Lost on batch sparging utility

[Shakey_Dog]

I have a 5 gal. Rubbermaid system.  It is set to 5 gal vol.
4 lb MLT weight


That should be correct.  I think

Don

[Danno6102]

God damn! wrote my whoel post then had an error & lost it all, so here goes again!

Brad,
The method I use is to drain the tun first, then do two sparges of equal volume. So I would like to see it so you check the drain tun box, then input the number of sparges you want to do, 1, 2, 3, whatever. Then check the equal volumes box.

a quick example using a 7 gallon pre-boil volume:

say I get 3 gallons from my intial tun drain. I specify I want to do 2 sparges. It takes the remaining 4 gallons & gives me two sparges of 2 gallons each. If I specified 3 sparges it would give me 3 sparges at 1.33 gallons each.

Not sure if I'm asking for too much here, but this is what I would like to see. I think it would make it more versitile with peoples different sparging techniques. I can always mess with the fill % if it's to much of a pain to change. You have done an awesome job with this program & upgrade & am in no way putting it down.

Danno

[Danno6102]

Forgive me for my programming ignorance, I'm not sure how difficult my ideas are to do, but as far as overfilling the mash tun, could you have the batch sparge utility look at your tun volume that you enter in your equipment setup & create an error window or something if it is over filled during one of the sparges?

Danno

[BeerSmith]

Danno,
 That sounds very reasonable - perhaps one more option for sparging using a certain number of batches.

 Only concern I have is to try not to make the batch sparge options too complex.  Still it seems reasonable.

Cheers!
Brad

[Shakey_Dog]

Man I love having an office at home.  Here I am having a stout and messing with beer stuff .

Any how,  I still get strange things with the batch sparge.  I choose drain tun first and I am still getting the round 1 sparge of .17 gal.  Every time I go back to the details button it is back to the default of 90% and only that box checked No matter what I do it will not change in the brew sheet.

Any ideas while I have another beer

Don

[BeerSmith]

Don,
 Most likely this is caused by one of two things:

 1) Your equipment settings are not correct - so there is no room in your mash tun.  Check the equipment parameters (mash tun capacity) for this recipe.

 2) Your mash tun is almost filled to the top with grain - for example you might be brewing a high gravity ale.

If neither of the above are true - email the recipe to me and I will run it through the debugger!

Cheers!
Brad

[Jason miller]

Brad

Heres what problem I'm having......no matter what I change my mash tun % to I only get one step.  My equiptment is set to 15 gallon mash tun (default for 15 gallon brewtree system).  being new to all grain batch sparging heres what I would like to see hope it's not too much to ask for I spent allot of time reading about all grain brewing and this way seems the most straight forward I downloaded an excel spreadsheet that fiqures all this out and It's pretty much been dead on for me...here goes  when batch sparging is selected you choose the amount of runoffs you would like (for me 2) and the software figures out based on the amount of grain how much water you need for the first run off taking into account the amount the grain absorbs, (water volume will be more for the first one) and and then tells you how much water to add for the second one, to achieve 2 euqal runoffs  after the grain absorbtion is taken into account.  also it would be great to have runoff gravities in there and a utility to tell you what your effic. is based on actual readings.  one more thing that would be good when importing a recipe that you wish to brew by using batch sparging it would be good to have the prog scale up the amount of grain needed based on recipe volume to achieve the same efficency as a non batch sparge brew session that may have a higher effieiency.  heres a link to the spreadsheet I mentioned I find it's features very useful without it I would of had a much harder time understanding how to get started.  http://home.elp.rr.com/brewbeer/files/nbsparge.xls


thanks

Jason

[BeerSmith]

Thanks - I will take a close look at the spreadsheet.  I still have not gone final on this so I hopefully there are some minor adjustments that can be made.

Other points:
- Hopefully you have downloaded the latest batch sparge update:
   http://www.beersmith.com/download.htm

- BeerSmith does calculate the water needed for the sparge based on your grains, absorbtion,  etc...and then divides that as needed to match the parameters you specify in the batch sparge options.

- I am looking at an option to specify the number of runoffs...and will certainly examine your spreadsheet before I proceed.

- The pre-boil target gravity is displayed on the brewsheet.  I could probably also estimate rough starting/ending runoff gravities but obviously this can vary significantly during the runoff.  I will look into it however.

- You can easily scale a recipe by efficiency - just use the "Scale Recipe" button and change the efficiency number in that dialog.  The program will adjust ingredient amounts to match the new number.

Cheers!
Brad

[bonjour]

Brad,

look at these batch sparge spread sheets.  (sent by email) They follow what you have seen, but they are based on recipe formulation, not conversion, and thus predict gravities based on available points in the grain bill (estimated by grain wt * 37).

Also look at the fall-off of effeciency as gravity increases.

Fred Bonjour

[BeerSmith]

Thanks!
 I will take a close look at the spreadsheets this weekend and try to decide where I need to go next.

 Clearly an option to specify number of batches would be nice, and separately some kind of calculator for the gravity of the runnings/falloff over time.

 The latter piece I might not include right now, only because I need to do some research and testing first.

Cheers!
Brad

[bonjour]

Batch sparging is a essentially dilution calculation.  Complicated by the variables that you use,  number of batches, amount of grain, etc.  To accurately predict the gravity of the wort we must know the gravity points available for dilution.  In order to determine the total points for this we must use the MASH efficiency, how completely the grain has converted.  I find 80% works on my system.  Specifically not the overall system efficiency, though this does depend on the mash efficiency.

Batch Sparge efficiency falls off as the amount of grain mashed.  More specifically on the amount of water retained by the grain.  This retained water represents a loss of gravith points which obviously increases as the amount of grain goes up.  This could be compensated for by increasing the boil volume, but then our boil times may be longer than intended to reduce the volume.    

Batch Sparge efficiency is optimized by sparging the largest volume possible (Sparge your entire boil volume) and by making each "batch" the same size.  That is if you are going to boil 6 gal sparge 2 batches of 3 gallons.

Hope this helps some understand what is happening.

Fred

[rosejay0918]

I think it was  pretty much been dead on for me...here goes  when batch sparging is selected you choose the amount of runoffs you would like.Is just like him,Thanks!