Did my first AG today, an Oktoberfest. I took care to enter what I knew how to enter into BeerSmith, e.g. I did a one-hour water boil last week to measure boil off, I measured dead space in my tun and kettle (accounting for some tipping), etc. And because of that, I pretty much nailed what BeerSmith said I should hit for the mash: about 7.25 gal to boil, with a preboil SG measured @ 1.046 vs. calculated 1.048. Pretty darn close, so I was expecting a perfect brew! My post-boil size was right at 6 gallons, just as BeerSmith predicted. This should have set my red flags off when I generated the recipe I suppose, since my target batch size was only 5 gallons...
So when I drained the wort into the carboy, and found myself with 5.5 gallons (and I could have kept going for a little more), I realized something was wrong. Measured the gravity, and it was only 1.038 vs. a target of 1.06. Obviously too much water. Since I had everything pretty much nailed up until boil time, am I on track thinking that the trub/chiller loss is a culprit here? I left it at the default .75 gal, more for lack of knowing what a good value was or how to measure it...I figured BS would pick a "typical" default. But in my head now, I just don't see losing three quarts of water to trub, and I honestly don't even know how I would lose water to an immersion chiller.
For giggles, I lowered this number by a half gallon in BS and reapplied to the recipe, and sure enough it just tells me to add about that much less water during the batch sparge. Seems like that would have gotten me closer to my 5 gallon batch size right there.
So am I on or off track here?
(Even worse, with 5.5 gal in the carboy, I didn't have enough room for my entire 2L starter! I only got about 2/3 of it in, but I don't think it's an underpitch given the lower gravity. I just saved the rest for next time.)
So when I drained the wort into the carboy, and found myself with 5.5 gallons (and I could have kept going for a little more), I realized something was wrong. Measured the gravity, and it was only 1.038 vs. a target of 1.06. Obviously too much water. Since I had everything pretty much nailed up until boil time, am I on track thinking that the trub/chiller loss is a culprit here? I left it at the default .75 gal, more for lack of knowing what a good value was or how to measure it...I figured BS would pick a "typical" default. But in my head now, I just don't see losing three quarts of water to trub, and I honestly don't even know how I would lose water to an immersion chiller.
For giggles, I lowered this number by a half gallon in BS and reapplied to the recipe, and sure enough it just tells me to add about that much less water during the batch sparge. Seems like that would have gotten me closer to my 5 gallon batch size right there.
So am I on or off track here?
(Even worse, with 5.5 gal in the carboy, I didn't have enough room for my entire 2L starter! I only got about 2/3 of it in, but I don't think it's an underpitch given the lower gravity. I just saved the rest for next time.)