Puzzled with Boil size water requirements

Hi everybody, I am a little puzzled why there is such a difference in required water needed for my next brew (a 5.5% ABV IPA).

I am using Beersmith, and it is now set up reasonably accurate for my system with a half a dozen all grain brews under my belt.

Previous brews have allocated similar water requirements for small experimental batches of 13L of beer, of around 25-27L. These have been standard bitters in the 4.3% ABV region or thereabouts.

With the IPA it is only asking for around 21L of water needed. Boil volume is 16.5L, pre boil OG of 1.048

Estimated post boil of 13.5L, OG of 1.061

Now my Beersmith equipment profile is set up for my boil off, of which is around 5.2L/hour which after a 90 minute boil is 7.8L !!!

Now if these numbers are correct then we have 16.5L minus my boil off, 7.8L gives me only 8.7L remaining!!!!!

The only difference I can easily spot between the other brews is that the calculated mash efficiency is only 62% on the IPA whereas on earlier brews it was estimating a higher mash efficiency of over 70%

What is going on here?

As a relatively new brewer, I would very much appreciate if someone could throw some light on this one.

Best regards,
WM7793

Hi WM7793 (is that your Borg name?),

Have you actually measured your boil off? It seems very high.

Boiling my kettle, which is on a stove-top with the lid only open a bit (the only way I can keep a rolling boil) I am using 0.4 gal/hr or 1.4l/hr for boil off.

That is a very good question.

I seem to remember that I have calculated from the diameter of my 50cm boiler, that the boil off time was in the region of 5L per hour.

I have not actually put water into the boiler and measured the boil off time over 90 minutes!

I must do this to accurately determine boil off.

That said, I have not had any problems with previous brews regarding water volumes. They have come out reasonably accurate!

Please offer any suggestions as to why I seem to be out with the water volumes.

Best regards,
WM7793

With the IPA it is only asking for around 21L of water needed. Boil volume is 16.5L, pre boil OG of 1.048

Estimated post boil of 13.5L, OG of 1.061

Click to expand...

Ok so that is 3l of boil loss for 90 mins (might be a bit of overkill - typically 60 mins boil)  or 2l an hour. That sounds reasonable, I would put that in your beersmith profile.

If you are shooting for a 5.5% ABV you should be looking for something more like 1.053-1.054 O.G.

I suggest you post the Beersmith recipe on the cloud and make it public so it can be downloaded by the guru brewers here (that would not be me ) who will then be able to help you better.

I have similar style beer in cloud - search for "SNPA Clone Classic Recipe". For a 18.9l recipe with O.G. 1.053, total grains 10.9lb (5kg) total water 29l with 14.6 for mash and 14.4 sparge. Boil volume 22.7l. Boil off 1.5l, other losses about 4l. 1 l yeast starter added.

If anyone would care to explain how to embed a cloud recipe I would appreciate it.

I have just added a dummy recipe, and even without any ingredients, it is showing that I need around 20L total water required for a 13L batch brew in the brew steps page.

As I mentioned in my opening post, previous 13L brews have all been around the 25/27L range of water required.

Any suggestions please?

I am hoping to brew tomorrow morning and my yeast is raring to go!

Best regards,
WM7793

Hi WM,

First off sorry for talking in gallons rather than liters, being the American that I am

The first thing that you need to do is understand your system and setup your equipment profile accordingly.  Using a calculation to determine boil off is no substitute for doing a bit of experimentation.  How vigorously you boil, relative humidity, outside temp, wind...all have an effect on your boil off rate.  I recently dropped my boil off rate from 2 gallons / 60 minutes down to 1.25 simply by going to a more gentle rolling boil, rather than a very vigorous boil.  This reduced the amount of liquid in my kettle, making is easier to brew 10 gallon batches (not to mention a  huge savings on propane).

Once you have figured out your boil off rate take a look at what you have in your profile for losses to make sure that is set correctly as well.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

Hi Dan, thank you for your reply. No need to apologise for being over the pond and using the good old fashioned gallons, I would still use the same myself, here in the UK,  if the Europeans had not told us to use Litres. I have a great affinity for you guys over there!

