BeerSmith™ Home Brewing Forum
Brewing Topics => Extract and Partial Mash Brewing => Topic started by: frankvw on November 08, 2019, 07:08:40 AM
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I'm doing a series of "stove top" partial boil recipes. The idea is to brew 20L batches (20L going into the fermenter) using a 8 liter pot. Yes, I know, there are other ways to do this, but for a variety of reasons this is what I'm doing. :)
The problem is how to set up BS3 (especially the equipment profile) correctly for this method. Several posts have already asked questions on how to deal with partial boils, and I have read them, but they don't really get me to where I need to be.
In a nutshell, what I'm doing is:
- In an 8 liter pot I'm putting 6 liters of water;
- Adding 450 gr. of dry malt extract gives me about 6.25 liters of 1.026 wort (the DME displacing about half a liter of water per kilogram when dissolved);
- I'm steeping 500 grams of grains in that wort (steeping in wort rather than water because the water here is incredibly hard);
- Removing the grains leaves me with about 5.75 liters of wort (the grain absorbs about 1 liter per kilogram) and a small gravity increase (on the order of 1-3 points, depending on the grain used);
- Boil this wort with hops, top up with 1 liter of boiling water halfway through the boil to make up for the 2L/hour evaporation (using boiling water so as not to interrupt the boil);
- Cool, let settle, strain and transfer to fermenter (loosing about 0.25 liter in the trub) so total volume transferred should be about 4.5 liters;
- Add 1.5kg of LME and 500 gr. of dextrose sugar to the fermenter (1.5kg of LME adds about 1 liter, 500 gr. dextrose displaces about 1/4 liter in water) and top up to 20 liters which, adding and subtracting the above figures, should take about 14.25 liters of water.
How do I get BS3 to calculate (or at least approximate) colour, bitterness and gravity for this mess? :) Setting up an equipment profile will let me add 2L of water at the end of the boil, but if I do that I will get much less hop utilization than adding 1 liter of boiling water halfway through the boil because the boil gravity doesn't get up as high as when I only top up at the end of the boil. Then there's the diminished hop utilization due to the lower boil volume (which can be significant, trust me).
All suggestions appreciated!
// FvW