Simple BeerSmith Question

I bought beersmith awhile back, but never used it much. Now that I'm trying to get better consistancy, I am going to try and use it because of all the things it can tell me.

I do 5 gallon all grain batches. I usually try to get 6.5 gallons pre boil, and then boil for an hour to 5.5 gallons, and 5 gallons into fermenter. give or take.

My Question is: should I tell beersmith that I want a 6.5 gallon batch, or 5 gallon batch? How does it know how much I want to boil off? Just a simple question for Monday. THanks.

Put batch size as the amount you want to end up with. You can manually adjust the boil off, or just leave it at default.

From my experience (and there may be more than one way to do it), you need to tell it how much you expect to boil down to. So in your case, 5.5 gallons.

If you then set your boil-off rate appropriately, it will figure your pre-boil volume automatically.

The volume that ends up in the fermenter is largely dependent on at what point you stop transferring because you're sucking up hops/debris, so I wouldn't set anything in the software based on the volume into the fermenter.

Tell it how much you want to end up with. It will calculate the rest based on boil time and ingredients.

You will have to enter your kettle into the equipment table as well. Tell Beersmith how big your kettle is and how much you leave in it from siphoning, or the kettlevalve.

You have two options, but either way you have to make your batch size be your post-boil volume in order for the OG and IBUs to be accurate.

The first is to go into equipment and create a profile for your setup, in which you can specify your average boil-off rate. Then, on the recipe edit screen check the box for "set boil volume based on equipment" which will calculate your pre-boil volume for you.

If you always make a 5 gallon batch and always start with 6.5 gallons pre-boil, then you can uncheck that box and fill in 5.5 for you batch size and 6.5 for the pre-boil.

But since you are wanting to improve consistency, you might want to set up your equip profile.