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Another newbie to BeerSmith 3 and to all grain

mikenotts

Apprentice
Joined
Nov 23, 2019
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Hi all, I'm another (intermittent) kit brewer in the UK whose got more and more interested in all grain as a serious hobby i.e. to try and produce the best beer i can, not just a cheap substitute for shop bought stuff.  Hence my BeerSmith subscription (on YouTube beer videos, its always BeerSmith that's mentioned!).

I've done a few AG's as trial and error.  I have  a 30l Klarstein mash tun (not a recirculator and the temp control is rubbish - seems its a common problem on this model - but its excellent at holding a mash temp); I have a 26l brupak electric boiler and 23 litre plastic fermenters.  Then I bottle.

After trying the fly sparge method with poor results I now batch sparge - I got the exact method from the BeerSmith site.  I had also tried cooling via the standard copper thingy but it took 50 minutes to cool the wort.  I'm on a water meter and its also seems a waste of water, so I now use the no-chill method.

I've set up my equipment profile so now I'm getting to know the software and reading up.  Then I'll select a recipe and actually try to hit some simple parameters instead of throwing it all in and hoping for the best!
 
Welcome! Batch sparging is easier and with not as much loss of efficiency as some would lead you to believe. I don't know if this will help any... it's very old but here is the website of Denny Conn who didn't invent batch sparging (at least I don't think he did) but he was certainly one of the early proponents and defender of the technique back in the day. http://www.dennybrew.com I built my first all grain system based on this page and even though I now use shiny stainless steel vessels with pumps and electric control panels, I still think fondly of that old system.

When you get around to making that recipe make sure you take accurate notes along the way so that you can adjust your equipment profile as needed.
 
Welcome!  Glad to hear you are crafting your equipment profile to match your process.  The profiles are crucial to making the software perform well for you.

Fly sparging in theory will give the brewer a better extraction efficiency, but in practice I have found that batch sparging is much more reliable and consistent.  I agree with Kevin58 that Denny's write up on batch sparging is a very good read and has some good information on how to get the best extraction from a batch sparge.
 
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