Making short beers with BeerSmith

Is there a quick and accurate way to make short beers from the spent grain of high ABV beers? Just made a short beer from the spent grain of a 5 gallon batch of Imperial Stout with 25 pounds of grain and an ABV of 11.2%. For the short beer I added 4 gallons of 165 F water to the spent grain in the MT, let sit 1 hour and got a starting gravity of  1.040, 10 brix. After fermentation got 5.2% ABV. For me that is a short beer!

Is making short beers a function of BeerSmith? If not, can it be? Here is what I did:

Set equipment to 4 gal brew pot, set the type to PM, set the style to a regular version of the style and scale down to a 3 gallon batch. BeerSmith scaled down both the grain and hop quantities. This works OK but the starting gravity (SG) was much higher than the measured SG. To correct this I adjust the scaled down grain bill so the estimated SG equals the measured SG.

This throws the hops / IBU's off so I set the desired IBU to the original recipe. Beersmith then adjusts the hop bill. This method works OK, I think, but takes several steps to do.

Looking to see if there is already a less cumbersome or more accurate way to make short beers using Beersmith that I may have missed.

If making short beers is not already a function of BeerSmith, it should be.

Note: When doing a BeerSmith spell check, why do "words" like IBU and Brix come up as needing to be changed?
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+1

This shouldn't be too hard to add. An option to attach a recipe to another starter recipe.

Traditionally this is called parti-gyle brewing, where you have two runnings and make a beer from each of the runnings. Beersmith in it's current form does not really work for this, what I'm considering doing is making three recipes, one for the base grain, and two extract recipes, to mimic the wort produced. However I have not really tried it yet. I'm at the primary recipe wort design stage. It would sure be nice to automate this, as it's a more complex brew design.
AO

When I brew parti-gyles I find if you always add a little of the first running to the second running the small beer isn't quite so grainy tasting.

One way to "make" a new recipe for the second runnings on the fly is to create a duplicate of the first runnings recipe.  Once you've collected your second runnings, open up the duplicate recipe.  Just below the "stlye" tab is your "estimated original gravity" bar.  Double click on it and an "Adjust Gravity" window opens up.  Where it says "Desired OG", type in the actual gravity of your second runnings.  In this case, yours would have been 1.040.  Click "OK".

By doing this, you're grain bill on the design page will have dropped all your grains to the amounts required to make that recipe from scratch.  In this way, you now know the grain bill of your second runnings.  You can now adjust or change your hops, misc., yeast etc. to fit what you want to make out of these second runnings.

You can even make the second runnings beer from scratch in the future with this recipe.  If it happened to turn out great, you won't be regretting not having the recipe, because you created it on the fly!

I made a huge Russian Imperial Stout and used this method to make a dry stout from the second runnings.

You can even get really creative with those second runnings.  Create your recipe.  Then adjust it by adding more grains to your grain bed (capping), to create a bigger beer of your choice.  Measure your grain bed temperature and figure out what strike temperature you need to get back up to a good mash temperature and then heat your second runnings to that strike temperature and add enough back into your Mash Tun to get about 1.25 quarts per pound of grain.  This second mashing will allow you to create a very complex grain bill for your second runnings, if you so desire.  After mash is complete, lauter and drain as usual.  Then add the last bit of second runnings to your mash tun to sparge with.  Your new (capping) grain will have soaked up some of the wort, so you'll have to add enough extra water to your second runnings to compensate for this.

I've tried both, using the second runnings as is and adding them back to the Mash Tun with more grain.  Both methods produced good beer.  You can actually create two huge beers if your Mash Tun is large enough.  What's neat, is you can be boiling the first one, while you're mashing the second one.  It makes for a really long day though.
You can even take those second runnings and pour them back into your MLT, as if you were using them as strike water.  By cap

I've been doing Parti Gyle brews for a year or so.  I started because I needed to brew more (for some parties) and I was doing a lot of Belgians so there was sugar added anyway.  Also I only had a 5 gal Mash tun.  Anyway now I have upgraded a few things and it's easier to do do but you do really want to be able to boil two kettles at once.  If you can do that you really shorten the day.

Beer Smith is not a great help with this right now.  To plan recipes in BS I'm doing three.  One for the master and the next two for the splits.  I can get the SG and SRM from Randy Mosher's charts but to get those numbers into BS is a dance.  THere is no option to add a full wort as a fermentable so you have to add it as an extract and play with things till you get the numbers you want.

The two recipe mode only works if you do the second version on the fly.  My plan is to make two beers I work out in advance so I have to work backward from what I need.

It works but it's a PITA so I do wish there were an easier way inside of BS.