brewprint said:
If one does what you are saying, their final volume will be a significantly higher via volume, then you'd have to account for loss via trub and chiller like you stated.
Who does that? Seriously do you know anyone that wouldn't use some kind of a hop bag for 12 ounces plus on an 11 gallon batch of ipa? Now you're just being difficult.
I am really not trying to be difficult. You stated that this, in your opinion, is a very significant flaw in BeerSmith. I am trying to explain why it is not.
OK, real life scenario:
I brewed my DIPA last fall, aiming for a 17 liter batch with 2 liters of trub, so total post boil would have been 19 liters.
I started with an extra half liter of water through misreading the sheet as I was filling my kettles. Added a total of 218 grams of hops. So that comes out to 44.5 grams of hops per gallon, or 1.57 ounces/gallon. No hop bag.
I ended up with 17.65 liters in my carboy and 2 liters of trub (as planned). In entering in my process data into my tracking spreadsheet, I noted the extra half liter of water added deviation from plan. My boil off rate and grain absorption was pretty close to target; preboil volume was 24.2 liters versus projected 23.76 liters by BeerSmith. So in total the 218 grams of hops added to the boil kettle amounted to and additional whopping 200 ml (0.2 liters) of additional wort not accounted for in my water additions. My boil off rate was 2.42 lph versus my equipment profile which was set at 2.43 lph, so in a 90-minute boil, that may have accounted for most of the 200 ml I was off, but even ignoring that, the volume is pretty proportional to the amount of hops added and not the absorption rate of the hops.
If, on the other hand, the software had added 5 oz of additional water for each ounce of hops I added, The software would have put in an additional 1.14 liters of water throwing my system completely out of balance. I would have missed my pre-boil gravity based upon a dilution factor of around 4.7% and post-boil gravity by a similar amount.
It certainly seems to me that if this were a more significant error, as you have been arguing, then Brad would have addressed it by now. As my experiences and measurements bear out, it the volume of the hops is a rather minor addition to the ending volume and one that can easily disappear into the error of most people's ability to accurately measure.