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Beginning Brewer new to Beer Smith

Steadfast

Apprentice
Joined
Aug 2, 2014
Messages
3
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0
Location
N. California
Our first beer is 15 Minute Amarillo Ale recipe from Basic Brewing that we scaled down to a one gallon batch substituting Simcoe hops for the Amarillo. We just opened our first bottle tonight and it is fantastic! Our second beer is an all grain wheat/rye session beer that we did using BIAB. We ran into problems with losing to much volume in the boil. I got so frazzled trying to correct it that I forgot to check final gravity. But it is bottled and time will tell if it was a success. We have been scaling 5 gallon recipes by dividing by 5. I purchased Beer Smith 2 for mobile last night  to help scale recipes more accurately. I love brewing small batches as it much easier to move gallon glass fermenter, shake to aerate yeast and to experiment using a 5 gallon recipe and dividing it up in 5 different fermenters with different hops and yeast for each. I am looking forward to brewing often to get more experience. The closest home brew shop Is more than 2 hours away so not easy to get ingredients or to ask questions.

I have set up our equipment profile for Beer Smith and am not sure if it is correct but am hoping it will help us to figure out how to adjust water needed for each batch as we are planning to continue with all grain brewing. Once we get better at brewing may want to make two to five gallon batches but for now 6 to 8 bottles are fine.

Because we are new I did not know the answer to some of the questions to set up equipment profile. Such as I don't know what our efficiency is or tun specific heat. Until I am able to figure out profile is there a rule of thumb for how much water to add for each pound of malted grain? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
You could post up your recipe (export as .bsmx file) and attach to post with specific questions you had on setup. For the most part Beersmith figures out how much water you need as long as its set up right. Specific Heat is used for infusion mashing and not so much with biab. Efficiency is tough to figure out without brewing a couple times, but you do need to go back and change things after a couple batches. You'll probably need 2 different profiles setup for 1 gallon vs 5 gallon batches.
 
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