stumped by rye mash

As a preface here, to explain my peculiar mash bill, I'm starting a micro distillery and working out the bugs on a very small scale, i.e. 30 gallons mash and a 10 gallon still.  I am fully licensed and permitted so no moonshining going on.  Anyway, I used beersmith to calculate my water needs for 30 gallons of mash and strike temp (I'm sure there is operator error here, so this is not a knock on the software in any way). 

Here's my dilemma -  I am using a 30 gallon mashtun and was hoping to get 30 gallons of wert.  I used 60 pounds of grain (1lbs per .5 gallons is a common distillation ratio), 51 lbs. malted rye and 9bs malted barley with a total of 41.76 gallons of water (7 gallons for absorption per beersmith.  I input my grains amounts and the equipment size and let beersmith calculate the water).  I added 22 gallons of hot water and let it steep for an hour, drained it and then for batch sparging added 13 gallons of water to steep for 10 minutes and drained.  I ended up with only 11 gallons of 1.060 wert.  So the OG is good but I thought I would get 30 gallons and that I was allowing enough water for absorption.  If I'd added 10 more gallons of water my OG would have been much lower and it would have really thrown off the grain/water proportions. 

The other issue is the tempurature change.  Beersmith said to heat the water to 158 for a step tempurature of 148, which I wanted.  But when I added the 158 degree water to the mash tun and grains it droped to 138.    I added more hot water and something must have worked as I got 1.060 OG, but I'd like to be more precise than just guessing.  Any suggestions for ensuring my strike tempurature is correct? 

So my conundrum is keeping the grain proportions but getting a higher volume of wert. 

thanks in advance. 

Brew,

My freshman year roommate and I decided to recall our family traditions and make some moonshine - didn't work out too well but it was fun.

But, it sounds like you're more into commercial efforts, not recreation. The numbers you give for mash and sparge don't add up to those needed to give you 30 gallons. In addition to your grain absorption, there's likely to be some dead space under your false bottom/screen/strainer. That information needs to go into your equipment profile. When I built an equipment profile for a 30-gallon mash tun using a single infusion, batch-sparge profile the "Vol" tab called for 22.75 gallons of mash water and 18.95 gallons of sparge water. That gives a pre-boil volume of just over 30 gallons. (I had to adjust the batch size to 21 gallons to deliver the volume of wort you want.) It sounds like your dead space is much greater than what BeerSmith assumes; you can plug in the correct volume in the equipment profile. Maybe the rye gummed up your mash and trapped more water than anticipated.

Maybe the high percentage of rye malt requires more than an hour for total conversion, accounting for the low yield. Did you do an Iodine test to see if all the starch was converted?

When you select your mash profile remember to click the "Adjust Temp for Equipment" box to the right. Also adjust the specific heat to match your mash tun material in the equipment profile. If your tun is stainless, it will absorb a lot more heat than the default value for a plastic tun.

BeerSmith has a lot of moving parts that need to be adjusted to give accurate results. Let us know what you learn.