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System and recipe tuning

N

NYCHomebrewer

I've been using Beersmith for about 9 months now and slowly learning my system's little quirks etc.

I find Beersmith to be pretty accurate. Or, maybe it would be more appropriate to say consistent. I use a 10 gallon plastic cooler, like a lot of people for my mashtun, and I just went ahead and used Beersmith's numbers for the heat absorption. Yet I consistently seem to end up 2-4 degrees on the too hot side and end up having to add a quart or two of cold water to cool it down appropriately. Its always kind of a guess how much to add, and then how much water to add during the mashot/sparge in order to hit my final volume.

The thing is, I've brewed enough batches of beer now that if I had fed all the actual temperatures into a program, I should be able to calculate the precise... specific heat capacity (?) empirically.

I think it would be great to be able to have a tool built into Beersmith in which it would take a bunch of target temps from my log, along with actual temps, and come up with an actual specific heat capacity for my system.

I also think it would be great to have, in addition to the recipe page, an electronic "brew page" very similar to the one you can print out but with extra slots where you could input your actual temperature and have it tell me how much water at X degrees to add to hit my target and automatically adjust the sparge temps and volumes accordingly.

Come to think of it, it would be nice if you could tweak all your system settings empirically like that, evaporation rates etc.

I'm really looking forward to the next version.

NYCHomebrewer
 
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