Brewtarget questions from an extract brewer

[jdholman]

Hello All:
I am an extract / specialty grains brewer since 2001 and I am currently running Beersmith under Wine under Ubuntu 10.10. Anyway, I am trying out Brewtarget and I have a few questions:

1. I usually do a 2.5 USG boil and then add cold bottled water to make 5 or 5.5 USG depending on my target batch size. In Brewtarget, I put that my target boil size is 2.5 or 3.0 and Brewtarget thinks that this is how much wort I finished with. What's the best way to tell it that I am adding water other than making a bogus boil size?
2. In Beersmith, I had a place where I could enter my brewday actual "observed" OG and then my observer FG. This did my calculations for my actual ABV. Where can I do this in Brewtarget? I can only find the OG anf FG ranges per the style of beer.

Thanks in advance.

Jim

 

[erikpete18]

1. If you go into your Equipment section in BrewTarget (kettle icon, or the first under the View menu) you can get into the different equipment setups you have. In there is a "Final Top-Up Water" box that you can put how much you add to the fermenter. For instance, I've got mine set up as a 2.75gal boil and a loss of 0.25gal to boil off and another 0.25 left behind in the kettle. Then I add 3 gal of top-up water to give me a total volume of 5.25 gal.

2. I don't see that he's got an actual measured Alc section. It will calculate a predicted based on your yeast and predicted OG/FG, but I don't see anywhere you can input a measured value. However, all you have to do is subtract your FG from you OG and multiply by 131, but that doesn't do much if BrewTarget is your only record keeping.

 

[jdholman]

Thanks for the reply. I have imported my Beersmith recipes into Brewtarget and I notice that in Beersmith, when I increase my boil volume from say 2.00 to 2.50 G, my IBUs go up. In Brewtarget, they don't.

Is this anything I need to be concerned with?

Thanks,

Jim

 

[erikpete18]

The theory is that the less sugars are in the wort, the more IBUs you can potentially get. BrewTarget has a "Boil SG" that it will use to calculate the IBUs for the batch (depending on which, if any, extracts you list as late additions). When I change the boil volume on the left side of BrewTarget on the main screen, it will adjust the boil SG and the IBUs, but I haven't gone back through the equipment section to actually change any of the numbers to test it. A small volume increase like that shouldn't have a huge effect anyways, its more for when you're comparing a full volume boil (6gal) to a half boil (2.5gal) that the wort really starts to increase in density.

 

[mikfire]

brewtarget will have a tab for brewday information in the next major release. It is on my list of things to get done, just as soon as I convince myself that sorting does or does not work.