another Beersmith Question

OK, I have one other question.

When calcualting the Water Needed I seem to loose a lot of beer to Hot break in my Kettle, so i was running some calcualtions. Here is my question. When you increase the amount lost to trub, the calculator just keeps increasing the preboil amount. So, lets imagine my Preboil gravity for my recipe is 1.043 and this recipe calls for 14 pounds of grain (13 pilsner and 1 carapils). So if I now increase my Preboil amount by 2 gallons inorder to compensate for the trub, doesn't that mess up the recipe. I would need to add 3 gallons by more sparge or top up water. By doing this you would be dilluting your Starting Gravity preboil right.

So, if I have a 6 gallon recipe from a book, and I get 2 gallons of waste in my kettle, do I need to scale up to a 8 gallon recipe in Beersmith.

This may be very confusing, but take the water needed calculator on one of your recipes and put in 30 gallons of trub. It just tells you to collect 30 more gallons preboil, but still says that you should have an expected 1.043 preboil gravity. I would have thought the program would account for your trub and increase your preboil water and increase the sugars to account for the losses.

I must be missing something. I keep coming up short on beer or short on gravity

Thanks,
Tom

I'd say you are correct. That does seem like a strange way to account for trub and chiller losses. It is almost like the software treats this loss like a loss of water to evaporation.

However, the amount lost to trub and chiller is generally low and relatively consistent from batch to batch (big hoppy beers aside). So the software is probably pretty close nearly all of the time. For those times when you can anticipate a big loss (e.g., a big IPA with lots of hops, especially whole hops that soak up wort), I would just adjust to a slightly bigger batch size to compensate, rather than try to make the adjustment in your equipment profile.

+1 scale your batch size. Your equipment profile must reflect your equipment accurately for beersmith to compute eff. and volumes. Always start the recipe with finished volume(batch size) on your correct profile. This should take care of keeping gravities accurate through the process.