Evaporation Rate as Gallons per Hour and Percent Fermentables

First off, I really like the program.  I evaluated it after getting tired of the clunkiness of the ProMash interface that I'd been using for a couple of years and the lack of updates there.  What really hooked me was the interface, concept of equipment, frequency of updates, and better brew day print outs.

There are two easy to fix but awkward parts of BeerSmith that I'd love to see changed:

1) I should be able to enter evaporation rate as gallons per hour rather than a percentage.  The boil pot doesn't know how full it is and unless I've got a very strange setup my boil-off rate isn't tied to how much water or wort I have in the kettle.  For example, if I fill my kettle with 8 gallons of wort and boil for an hour on my setup I will have 7 gallons of wort (1 gallon per hour or 12% per hour.)  Now if I keep boiling for another hour I'll have 6 gallons (1 gallon per hour or 14% per hour.)  And so on (I've checked this many times on my setup.)

With BeerSmith you enter a percentage for the boil off rate and that percentage of original wort volume is calculated to boil off each hour.  So, somehow the previous hour of boiling is affecting the current hour of boiling.  This make no sense and it means that I often have to tweak the percentage value in order to get the right gallons per hour rate.

2) In the display of grains and extracts in a recipe the percentage column is listing the grain bill percentage by weight.  I'd love to have this instead display the percentage by gravity point contribution.  For example, when I brew a Belgian Tripel that's 80% pilsner and 20% sugar I mean that those percentages are of fermentables.

Thanks,

Dave.

Thanks Dave,
  I'll take a look at both of these - neither one looks particularly difficult to implement, so I will see if I can patch it into a future update!

Thanks,
Brad

Thanks Brad, that would be awesome.  I'll keep my eyes peeled.

Dave.

I agree. I am having to hand calculate my loss. It would be nice to have the ability to use gal/hour loss instead of percent. On my equipment if I lose 1 gallon per hour, that is 20% for 5 gallons and 10% for 10 gallons.

Please add this feature. It will make BeerSmith better, and me very happy  ;D

I also agree.  This would be a nice feature.  It does not matter if I boil one hour or two, 5 gal. or 10 gal. batch, my boil off is always 1.3 gal / hour.  I always have to remember to adjust my percentage to get the correct boil off rate.