Hop wrote:I still use BeerSmith for BIAB. I've just been making minor adjustments to my equipment and other settings in it so I can dial it in.
I do a number of things differently from the suggestions. For example, I don't put my entire boil volume in during the mash. I actually lift my bag up above my kettle in a basket (then put that basket on a couple planks of aluminum-covered wood) and sparge it with at least 2-3 gallons of water--my mash volume is generally ~4 gallons, and the grains still retain about 0.5 quarts per pound of grain, so the calculations aren't tough.
If you're off on your boil volume, adding sugar is not the way to go about fixing it. Instead, you should add water (use something to measure your volume... I use a yard stick and I made a spreadsheet to calculate volume based on cm).
The more important thing to get right is gravity, not volume.
If your gravity is higher than expected, add water to get the right gravity (BeerSmith has a Dilution Tool to do this quickly).
If your gravity is lower than expected, you'll need to adjust it by either boiling off more water or by adding some extract (I have some organic light dry malt extract that I use for yeast starters, and I sometimes use that to adjust my gravity up. I'm more likely to just boil extra water off, though).
The main thing to make sure to adjust on-the-fly if you're dealing with different volume or gravity is hops, because it will be utilized more with more volume and less with more gravity.
OOPS! Funny how one word can screw the entre post. I meant to say my pre-boil GRAVITY was way way low so I upped the amount of sugar. The recipe had called for 3 lbs and I had bought 2- 2lbs bags so I added them both instead of just 1.5 bags.
