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Trub loss has no effect?

J

jgriffin

I'm still learning my way around Beersmith, so hopefully i'm not missing something obvious.

I'm just setting up the equipment for my new full mash setup. I've input all the data in for my boiler, but have noticed something interesting.

As i'm using a converted keg as a boiler, there's a few liters of wort left in the bottom of the keg under the tap. No matter what figure i set this to, when i choose my equipment in a recipe, it doesn't seem to modify the gravity of the beer.

For example, if i put in a crazy figure of 15L of trubb loss in my boiler, for a final batch size of 23L, this gives an initial boil volume of 42.81L.

Now you'd think that starting with 42L and losing 15L to trubb, that the OG would be down a fair bit, and i would need to increase my grain bill, but beersmith doesn't seem to take this into account.

Am i missing something?
 
The challenge is that the trub loss is not currently included in the estimated gravity calcuation.  The estimated gravity uses the brewhouse efficiency to account for "gross" losses in the brewing process (to include trub loss and less than optimal extraction).

Admittedly in the extreme case where you have 15L of trub loss in a 23L batch, your brewhouse efficiency would be absolutely horrible.

Trub loss is used to calculate total water needed, sparge water needed and other water needed calculations.  If I were to include the "concentration" and "loss" effects of the boil and trub losses in the original gravity estimate (which is quite possible), I would have to change the definition of brewhouse efficiency - perhaps using lauter extraction efficiency instead.

While this is certainly possible, the program would then not be consistent with the batch brewhouse efficiency used in many books and by other programs.

I have been considering a more detailed efficiency sheet as a pop up from the main recipe - so that the effects of each step on efficiency can be shown in more detail.  Here it would be possible to show different types of efficiency and also the effects of boiling and losses on overall efficiency.  However, I have not yet had time to implement this fully.

Cheers!
Brad

 
Fair enough then, makes sense.
Could you possibly update the help file with regards to the efficiency figure then? At current it reads as though it is a mash efficiency figure.

Cheers

john
 
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