Brewday - BeerSmith Giving Wrong Water Volumes?

I am boiling water now for my brew but as I look at what BeerSmith is asking me to do I realize that it is not giving me as much volume as I want.

I am looking to boil 6 gallons wort in order to get a little over 5.22 gallons beer. BeerSmith is set for "Single Infusion, Light Body" for my Munich Helles. It tells me:

Mash In: 12.19 quarts (3+ gallons)
Mas Out: 7.8 quarts (almost 2 gallons)

This is not going to get me to where I need to be (6 gallons) in order to compensate for boil off after one hour.

What am I doing wrong and/or how can I correct this!?!!?

after the sparge does it say top off with to equal X amount

You must not have a sparge set up. You can mash, mash-out and then sparge. You can sparge with whatever you need to make up your volume.

It's easiest if you work backwards. Say you want to start with 7 gallons.

Then, you'll figure your mash amount. If you have 10 pounds of grain, at 1.25quarts perpound, that's 12.5 quarts of water. The grain will absorb about 1.25 gallons, so you'll get 3 gallons out of the mash runnings. You're using almost two gallons for mash out. Then you'll sparge with 2 gallons.

If you're batch sparing, I'd skip the mashout and just do two equal batch sparge rounds.

I am such an idiot, I have never looked at the brew day sheet. There it is. Duh.

OK, well, better this than not knowing although I do feel pretty stupid. Thanks for pointing that out, that saved my morning.

maltoftheearth said:

I am such an idiot, I have never looked at the brew day sheet. There it is. Duh.

OK, well, better this than not knowing although I do feel pretty stupid. Thanks for pointing that out, that saved my morning.

Click to expand...

Well, the software is pretty good but it does have certain quirks.