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Brewing Shrinkage

mattsta

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Hi, I have a question about Cooling Shrinkage. 
Does Beersmith, add the Cooling shrinkage when working out the Estmated Boil Volume.  When I put this down on paper it seems to.  But this doesn't make sense to me unless by Shrinkage do you mean that additional water is lost to evaporation during the cooling period, or that the volume of liqud physicall shrinks (as you would expect) as it cools.

If the latter, I am not sure why it is calculated in to the Est Pre-Boil volume, as surely when you heat the water to boiling it expands, so therefore the shrinkage is moot, no?

Just a thought.

Thanks, Matt
 
If you open up a recipe and go to the 'volumes' tab, you can see the calculation of volumes from the fermenter back to the mash and sparge volumes.  The program starts with room temperature/cool wort into the fermenter and trub losses also at room temperature/cool.  From there is applies the expansion coefficient and that expanded volume carries back to the volume of water required for the mash and sparge water.  So the recommended water volume for mashing and sparging is a hot or thermally expanded volume. 

The program also uses the thermal expansion as a constant and does not apply it as a function of the water temperature.  I have mentioned this to Brad before and he seems to think that the error caused by this difference (approx 2% of expansion volume) is less than most people's error in volume measurement.  While he is fairly accurate in this assertion, it does make it difficult for those of us who do full volume BIAB and start by measuring out cold water.  Since my only volumetric measurement at or near boiling (4% expansion) is post boil volume and BeerSmith does not use this observed figure in the program data, I have set my thermal expansion down to 2% which is where the strike volume, sparge volume, and post mash/pre-boil volume measurements are used by the program to calculate actual efficiencies.

 
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