Volume into fermenter - only 15 litres instead of expected 20

Hello All.

I wonder if anyone has any suggestions as to why I have got a noticeably lower than expected volume.

I followed a Brewdog's Punk IPA recipe and input the information into BeerSmith to get my water volumes. The brewing went well - OG and FG were good (OG was a bit higher than expected - 1.058 instead of 1.056, FG was spot on at 1.010) and for the first time doing all grain, I have a beer that tastes like a real beer in that it doesn't have any off flavours - woohoo! I'm pretty chuffed and excited about it!

However, the puzzling thing is that the recipe was designed for 20 litres, but I only ended up with 15 litres. Is there anything obvious/common that I could be doing wrong. I have entered the information into the equipment profile including measuring the boil off rate, but I am not sure if I am doing something wrong there or if it is something wrong with my process.  I cant get my head round it as the OG and FG were good and if I had put another 5 litres in then it would be way off target. I wondered if something wasn't right with volumes as the brewing steps stated that I should do batch sparges of 1.04 litres and then 13.06 litres, and 1.04 is a bit low for a sparge! Or could it be around the efficiency - that is set at the default 72% BH efficiency?

Any thoughts or pointers would be most welcome.

Regards,


Greg

Congrats on the tasty beer!  8)

It's tough to tell from your post, but it sounds like you're using a default profile and have yet to customize it to your experience. How much have you modified your equipment profile?

When you made your beer, you should be making volume and gravity measurements along the way. There are fields in BeerSmith for this info. This will show you where your results differ from the predictions. On the Sessions tab, second row, left column, you'll see "Meas Efficiency". This is the brewhouse efficiency of your system, as calculated from your measurements. It's this number you'll use for future recipes.

Hello brewfun.

Thanks for your reply.

I had entered the information into the equipment profile e.g. boil off rate, trub loss, deadspace loss, fermenter loss etc, but hadn't taken anything from the session tab to work out the efficiency to apply to the next brew. The BH efficiency was set at the default 72%

I have done as suggested and entered as many figures into the session tab from my scribbled notes from the brew day, and it is showing as 54.1% Meas Efficiency. How do I then apply that to the next recipe? I entered that figure into the Brewhouse Efficiency field in the Equipment Profile, and recreated the recipe, but the volumes all look the same. What should I see different?

I have a feeling that I am not filling the information in properly so may need to read through the guides.

Regards,


Greg

The updated efficiency should show a change in gravity. This should require a reduction in volume to get to the correct gravity.

You can apply the new profile to the recipe via the Scale Recipe function. The recipe grain and (possibly) hop amounts will change to allow for the new efficiency and correct volume.

If you're still having trouble, please post the recipe file by highlighting the recipe, then using File > Export Selected. Then post the resulting .bsmx file. This lets us see all the details not captured by simply posting a recipe report.