Beersmith and New Belgium

[DrugCoder]

I just downloaded the trial of Beersmith and to practice with entering recipes I decided to pull out the December BYO and enter the New Belgium recipes.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I'm trying to match up the ingredients as best as I possibly can with what is already loaded in Beersmith and my numbers are off from what BYO says they should be.

For example BYO has the all grain Fat Tire recipe as having an SRM of 15 but my recipe in Beersmith only has it at 9.6. I had problems with the OG and IBU but figured out that I had my efficiency at 75% when BYO has their recipes set for 65%.

Why would my SRM be so much lower?

My Abbey Ale hit the OG right on but it has the estimated FG as 1.016 while BYO has a FG of 1.011. Why is it estimating this difference? My recipe shows 18.8 IBU's while BYO shows 20. Would you worry about a 1.2 IBU difference?

The Trippel recipe has the FG off as well. I have 1.018 while BYO has 1.010.

Any ideas?

 

[Nateo]

Software cannot accurately predict FG. Beersmith just assumes 75% attenuation, AFAIK.

The IBU difference is meaningless, because you probably don't know when your hops were harvested and how they were stored before you bought them. I'd say there is pretty much no way that the AA% you think your hops have is the same as what they actually have. Also those calculations don't take into account the bittering effect of beta acids.

 

[Greyhound]

The color difference does seem too large. I'd guess that the color of the grains that you selected in BeerSmith were lighter than what BYO used.

 

[foltster]

BYO sucks at color. They seem to use whatever the hell number they want for most of their recipes.