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How to add Misc. Ingeredient for Steeping?

socfrangis

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Hi there, hoping this is an easy one. Background on the recipe: I got a MoreBeer Belgian LME kit on sale for $20 (cant pass that up) and was going to use it as a base for making a holiday Belgian Jackolantern Ale (pumpkin). From some others previous recipes, some recommended to steep the pumpkin initially. I haven't made up my mind whether or not i just want to steep or just add to the boil, but found something weird. When you add a new ingredient of type "Miscellaneous" it can not be added to steep.

Note: I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of whether or not I should steep vs boil pumpkin, but would rather figure out the Misc Ingredient to the initial steeping stage. I can foresee possibly in the future i may have another spice or something I would want to steep with some carafa II and would have the same issue. Also i thought it had to do with the fact that I built it around LME, however, as soon as I added some carafa II for the color, the carafa instantly added to steeping in my brew steps.

So how would one add an ingredient (misc) to steep? It appears you can only steep ingredients which are of type "grain."
 
If you want it to be able to be added as a steep, simply change it in the profile to "grain" and it can be added as a steep.
 
What should i do to the yeild properties, set them all to zero?

I thought about that, but was worried it would mess with my SG calculations.
 
BeerSmith has an efficiency rating for steeped grains.  It is preset at 15% and can be found in the 'options' windows.  Click on 'options' >> 'Advanced' and in the first set of variable parameters you will see 'Steeping Efficiency'.  I would recommend leaving this at 15%, since it is a global setting and affects the calculations for all recipes.  You may be better off editing the entry for the pumpkin as Scott has recommended:  change it to a 'grain' and edit the 'potential' to either 1.000 if you do not want BeerSmith to figure in any contribution or whatever contribution you know or have looked up for it.
 
Thanks for the advice!

Question, do you guys think this is worth a software feature request, to be able to change the "Use During" field of Misc to "Steeping?"

It seems like the proper thing to do, rather than shoe horn random ingredients in as a grain. Thoughts?
 
socfrangis said:
Thanks for the advice!

do you guys think this is worth a software feature request?

Yes.
Adding some misc ingredients at Whirlpool/Steep is pretty standard and should be an option.

**Not to be contrarian to the advice by Scott and Oginme, but adding the spices to your Hops database makes more sense, than grain. BeerSmith treats grain as pre-boil steeping. Hops are allowed to be timed to the boil and whirlpool/steep. Just make the spices worth 0.0% acids. In this format, the spices show up in the boil ingredients section of the recipe instructions, plus can be changed to "dry hop" them after fermentation.
 
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