I've been having issues with varying amounts of wort lost to kettle trub, and it's effects to my "brewhouse efficiency" in BeerSmith. Tinkering with my equipment on one of my recipes in BeerSmith I changed the volume "Lost to Boil Trub and Chiller" to 20 gallons (for a 5 gallon batch, just to make sure BeerSmith is giving me good information); then I opened up the "BrewSheet" which is what I use when I'm brewing for determining volumes and my targets etc.
So check this out; the BrewSheet says "Sparge with 30.28 gal of 168 degree water, add water to achieve boil volume of 35.98 gal" then "Estimated pre-boil gravity is 1.051 SG with all grains/extracts added"... Mind you this is a 5 gallon recipe with about 16 lbs of grain. So I change the "Lost to Boil Trub and Chiller" number back to 0.5 gal, and then guess what? The preboil volume is now 8.71 gal and the pre-boil gravity is 1.050. The estimated preboil gravity actually went down 0.001 point. Craziness.
If I'm doing something wrong... please tell me what it is. Otherwise I realize now I can't trust the software to give me a good preboil gravity/preboil volume to be shooting for.
So check this out; the BrewSheet says "Sparge with 30.28 gal of 168 degree water, add water to achieve boil volume of 35.98 gal" then "Estimated pre-boil gravity is 1.051 SG with all grains/extracts added"... Mind you this is a 5 gallon recipe with about 16 lbs of grain. So I change the "Lost to Boil Trub and Chiller" number back to 0.5 gal, and then guess what? The preboil volume is now 8.71 gal and the pre-boil gravity is 1.050. The estimated preboil gravity actually went down 0.001 point. Craziness.
If I'm doing something wrong... please tell me what it is. Otherwise I realize now I can't trust the software to give me a good preboil gravity/preboil volume to be shooting for.