How to Brew Equipment Setup

Hi folks,

I'm trying to set up my equipment profile to match the book "How to Brew" but the resulting calculations don't match his.  Here is the example recipe I've entered: http://howtobrew.com/book/section-2/steeping-specialty-grains/example-batch, and here is the equipment profile I've set up:

Boil Vol: 3gal
Boil time: 60mins
Boil Off: .5gal
Loss to Trub/Chiller: .4gal
Top Up Water: 3gal
Batch vol: 5gal
Fermenter loss: .5gal
Bottling vol: 4.5gal

Which for this recipe gives:

OG: 1.040 rather than 1.048
IBU: 51.7 rather than 39
ABV 3.9% - Seems awfully low, doesn't match the style

Any ideas?

Marc

Your loss to trub and chiller seems high for an extract + specialty grains recipe as a start.

There is no way of knowing what Palmer got for steeping grain efficiency once that is corrected. 

I would enter the recipe as published, then click on the slider for OG and adjust the OG up to target (1.048).  This will scale the recipe upwards to give you the same target OG as the published recipe, but using your equipment profile.

For IBU, you can do the same, but I am sure that Palmer was not using the Tinseth equation for IBU calculations back when this recipe was published.  Given this, I would first err on the side of the same hop contributions should give you close to the same ending bitterness (IRL).  If you wanted, you could make the same adjustment to the IBU as described above for the OG reading but I would caution against that given the difference in IBU models.

Thanks for your thoughts.  I boosted the trub/chiller loss to get the Boil Volume up to the 3gals described in the book. 

The other way to do that is to reduce the top off water to the fermentor.  This would keep the total amount of water closer to the original recipe.

For anyone coming across this in the future looking for the same thing, the closest I came to respecting both the description of his basic 5gal setup in the book and the recipe is this:

Boil vol: 2.94gal
Boil time: 60mins
Boil off: .6gal
Loss to trub and chiller: .25gal
Top up: 3gal
Batch vol: 5gal
Fermenter loss: .5gal

This actually causes his porter to come out similarly to mine, which I guess is a beer but maybe not the beer I had in mind when I followed the recipe.

OG 1.045
IBU 51.4
SRM 26.9
ABV 4.4%