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Equipment setup question for extract brewers

ryan79912

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I'm new to beer smith and have been able to figure everything out except the equipment part.

I brew in 5 gallon batches. I typically use 2 gallons of water in a 20 quart pot to make my wort. After the wart is chilled I add 3 gallons of water to my fermentation bucked to get to 5 gallons total.

When I put these figures into the equipment tab, it says the total water needed is somewere around 6.6 gallons. Even with evaporation and fermentation loss figured in, that isn't right. I've been playing with this for over a day and cant make sense of it. I've never used more than 5 gallons of water for a batch. I'm also very confused by the difference between est pre boil volume and measured pre boil volume. Whats the difference? Can anyone help me?
 
It seems to be working for me.  Do you boil 2 gallons of water for 60 minutes?  You'll have evaporation and so when you add that volume to your 3 gallons of top off you won't be bottling very much. 

I setup a 5 gallon pot equipment profile and the numbers looked correct.

Top Up water for kettle: 0 gallons
Boil volume: 3.6 gallons
evap rate: 1.00 gallons (hourly rate)
cooling shrinkage: 4% (.09 gallons)
loss to trub/chiller: .25 gallons
top up water for fermenter: 3 gallons
batch volume: 5 gallons
fermenter loss: .25 gallons
bottling volume: 4.75 gallons
 
Thanks for your help merfizle. Yes I boil 2 gallons for 60 min. 

Clearly I'm just not understanding this. Why is your boil volume 3.6 gallons when you are only boiling 2.0 gallons?
 
I'm not sure if this is new for beersmith 2 but there are 2 pre boil volumes - measured and estimated. I can not find an explanation these anywhere. I have no idea what the difference is, but they both need values and effect the calculation.
 
Because you need to account for boil off.  Generally, I figure 1 gallon of water is lost to evaporation per hour of boil.  So, if you want two gallons of wort then you need an extra gallon there.  Plus, BS uses trub/chiller field, batch volume, cooling shrinkage and fermenter top off water.  What values do you have in those fields?

Mark
 
ryan79912 said:
I'm not sure if this is new for beersmith 2 but there are 2 pre boil volumes - measured and estimated. I can not find an explanation these anywhere. I have no idea what the difference is, but they both need values and effect the calculation.

Ryan, estimated is what BS caclulates.  Measured is what you actually measure.  In other words, BS tells you how much water you should have pre boil...so 3.6 gallons.  You would measure what you have in your boil pot with a measure stick or whatever and enter that into the measured field.  They should always be the same unless for some reason you wanted or ended up with more or less.  It's hard to measure 3.6 gallons so maybe you decided to do 3.75 instead, etc.

Mark
 
So are you saying you put 3.6 gallons of actual water in your pot to start with or 2 gallons?

Is the pre-measured boil volume figure beersmith uses automatically deducting boil 1 gallon boil off?

I boil 2 actual gallons of water in the pot. I don't lose much to evaporation. I don't under stand where they are coming up with 1 gallon of boil off from. I never lose anywere that much.
 
I used your figures above and it says I need 7.8 gallons of total water when you click on the water volume tab?

Still don't understand how you came up with 3.6 measured pre boil if I'm only boiling 2 gallons.
 
I'm not sure either.....that volume is what I use in my 9.5 gallon potfor 5.5 batch.  Perhaps if you tell us what your equipment profile looks like.

Mark
 
I used the 2.0 gal/7.6L option and modified it with these figures.

measured pre-boil volume - 2.0 gal
est pre boil volume - 2.0 gal
boil off .14 gal
post boil volume 1.86 gal
cooling loss - .07 gal
trub loss .25 gal
top up water 3.0 gal
batch size 5.0 gal
fermentation loss - .40 gal
estimated bottling volume 4.6 gal

Under total water needed it says 6.2 gal needed. Just wondering where that figure comes from. Thanks for your input. I'm finding this a bit too complicated.
 
What values are under Mash in your Water Volumes tab?  Even when you  have Extract selected for some reason it still uses values in the Mash tab.  Change your recipe to Partial Mash, then click on Mash Details.  Click red check box under Mash Profile and put 0 for Grain Weight Basis.  Now, recheck your total water needed.  You must not have BS automatically calculate boil volume?

Mark
 
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