contradicting beer smith water totals?

[Grippi]

Hi, I've been using the these forums to answers a lot of my questions, without actually needing to create an account until now. I've finally found a question I haven't seen answered, which is incredible, because I swear this place has all of them, haha.

So I keep noticing that I end up with too much wort with low gravity using beer smith. this has been tackled many times here, but I keep dialing in my equipment with better accuracy each time. last time gravity was on, but about a half gallon more wort than needed after boil, and bucket filled. I then realized my boil rate was low, so I upped it to where it should be for next time, about 1.75 gallons per hour. the problem is I feel like now I'm going to end up with even more wort, than expected. On top of this, I noticed while putting together a recipe that I'm getting a different amount of water recommended when I mash in, from the setup screen and the timed screen. I'll try to explain this better.

So I go into my mash profile setup in the recipe, and put in .75 qt/lb for my protein rest period of 20 minutes. 10 gallon batch, I should mention. In that screen, it shows 16 Qt. of water at 137 degrees. I hit save and go to the timer screen for brew day, and it says to add 17.52 Qt of water at 137 degrees. Why are these numbers different, and could this be why I keep ending up with too much wort? the Saccharification values match up in setup and the timer screen, so why are they different in the protien rest part? am I missing something here?

a little more detail: I'm attempting my first 10 gallon batch, though I may rethink that if I can't get this figured out so as to keep trying to dial in my setup. I have a 16 gallon brew kettle, a second 12 gallon pot to fill twice for HLT, and a 10 gallon Home depot cooler mash tun with false bottom. Yes I realize this is close volume wise, so decided to skip the mash out, since there's no way that's fitting in there with the protein, and sacch. water.


setup details
75% efficiency (as of my last 5 gallon batch)
10 gallon mash/tun with .38 dead space under false bottom
16 gallon brew kettle, boil off rate about 1.75 gal/hr last brew day.
12 gallon HLT. (will fill once for mash, and once for sparge)
trub loss seems to be about half a gallon on a 5 gallon batch, thinking .75 on a ten gallon, but we'll see.

lastly, I shoot for and calculate for a half gallon extra going into the fermenter So I hopefully end up with 5 gallon, (ten in this case) going into kegs on keg/bottling day.

thanks for any help and suggestions, and if you need more clarification on something I may have missed, happy to provide any extra info. I realize my mash tun should probably be bigger for a 11 gallon batch going into fermenters, but the calculations seem to make it doable, so I wanted to give it a shot. thanks again, happy to finally have joined the conversation.

Edit: could this be a result of the dead space in my mash tun? if so , why do I keep ending up with too much water? should I just shut off the Sparge water when I hit my target pre boil, check gravity, and call in a day, per se, assuming I hit my gravity?

 

[Stillraining]

Every once in a while I will get some huge water volume numbers ( like mash with 2500 gallons!) on the Brew step page that obviously do not match my 10 gal batch volumes, and I have to close the recipe and reopen it to fix the issue,but this doesn't sound like what your talking about.
I dont use the Timer page function but I just checked a couple of my recipes and they do match exactly to my mash profile. What mash profile do you have selected?

A couple things: I believe you may have your brew house efficiency set to low..mine is set at 80 to 90 depending on recipe ( Lower for IPA's and Higher for less hoppy kettle loss beers.) and I come in pretty close to everything. I also use .96oz per lb for grain absorption which I believe is the Beer Smith default..So if my math is right your telling Beersmith your grain is absorbing more water that it actually probably is.

DougZ is probably the sharpest pencil in the box on this stuff so best to wait for him to chime in on any math questions rather then put too much trust in me.

 

[Grippi]

Every once in a while I will get some huge water volume numbers ( like mash with 2500 gallons!) on the Brew step page that obviously do not match my 10 gal batch volumes, and I have to close the recipe and reopen it to fix the issue,but this doesn't sound like what your talking about.
I dont use the Timer page function but I just checked a couple of my recipes and they do match exactly to my mash profile. What mash profile do you have selected?

A couple things: I believe you may have your brew house efficiency set to low..mine is set at 80 to 90 depending on recipe ( Lower for IPA's and Higher for less hoppy kettle loss beers.) and I come in pretty close to everything. I also use .96oz per lb for grain absorption which I believe is the Beer Smith default..So if my math is right your telling Beersmith your grain is absorbing more water that it actually probably is.

DougZ is probably the sharpest pencil in the box on this stuff so best to wait for him to chime in on any math questions rather then put too much trust in me.

the mash profile in this recipe is a double infusion, light body, though I customized much of that to fit my equipment. it looks like this:

Protein Rest 122 F for 20 minutes.
parameters:Water to add-16 qt.
water/grain ratio: .762 qt/lb (16qt easier to measure)
infusion temp: 137F
Sacch. Rest 152 F for 60 minutes
Parameters:Water 19.99qt
Water/Gr. 1.786 qt/lb
infusion temp 186.2F
no mash out, as my cooler can't fit anymore water at this point for a 10 gallon batch

I set the grain ratio to those based on my tun space, and fine tuned to get relatively even measuring amounts for water volumes. Hard to measure 15.87 qt of water with my setup.

