Brew Smith 2 question

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Vanderfell

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Quick question. Is there a quick guide somewhere that will show me how to calculate all the equipment information like “tun specific heat” and “trub loss?”
 
For setting up your equipment profile, you will need to get some water in it and do some testing and measuring. These are things you absolutely should be familiar with anyway. There are some things in the help menus and/or you can probably find something close to your system already in the list. Maybe make a copy that and edit it from there. After a few brews, you will probably find values that need to be changed as you get everything dialed in.

For the two you mentioned... Specific heat is a thermal characteristic of your kettle. BS will attempt to calculate a strike temp from this and other data. Trub loss is the volume of stuff you will not drain from your boil pot into your fermenter. Many kettles have an offset dip tube that leaves some of the gack and fluid at the bottom when draining. If you use a counterflow or plate chiller, there may be some undrainable wort left in it. Fermenter loss is similar. When you go from the fermenter to the keg or bottles, there's some schmutz at the bottom you will leave behind.

Couple things you might try

1. You can mouse over a field and it will give you a brief tip about what the field is.
2. You can hit F1 for a help menu about whatever page you are in
3. They have a fairly helpful forum
4. Definitely review the the getting started pages
 
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Agree with the previous post on extensive use of help menus, forums etc. There’s tons of info out there. Then go with presets or what others have posted for similar equipment to yours, then refine from there.

Don’t worry too much about getting every detail right off the bat, I think that’s neither possible nor really desirable. Best to refine things like “trub loss” over the course of one or more batches (many people say 3-5 should do and I agree with that, it’s five for me whenever I change equipment). For example, trub loss may vary with the amount of hops, form of hops (pellet whole etc), whether you use bags or screens to contain vegetive matter or not, etc., so you’ll need to measure how much you’re actually losing a few times then go with an average, or if you’re really anal (not necessarily a bad thing for a brewer so not a slam) you’ll set up different profiles for different styles - a double IPA hop bomb and imperial stout might fit one, while a basic lager or blonde ale could fit into another.

You should measure your dead space and things that will affect your mash water volume prior to brewing the first time as those don’t change and will have a significant impact if you’re brewing all grain. Similarly, if you have a spout on your kettle you may lose a couple quarts / liters Standard wth each batch due to its placement and the fact that a lot of bad stuff settles to the bottom (whirlpooling with a spoon can lessen this significantly). So there are some things you can control or affect and others you can’t.

I have six liters of space under my false bottom in my large tun so I have to add 6 extra liters of hot liquor / mash water to get the proper water to grain ratio. If I didn’t take that into account I’d have super thick mashes that would not extract fully or properly so my numbers would be way off. That’s the kind of thing you have to worry about prior to or during your first brew. Everything else you’ll learn as you go and have a lot of fun doing so!
 
Great points! It's tough sometimes because if you looked at everyone's equipment profile, they will most likely all be different. Even our processes are different and cause our configurations in BS to vary. For example (compared to the last persons reply) I only have 0.28g under the false bottom, I ignore the grain to water mash thickness ratio, but after absorption volume, I run 2" of fluid above the grain bed. Even if you did it the same way, our kettles may be different sizes so our numbers would be totally different.
 
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