BeerSmith Equipment Profile

Hey Guys and Gals,

I was wondering if someone could help me be a little lazy here. I am still doing all my research and learning while I'm overseas. I just got the beersmith software and would like to setup my equipment profile before I get home so I can start playing around with it and learning the ins and outs. I have already ordered a 20 Gal MegaPot 1.2 for AG BIAB. I'm looking to start out with 5gal batches, eventually working my way up to 10gal once I get some average figures from the smaller batches.

Can someone give me some ballpark figures to work with? Ordinarily I would get these myself and put in the effort, but I don't have hands on any equipment yet.

I do 5 gallon in a 15 gallon pot, here is my equipment profile. For the mash profile, I used grain weight basis 12.75 lb and boil vol basis 7.5 g

Perfect! Thank you very much.

This is helpful as I just got new equipment to plug into a beersmith profile. I now have a 15 gallon SS SpikeBrewing kettle for MT and BK.

A couple of questions....

1) I guess I need to make a profile for both 5 gallon and 10 gallon batches? Different boil off rate, etc..
2) Deadspace in this case is the space between false bottom and bottom of MT kettle?
3) MT weight = empty kettle weight?

1) I'd make different profiles for different volumes, even if the equipment were the same. If you later find your boil off rate to be the same, you can combine down to one.

2) Deadspace is the volume you CANNOT drain from your mash tun.

3) MT weight is the empty kettle weight. BS uses this and the corresponding heat capacity to figure out how much of the strike water temperature will go to heating up the mash tun.

The Equipment Profile, while a bit detailed, is starting to make some sense. Question - If I find a 5 gal recipe and apply my equipment profile will BS adjust the gris bill and additional ingredients, or is that when you "Scale" the recipe? Also, If I want to "Target" 6 gal into the fermenter do I "Scale" my new recipe against the Equipment profile, and my 6 gal fermenter target? Lastly, if I'm not sure of my efficiency yet where do I tell BS to bump up the gris bill to compensate, until I can better measure the true results?

To have BeerSmith adjust the ingredients for a recipe to a new batch size or equipment profile, use the 'scale recipe' feature. Select your recipe and click the 'scale recipe' option. Start by selecting the new equipment profile which has your new target batch size. Make sure the "match original gravity, color and bitterness" option is checked. BeerSmith will do the rest.

If you don't know what your actual efficiency will be, pick something relatively close to what you have been getting or something relatively common, like 70% to 75% efficiency. Measure and adjust based upon your first few brews.