I set my efficiency based on my last brew as it's gone up everytime. last time was 75%, so that's what I had set it at for this time.

I batch sparge
use equal batches (not sure this really matters much as I just pour it all in for one sparge in the past, but perhaps it being ten gallons, beersmith split it into to rounds of about 14.5 qt. of sparge water twice.

I changed grain absorption to .85 after my first brew with beersmith, actually because of something I read in the forums here, where homebrew shops tend to have their mills set too wide, so generally the absorption is less than ideal, and it was suggested to lower this number, which seemed to have worked to some degree, because I ended up with less extra wort last time than the first time using beersmith.

hope this helps diagnosing this. Again though, my main hangup here is that it's telling me 16qt, in the mash setup page where all of the above is listed, but when I go to the time page for brew day, it's telling me 17.52 qt, for the mash in, even though it says 16qt on the setup page. I'm sure I'm just missing why that is. Last time I just shut the sparge down when I hit my level in the boil kettle, and was spot on gravity wise, but had a gallon or so left in the mash/tun. though this isn't a huge deal, I guess, I figure it can't be great efficiency wise, and that to my knowledge it should be empty, and I hit my marks. Thanks

 

[Oginme]

It sounds to me like your process is not defined well enough in BeerSmith.

Start with making sure that your water measurements are as accurate as you can make them, otherwise you will be chasing yourself around and around.

Next, you have 0.38 gal of dead space under your false bottom. Is this the volume you cannot pour out of your mash tun when you drain the wort, or is it the volume needed to fill your mash tun before it reaches the false bottom? If it is the latter, you need to measure the actual volume left in the mash tun after you drain it. You can do this with cool water by filling the mash tun up to the bottom of your false bottom (since you know that volume already) and then measuring the volume that you can drain out. The difference between water in and measured water out is your actual dead space.

After that the next time you brew, you need to measure your volumes out versus your volume into your mash tun, subtract your known dead space and use the difference between volume in and volume out divided by the grain weight to give you an actual measurement of grain absorption.

Measure your pre-boil and post boil wort volume in your boil kettle and divide this difference by the boil time to get an actual boil off rate.

Now plug these values back into BeerSmith profiles to get your water closer to being in balance.

Just going by the measured brew house efficiency from previous brews can be misleading, since it is based upon the potential sugars entered in the grain bill times the expected volume. You can actually get the same brew house efficiency if you expected 6 gal at 1.040 gravity and actually measured 1.060 gravity at 4 gal into the fermenter.

While you can always just play with the numbers based upon what you have read here or elsewhere, you will be a long time getting the information correct unless you take actual measurements and calculate the values yourself.

 

[Grippi]

Thanks. the dead space I measured doing what you said to come up with that number, and I do take notes of these things you mentioned, which is where my boil rate of 1.75 gall per hour came from, but it's a little different everytime, so I'm definitely still dialing in my equipment. great advice though, and I'll be measuring everything twice come next brew day to make sure I don't miss anything.

 

[Grippi]

Well, Brew day came and went, and my levels were almost spot on. I actually couldn't fit all of the water that was recommended in the mash tun for the sacch. rest, though I noticed I could have added it in after about 20 minutes as the the grains absorbed the water, it was only about 2 liters less than what beersmith recommended. not coincidentally I was about 2 liters short on my 11 gallon batch. so it seems I have it pretty well dialed in at this point, and I should probably trust beersmith now that I have it dialed in. At least it appears that way, hoperfully next brew day will confirm this. Of course, there's always something. I forgot to crush my coriander seeds, though I'm hoping 2 oz. for five minutes is enough to add some flavor, I guess we'll have to wait and see. it being an 11 gallon batch, it took me longer than expected to cool it, so they had some extra time to steep, hopefully that helps. thanks guys.

 

[Tarpon87]

Im confused, you ended up with too much wort so you went into beersmith and increased the boil off rate to something that would have given you the correct amount of wort?

 

[Grippi]

Im confused, you ended up with too much wort so you went into beersmith and increased the boil off rate to something that would have given you the correct amount of wort?

No, I increased the boil off rate to the correct boil off rate, which gave me the right amount of wort, at almost the right estimated OG. I was about 2 liters short on 11 gallons this time, but I couldn't fit about 2 liters of water that beersmith was calling for into the mash for sacch rest. I realize now once the grain absorbed some of the water, I could have added it in then. Pretty pleased with how it worked out though, and next time I should be able to hit it on the head, or close to it I think. I also double milled my grains this time, as I noticed where I usually get my grains they weren't all getting cracked. about 1/3 of the grain weren't even cracked on one run through their mill, so with a second run, they looked like what has been described to me they should look like. I think the combination of these things helped balance everything out. I also triple checked all my measurements to make sure I wasn't missing anything. All and all, and very successful day. IMO