schristian619
Well-Known Member
I've been using beersmith for many years with my previous equipment and found it pretty accurate for my needs. I just got a new 20g Spike Brewing system to replace my older 10g electric system and am having trouble with the equipment profile in Beersmith.
For my first run on this system and for this profile, I did the following:
12g batch (roughly 2 gallons lost to dry hopping and gravity checks etc - so 10g finished product)
4% loss to cooling per Beersmith recommendations
1.5g kettle loss to rub, chiller, etc (the 20g spike system leaves 1g in the kettle for me - which is fine as I want clear wort in the fermentor anyway)
so that puts my post boil volume at 14g
2 gallon boil off gives a pre-boil volume of 16g
All seems well until I try to measure post boil gravity. The batch gravity is based on a 12g batch, but my final volume in the kettle is 14g. So while my efficiency was actually a little higher than predicted at 80% vs 75%, my starting gravity was low due to the discrepancies in volume. Essentially, Beersmiths target SG was as if I boiled off another 2 gallons and had a final kettle volume of 12g.
I'm thinking I need to set my batch size to match my post boil volume, rather than my fermenter volume. Does that make sense? So for 10g of finished product, I have 12g into the fermenter, but design it as a 14g batch in Beersmith. Is there a better, more accurate way of doing this? The issue this would create is that it would give me pre-boil volume tarts that are way too high. I can't seem to find a post boil volume vs batch size in the software. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
For my first run on this system and for this profile, I did the following:
12g batch (roughly 2 gallons lost to dry hopping and gravity checks etc - so 10g finished product)
4% loss to cooling per Beersmith recommendations
1.5g kettle loss to rub, chiller, etc (the 20g spike system leaves 1g in the kettle for me - which is fine as I want clear wort in the fermentor anyway)
so that puts my post boil volume at 14g
2 gallon boil off gives a pre-boil volume of 16g
All seems well until I try to measure post boil gravity. The batch gravity is based on a 12g batch, but my final volume in the kettle is 14g. So while my efficiency was actually a little higher than predicted at 80% vs 75%, my starting gravity was low due to the discrepancies in volume. Essentially, Beersmiths target SG was as if I boiled off another 2 gallons and had a final kettle volume of 12g.
I'm thinking I need to set my batch size to match my post boil volume, rather than my fermenter volume. Does that make sense? So for 10g of finished product, I have 12g into the fermenter, but design it as a 14g batch in Beersmith. Is there a better, more accurate way of doing this? The issue this would create is that it would give me pre-boil volume tarts that are way too high. I can't seem to find a post boil volume vs batch size in the software. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.