What I am struggling with, is why has the recipes now stating a much lower volume of water for exactly the same size batch of beer !

I have not made major changes to my system profile, only tweaked it here and there after taking many measurements (ie trub loss, etc). I agree that I have not done a specific boil off calculation (I will now), but the value plugged into Beersmith of 5.2L per hour is there or thereabouts, as I have not had serious problems with not having the right amount of water for sparging.

So, I am really puzzled why the total water required is around 7L less for my recent recipes.

Any ideas on what I may have done to screw Beersmith up so badly, would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
WM7793

If you attach two recipes (one with the larger water volume and one with the smaller water volume), we'll be able to compare them and probably be able to see what's going on.

Great!, thanks Scott.

I hope I have done this right, as this is the first time that I have needed to do this.

Very much appreciate your help on this matter.

Best regards,
WM7793

Before you brew again, read the posts pinned to the top of the "All-Grain/Advanced" section of this forum. The equipment profile set up info is especially useful for questions of this sort.

My experience has been that when something fails the sanity test, I've clicked the wrong box, used the wrong profile, or otherwise overlooked some tiny detail inBeerSmith. BeerSmith has so many moving parts in order to give great predictability, but it's easy to overlook the tiny little switch in the corner - or the great big box in the middle of the window. Usually when I find an inconsistency I re-enter the whole recipe and it all works. Sometimes I notice my initial error; sometimes it just magically works better the second time.

durrettd said:

Before you brew again, read the posts pinned to the top of the "All-Grain/Advanced" section of this forum. The equipment profile set up info is especially useful for questions of this sort.

My experience has been that when something fails the sanity test, I've clicked the wrong box, used the wrong profile, or otherwise overlooked some tiny detail inBeerSmith. BeerSmith has so many moving parts in order to give great predictability, but it's easy to overlook the tiny little switch in the corner - or the great big box in the middle of the window. Usually when I find an inconsistency I re-enter the whole recipe and it all works. Sometimes I notice my initial error; sometimes it just magically works better the second time.

Click to expand...

+1
I've learned the hard way.... Beersmith is an excellent tool, but requires some study, planning and setup.
You can't just download the program and brew based on whatever numbers barf up.

Thank so much for your replies gents, but all to no avail.

I created a brand new recipe from scratch and the volumes were no different. In fact with no ingredients added to a new recipe, it still only showed around 20L for a 13L brew instead of all my previous 6 brews of around 25 to 27L of water.

I would appreciate if anybody could take a look at the two recipes that I have posted, to see if there is anything that I may have done wrong. In fact, looking at the last couple of recipes that I have created but not yet brewed, the same has happened, ie down on total water required compared to my first six brews.

I am at a loss here!!!

Best regards,
WM7793

I downloaded both recipes and immediately noticed the actual numbers in the equipment profile for the IPA was missing from the recipe - all your losses were set to zero. I don't quite understand why, perhaps a bug in the program. Try creating another equipment profile with a different name and then selecting that for your IPA .

Ok, I think I have cracked it. Did you convert this recipe from a different unit? Weird things seem to happen when you do that.

I got your profile to work. It now says you need 28.2 liters of water.

Ok here is recipe fixed I hope:

Thank you SO much TAHammerton, for taking the time and trouble to sort out this problem which was driving me crazy.

I feel a little embarrassed now for not checking the equipment profile, as I did not expect the data to have disappeared. I was looking to see what I must have done to mess things up. You have taught me a very valuable lesson, to go back to basics, and not assume anything.

Looking back now, I had a weird error message last month which I emailed Brad about. It was regarding an error displayed whilst trying to save a recipe, which was:

Assertion failed
[file Bdata.cpp:2812 complied Dec 4 2013]

Followed by:
SL1b.cpp(841:assert"O"failed in SAssert().

Which Brad had not seen before, and thankfully, has not repeated itself!

Now this explains why all recipes that I have created since last month have all displayed low water volumes due to the losses set to zero in the equipment profile.

Anyway, thank you once again, TAHammerton, for all your help in curing the problem, it is very much appreciated by a fellow brewer from over the pond!

Now back to my brewing with renewed enthusiasm!

Very best regards,
WM7793