ABV a bit. Added last night and it's churning away this morning. We'll see how it turns out in about a month I suppose.

Just an update: be careful to let late addition honey ferment out completely. Be patient. I thought mine had. Gravity stopped moving, stayed consistent for 4 days. A month later I had exploding bottles! Not fun.