New Equipment, New Issues

Hey everyone,

I finally bought my own equipment after brewing with a friend for a while.  I bought the SSBrewtech Infussion MT and Kettle.  I also got the chugger pump and duda energy 30 plate wort chiller.  I’ve made two batches with this new setup and have ended up low in my conical fermenters.  I’m only getting 4 gallons into the fermenter and a lower than expected OG.  I’m assuming this means I’m not getting full conversion AND losing water somewhere.  Now, I’ve noticed every time I transfer water/wort I end up losing a little in my lines but I don’t know how to account for this in BeerSmith.  While I’m losing water/wort in the lines, I’d still need to figure out why I’m not getting the correct OG.  I’m currently set up to do a single infussion mash with no mashout and fly sparging. using a 5 gallon water cooler as my HLT.

I’d love to hear your input, thanks so much for any help you can provide me with.

Have you checked the volume marks on all of your equipment? You need to find gallon jug and weigh out 3785 grams of water in the jug and mark exactly where the fill point is for that mass of water is in the jug. Then you can quickly fill up jug after jug to sequentially see how volume marks on equipment line up with your reality.

Be sure to check the HLT, tun, and fermenter. Maybe one or more of them is off.

PS: if the volume mark is on one side of a piece of equipment, then the equipment needs to be on a level floor. One way to check for levelness is to rotate the equipment 180 degrees and see if the liquid level varied with respect to your volume marks.

I use that mash tun as well; it has very little dead space.

Can you post some numbers (mash, sparge, pre and post-boil volumes, lbs. of grain, etc.)?

Do you have your BeerSmith set at 5 gallon batches? I set mine at 6 gallons. Remember your going to lose some in the kettle and the lines and during chilling.  This could help by adding more base malt to your grain bill.

If your loosing liquid between mash tun and kettle then you can adjust (increase) the BeerSmith Lauter Deadspace in your equipment profile.

If your loosing liquid between kettle and fermenter then you can adjust (increase) the BeerSmith Trub/Chiller Loss in your equipment profile.

You also may be boiling off too much. You can adjust the Boil Off parameter in the BeerSmith equipment profile and/or try to boil less.

For efficiency, you can calculate your actual efficiency and put that number in BeerSmith.

It is pretty important to set up your equipment and mash profiles according to you actual equipment. It’s true that Beersmith comes loaded with equipment and mash profiles but those are general settings. Even if there is a setup for the system you bought, your usage is going to be unique. Boil off is one of those unique parameters.

There is a series of videos on Youtube that make setting up your profiles fairly simple to follow. Here is a link to the equipment profile set up. He also has a video for both batch sparge and BIAB mash set up.