RokGoblin wrote:Well, I made some adjustments to my equipment profile to adjust for deadspace, etc. and now I am hitting my numbers again.
Interesting thing about BeerSmith, it keeps it's own copy of ingredients, equipment, etc. for each recipe you create, so if you change your equipment profile, only future recipes you create with that profile will inherit the changes. Existing recipes will not change. If you re-use a previous version of a recipe, you need to remember to change the equipment profile, etc. and re-save that recipe to use the new profile with the saved changes.
Changing your equipment profile for an existing recipe/equip combo is exactly what you don't want to do. That causes BeerSmith to take the existing recipe and add or subtract water, leave your ingredient quantities the same, yet keep your SG, etc. the same.
This will happen unless your change your 'Brewhouse Efficiency' to match any losses or savings you change in your equip profile, and scale the recipe when you add losses/gains. The difficult thing about this is that the 'Brewhouse Efficiency' for BeerSmith is 'to the fermenter'. Losses, like trub or tun, are already figured in to 'brewhouse efficiency', but are also factored in as separate fields. This means that adjustments can't be figured simply for their effect on efficiency, since it is also included as part of 'brewhouse efficiency'. It sounds strange, but it is a math issue where you have to calculate for the effect of the loss/gain, then figure out how much to adjust that effect based on the existing 'brewhouse efficiency'.
The industry standard for 'brewhouse efficiency' is 'to the kettle', which makes standardizing/trading recipes and checking equipment function easier. BeerSmith has chosen to define 'Brewhouse effeciency' as 'to the fermenter' to simplify things for its users at the expense of fine control/visibility over their brew house. I look at it like a PC vs Mac- only give the simple minded users 1 button to screw things up with.
For all grain, the issue with BeerSmith is only a few percent. For extract it is just flat wrong. Try making an extract recipe with two separate equip profiles with post boil top ups- one with a larger trub loss/top up than the other. For the same ingredient list, the fermenter SG remains the same even though more trub (sugars) are lost, and more top up water is used.