It's all coming together now- few questions and clarifications on AG brewing

A few questions.
First off my last batch was a saison. I used Beersmith software. I had 11.75lbs of grain. In the back of the clone recipe book, it said to use about 4 gallons of mash water and 5 gallons of sparge water. I did this and ended up very light in my preboil gravity. Normally I would just fill up the kettle until I knew I would have just around enough to get 5 gallons after the boil. This time I filled up to about 6.75 gallons (all the sparge water). My OG was 13 points light. When I put the recipe into Beersmith it was callilng for less mash water and a lot less sparge water.
So my question is this:

I ended up light on my preboil gravity because I used too much sparge water right? That would do it?

I only stirred the mash about 5 times in 90 minutes. I should have done that
a lot more to help the efficiency right?

Does a lower efficiency mean a lower gravity and the two are correlated? I figured my mash efficiency around 62. Does that guarantee the beer will be watered down? Does a lower efficiency always mean a lower gravity?

How do most of you calculate the mash water and sparge water needed? Do you ever have more sparge water left and have enough wort collected you don't need the rest of the water? If you don't have enough sparge water to get your target wort volume do you heat water and add until you get it?

How do you calculate the wort volume you need preboil

Sorry for all the questions. My first 5 batches I just followed instructions and was using general info. I want to get this down to specifics now. Thanks!

Actually your mash ratio is about 1.36 qts/gallon, and your sparge quantity is fairly close to maximum at .42 gallons/lb. I don't think your efficiency is suffering from lack of sparge or mash water. I'm a little confused as to what the 6.75 gallons is, preboil or post boil? If it was post boil then that would explain why the OG was lower. If it was pre-boil then how much went into the fermenter? Did you base your OG off the 6.5 gallons?

And yes, you use the gravity and volume to calculate efficiency so the two are related. Beersmith can calculate this for you

6.75 gallons is about what went into the kettle pre boil. Almost 5 gallons went in the fermenter. Not sure what you mean about basing my OG off the 6.5 gallons. My preboil gravity was about 1.034 and my OG post boil was 1.051. I didn't see anywhere in Beersmith to get mash efficiency. I did see Brewhouse efficiency, though.

MN_Jay said:

Actually your mash ratio is about 1.36 qts/gallon, and your sparge quantity is fairly close to maximum at .42 gallons/lb. I don't think your efficiency is suffering from lack of sparge or mash water. I'm a little confused as to what the 6.75 gallons is, preboil or post boil? If it was post boil then that would explain why the OG was lower. If it was pre-boil then how much went into the fermenter? Did you base your OG off the 6.5 gallons?

And yes, you use the gravity and volume to calculate efficiency so the two are related. Beersmith can calculate this for you

Click to expand...

Click on the brewhouse efficiency and a field will pop up where you can enter the Pre boil OG and Post boil OG

Did you adjust for temperature when you took your readings?

Yeah I did

dataz722 said:

Did you adjust for temperature when you took your readings?

Click to expand...

I guess the only thing I could see is maybe your stirred way too much during your mash. The stirring itself isn't the problem, it's the temperature loss associated with opening the cooler that many times - this is just speculation so maybe someone who stirs as much as you could jump in and let us know what type of temperature loss they get. Did you take temperature reading before and after the mash?