scaesare said:
My issue is, it doesn't seem to be providing the most useful information. It' ultimately solving for the variable: What's my brewhouse efficiency?
It does, once you have a few measurements to give it. You'll find the Measured Efficiency in the Fermentation tab, second column, second field.
The answer to that should be rather constant once I work out my equipment info (mash efficiency, trub amounts, etc...).
Only if you are constant about your batch sizes. Using the same kettle for various volumes must take into account that you have a constant loss (unrecoverable wort) no matter what batch size. If it's a half gallon, this represents a higher percentage of smaller batches than large. Since it's a loss, it must be deducted from the overall (brewhouse) efficiency since it represents sugar that'll never become beer. Again, the greater the percentage of loss, the
lower your brewhouse efficiency is.
Ultimately the useful question to answer (at least for me) is: What do I need to buy to end up with 5 gallons of correct ABV beer in my keg, given the equipment I'm going to use?
Exactly! And Brewhouse Efficiency is the most accurate way to calculate this.
Thus it seems that BS accounts for the trub in the bottom of my fermenter by telling me my brewhouse efficiency has gone down as a result of needing to have additional liquid on order to hit my bottling volume.
No. The trub/loss BeerSmith accounts for is in the kettle and on the way to the fermenter. What you're describing is cellar yield.
If I brew this recipe, I now have "diluted" beer in the keg. For some reason it doesn't scale the grain bill to account for the fermenter losses, despite knowing about them.
Not correct. BeerSmith estimates the bottling volume in both the the equipment profile and on the Fermentation page. You can adjust fermenter yields to account for loss and hit a bottling target.
Fermenter losses are static and should be adjusted in the profile attached to the recipe. A dry hopped beer will have a lower yield than one that is not.
But, let's be clear, the beer isn't "diluted" if it started at the correct gravity, regardless of yield.
So, where does this additional "liquid" come from? Your efficiency.
When you state brewhouse efficiency, you're saying what percentage of the total available sugar will make it to the fermenter. So, if you say your BHE is 70%, and then increase the amount of trub, your gravity won't go down because you still state 70% of the total available sugar is going into the fermenter. This means that the ONLY place the sugar can come from is increased mash efficiency.
So now, in order to get my correct 5 gallons in to my keg at the right ABV, I have to go manually scale my grain bill to account for this.
Not entirely, you simply must adjust your sources of sugar, which is usually pale malt. But, this is available in the Scale Recipe function to quickly adjust all grain and hops. It's also available by double clicking the style bars (gravity, bittering, color) below the recipe window. This will adjust amounts within the parameters available from the ingredients. The bittering bar will not adjust hops that have a 0 IBU contribution.
I think targeting the end result (bottling vol) rather than an intermediate step ( fermenter volume), and using the constants supplied(trub & fermenter losses, boil off volumes, ettc...) and solving for all other variables (grain bill, etc..) would make the program more useful.
Again, it's an available calculation in both the equipment profiles and the recipe.
On other forums, I've seen it suggested that, because BS doesn't account for what losses you get in the fermenter when scaling a recipe, that you set those losses to 0, and then manually scale up the batch size and hand-subtract those losses in order to generate the correct grain bill... so clearly I'm not the only one who finds this counter intuitive. That's working around the software, rather than having it work for me.
This makes no sense to me, since it's already in BeerSmith. There are some users that have a very difficult time separating Mash and Brewhouse Efficiency and want to measure their batch size in the kettle. For them, setting losses to zero makes Brewhouse and mash efficiency identical. Given your stated desire to work out yield, this is not the best option for you.
This is intended as constructive dialog... I'm a registered customer because I appreciate the product, but I find this to be a source of frustration and/or confusion.
I and others on this forum are just BeerSmith customers, too. We just happen to have been using the program a little longer than you and are sharing our knowledge. You're among friends.