GreatWhiteNorthBrewer
Apprentice
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2015
- Messages
- 6
- Reaction score
- 0
Hello everyone,
To preface: I am brand new to brewing, a friend and I will be brewing batch #4 this weekend. I found beersmith and have been using it for the last 3 batches. Starting out, we decided to do the following:
- Do full volume boils, and chill with an immersion chiller
- brew 3 gallon batches to lessen the expense of mistakes (bad batches!)
- Start with just extract (not even any steeping grain)
With that said, I have been keeping pretty good notes from the previous brews which have had some consistent issues. The OG has been off the mark in beer smith.
- the first batch was nearly 10 points off (we attributed this to a mistake in volume)
- the second and third were of by about 6 points. I believe that this was caused by me not taking into account the volume of the extract.
For the third batch, i noticed the increase in volume when adding the extract, but thought nothing of it. After a 1 hour boil My OG was off by 6 points so i investigated. By adjusting the batch volume by the approximate extract volume (.1 gallon per pound of extract), the estimate lined up with my measurements and the volumes in the software looked about right also.
Since last weekend, i have been looking further into equipment tuning on beersmith and found the following advice:
- Trub loss not having an effect on OG (set to zero and add volume to batch volume)
- set brewhouse efficiency to 100%
- create empty mash profile to prevent "grain absorbtion" from being added to total volume
I have attached a copy of my third brew. In the file, i have tweaked what i mentioned the above. Although we are trying to shoot for 3 gallon batches, i have added .25 gallon for trub/chiller losses, and an extra .4 gallons of volume to compensate for the extract i added. In short, I believe that i've tweaked the recipe to reflect what actually happened.
Last batch, I had a refractometer available (sale item from distant LHBS), when testing the pre boil gravity, i found that was off also. After i tweaked the recipe in order to match the OG, the preboil gravity was still off (38 points before the tweak, 35 afterwards: measured 31)
My questions are these:
- Is there another variable i am missing that might bring my preboil gravity in line with the target?
- Is there anything else i can do in order to tune the software to my system? (especially knowing we will start steeping grain next batch)
Any advice for profile tuning would be wonderful, I plan to be quite thorough for measurements in the next batch so i'll have more data available for analysis. Is there anything i should pay particular attention to?
Thanks in advance, I am working quite hard to learn and make this work for me!
To preface: I am brand new to brewing, a friend and I will be brewing batch #4 this weekend. I found beersmith and have been using it for the last 3 batches. Starting out, we decided to do the following:
- Do full volume boils, and chill with an immersion chiller
- brew 3 gallon batches to lessen the expense of mistakes (bad batches!)
- Start with just extract (not even any steeping grain)
With that said, I have been keeping pretty good notes from the previous brews which have had some consistent issues. The OG has been off the mark in beer smith.
- the first batch was nearly 10 points off (we attributed this to a mistake in volume)
- the second and third were of by about 6 points. I believe that this was caused by me not taking into account the volume of the extract.
For the third batch, i noticed the increase in volume when adding the extract, but thought nothing of it. After a 1 hour boil My OG was off by 6 points so i investigated. By adjusting the batch volume by the approximate extract volume (.1 gallon per pound of extract), the estimate lined up with my measurements and the volumes in the software looked about right also.
Since last weekend, i have been looking further into equipment tuning on beersmith and found the following advice:
- Trub loss not having an effect on OG (set to zero and add volume to batch volume)
- set brewhouse efficiency to 100%
- create empty mash profile to prevent "grain absorbtion" from being added to total volume
I have attached a copy of my third brew. In the file, i have tweaked what i mentioned the above. Although we are trying to shoot for 3 gallon batches, i have added .25 gallon for trub/chiller losses, and an extra .4 gallons of volume to compensate for the extract i added. In short, I believe that i've tweaked the recipe to reflect what actually happened.
Last batch, I had a refractometer available (sale item from distant LHBS), when testing the pre boil gravity, i found that was off also. After i tweaked the recipe in order to match the OG, the preboil gravity was still off (38 points before the tweak, 35 afterwards: measured 31)
My questions are these:
- Is there another variable i am missing that might bring my preboil gravity in line with the target?
- Is there anything else i can do in order to tune the software to my system? (especially knowing we will start steeping grain next batch)
Any advice for profile tuning would be wonderful, I plan to be quite thorough for measurements in the next batch so i'll have more data available for analysis. Is there anything i should pay particular attention to?
Thanks in advance, I am working quite hard to learn and make this work for me!