beersmith volumes

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matc

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I came up short on my last few brews regarding my post boil gravity and I'm recalibrating my sight glasses on my kettle and HLT to pin point the problem.

When beersmith tells me that I need like 12 Liters of water for the mash at 154 F, is that supposed to be cold tap water ? Once heated, I will gain 4% in volume and that's 12.5 Liters instead. Not a big difference I agree but I wanna be precise as possible.

Once my hlt is properly calibrated with cold water, I will use it to re-calibrate my kettle and compensate for the 4% difference.
 
I don't really know, as I don't use BS, but that has never stopped me from answering questions in the past. Almost certainly cold water.
 
Beer smith doesn't tell you how much water to use. You tell it.
how much you will use,
the material of the tun,
the tun's temperature,
the temp of the grain,
the weight of the grain

Once you give it all the info collect x liters of water at the desired strike temperature in the tun and dough-in. That's it. Shrinkage from mash temps to 60F is ~2.5%. Insignificant as you can sparge with the volume determined by your first running volume till you reach the desired pre-boil volume.

You are over thinking this. Feed beer smith the correct data and it will spit out a volume and temperature. Collect the volume at that temperature in the tun and its done. Make sure the water temp is even and at the planned strike temp before you add the grains.
 
You have to set and save your equipment profile in order for BeerSmith to give accurate volumes specific to your setup. And you don't have to be concerned with shrinkage due to water temp. BS will factor that in as long as the Batch Volume is set and your equipment profile is accurate.

If you haven't already, take a few minutes and step through the Equipment Wizard and save your new profile when your done.

Cheers!
 
Give your equipment profile a name with a 1 at the start. That way it's always top of the list.

Equipment Profile Setup Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 11.51.26 PM.png
 
BeerSmith expresses the water volume at the typical temperature that it would be measured at. Thus, you initial mash water and sparge water should be measured at room temperature. The projected volume of your first and second runnings is calculated with the thermal expansion for temperature, since people are not going to chill their wort down to get an accurate reading and then heat back up to boiling. Final volumes are back at room temperatures, since you will most likely be measuring them post cooling.
 
Gavin C said:
Beer smith doesn't tell you how much water to use. You tell it.
how much you will use,
the material of the tun,
the tun's temperature,
the temp of the grain,
the weight of the grain

Once you give it all the info collect x liters of water at the desired strike temperature in the tun and dough-in. That's it. Shrinkage from mash temps to 60F is ~2.5%. Insignificant as you can sparge with the volume determined by your first running volume till you reach the desired pre-boil volume.

You are over thinking this. Feed beer smith the correct data and it will spit out a volume and temperature. Collect the volume at that temperature in the tun and its done. Make sure the water temp is even and at the planned strike temp before you add the grains.
Click to expand...

The thing I don't get about this is the amount of mash water to use. I was a long time Promash user, but eventually jumped to beersmith because Promash was never updated. However, in Promash you can state the qts/lb ratio you want, and it tells you the volume of water to add to the mash. I can't figure out how to do this in beersmith. Obviously the amount of mash water needs to change based on the amount of grain used - how does beersmith account for this? This has been very frustrating - I've gone through the equipment wizard a few times, but can't find this. Am I doing something wrong?

The last few brews I've done, I have created the recipe in beersmith, but had to use Promash to figure out all of my volumes. Its a rather inefficient process, and I have to use two laptops to do it (one Mac and one PC). I imagine that I must be doing something wrong!

JG
 
JasonG said:
The thing I don't get about this is the amount of mash water to use. I was a long time Promash user, but eventually jumped to beersmith because Promash was never updated. However, in Promash you can state the qts/lb ratio you want, and it tells you the volume of water to add to the mash. I can't figure out how to do this in beersmith. Obviously the amount of mash water needs to change based on the amount of grain used - how does beersmith account for this? This has been very frustrating - I've gone through the equipment wizard a few times, but can't find this. Am I doing something wrong?

The last few brews I've done, I have created the recipe in beersmith, but had to use Promash to figure out all of my volumes. Its a rather inefficient process, and I have to use two laptops to do it (one Mac and one PC). I imagine that I must be doing something wrong!

JG
Click to expand...

Don't have access to BS now bit if I get a chance later on I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can't figure it out. I'm thinking once you know your total water volume needed based on the grain bill, mash tun dead space, and grain absorption in your setup it should be easy enough.

That's what I do and show in the above post. You need to set your grain absorption in advanced settings. Tell Beersmith your mash-tun dead space and all other volume losses. This nets you your total water needed. For me may mash volume is 100% usually (no sparge). For you it will be this figure less what ever you want to sparge with. From there you can tweak it to reach close to 1:1 volumes for mash and sparge.
 
JasonG said:
The thing I don't get about this is the amount of mash water to use. I was a long time Promash user, but eventually jumped to beersmith because Promash was never updated. However, in Promash you can state the qts/lb ratio you want, and it tells you the volume of water to add to the mash. I can't figure out how to do this in beersmith. Obviously the amount of mash water needs to change based on the amount of grain used - how does beersmith account for this? This has been very frustrating - I've gone through the equipment wizard a few times, but can't find this. Am I doing something wrong?

The last few brews I've done, I have created the recipe in beersmith, but had to use Promash to figure out all of my volumes. Its a rather inefficient process, and I have to use two laptops to do it (one Mac and one PC). I imagine that I must be doing something wrong!

JG
Click to expand...

To set the qts/lb in BeerSmith, open up your mash profile and click on the infusion step. Select 'edit' on the options below the mash step box and the parameters for that set will open in a pop-up. You can edit the temperature, step time, ramp up time, the water amount as a bulk property or the qts/lb of water to grain for infusion.

Once you set this in your recipe, you can save it as a standard by clicking the disk icon next to the 'mash profile' selection box.
 
Oginme said:
To set the qts/lb in BeerSmith, open up your mash profile and click on the infusion step. Select 'edit' on the options below the mash step box and the parameters for that set will open in a pop-up. You can edit the temperature, step time, ramp up time, the water amount as a bulk property or the qts/lb of water to grain for infusion.

Once you set this in your recipe, you can save it as a standard by clicking the disk icon next to the 'mash profile' selection box.
Click to expand...

Brilliant! Thanks for your help.

Seems a bit clumsy, but it works. Figured there must be a way to do this.

JG
 
I don't know abut being "clumsy". Most of the brewers I know keep a standard infusion rate so it is kind of set as a standard for that particular profile. One of the nice things about BeerSmith is that you can establish a number of profiles to represent differing mash conditions and have them ready made to use as needed.
 

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