Want to make sure I get Beersmith dialed in sort of correctly

[Irishguy42]

So, I'm thinking of my next brew, and I wanted it to be a pumpkin ale. I was looking at this famous recipe here, and I wanted to convert it down to a 3gal batch size.

I'm learning how to do Beersmith as well, so I figured I'd throw in the recipe as best as I could, and scale it down.

Now, I'm not 100% sure if I've even dialed myself in correctly, but here's what I have right now.

I'm not sure if I have my equipment properly set up here. In fact, I don't exactly know my boil off rates and whatnot. All I know that is relevant for this is that I have a 5gal kettle, so I can probably do a 3gal batch w/o top-off water. From my first brew before this, I know that I had started with 5 gallons and ended up with 4.35 (some lost due to sampling on top of trub/etc), so that's where the .65 in 'Fermenter Loss' happened. And I didn't measure the 'Loss to Trub and Chiller' in my other brew, so I ballparked it.

So two questions:

Is my scaling correct here for grains/hops/etc? Can I trust BS on this?

*and*

Does starting with 4.14gal of water in my kettle for this sound right? Want to make sure my equipment is properly configured.

If you have any tips for a newbie in measuring the boil-off and that kind of stuff to make using BS easier for me, I would love that too!

 

[SlitheryDee]

My boil off rate for my 10 gallon pot using a propane burner is right at 1 gallon per hour. I had to just use trial and error to find that out, but if you want to get it right the first time you could just boil a known volume of water for an hour and see what you end up with. .75 gallons per hour sounds close to me though. I do BIAB and I dump everything from the kettle into the fermenter, so I just count trub and chiller loss as 0.00 and it seems to work out ok.

I leave cooling shrinkage and fermenter loss at the default amounts, though I think I probably lose more like .75 gallons to fermenter trub because I seem to end up a little short on beer at bottling time despite my volumes being correct going into the fermenter. That might be a bit of carryover from my kettle trub going into the fermenter in the beginning. As long as my volumes are correct going into the fermenter I don't sweat the rest so much though.

Assuming you're close on your boil off rate 4.14 gallons should be correct. If it doesn't come out exactly as beersmith predicts, just adjust your rate for the next brew though. You'll also need to adjust your efficiency over the next several brews based on what you get in order to be able to hit target gravities and IBUs in the future. Theoretically you should eventually be able to plug in your ingredients and get more or less exactly the beer you're shooting for though, it just takes time and brews to get there.

 

[Irishguy42]

Yeah, I figured that it would take trial&error to really nail down that stuff. Just wanted to make sure I looked like I was on the right course.

Do the amounts for the grains/etc make sense for a 3gal batch?