Beersmith

[Peter Smith]

OK Beersmith, it is the dogs nuts, last night I learnt how to do water additions .. thanks Druid, but lets face it in this instant age of xbox gratification we just want it to work out of the box right......   wrong... it needs a bit of config... so here is the thread for the bits you need...

[Peter Smith]

couple of things I found to start with in the preferences section  put your name and choose AG or whatever, then choose ALL STYLES (wow english bitter just appeared....)

go through the entire section setup your equipment with the wizard...

setup your equipment dont use his....

now water if you load the akl one then goto tthe water profile tool

put akl (or yours as the base, chose the desired ie dublin if guiness then click calc addition, save target call it AKL-> Guiness

create a new recipe when you add the ingrediant water choose akl->guiness, say yes to water additions and it will give you the water additions based on the batch size

Next beer tasting at 1 queen street I want to hold a Beersmith setup 20 min session over quaffers be there. we all throw in a beer and get Druid along he is da man, and he got me into AG and I want to say thanks..

I can say enough how much BS for about $30 has improved my brewing in the last few years... GET IT

[Peter Smith]

save as target AKL -> Guiness

add water in new recipe akl->guiness

[David R]

I've been using Beersmith for a while but haven't dabbled with that aspect of it, but given that I'm using rain water [which is pretty much devoid of any mineral content] I should probably look into it. Cheers for posing thatt!

[Scott H]

I'm in the same boat with the rain water. My ph is good as gold but not really 100% sure if rainwater is devoid of minerals might be the goal for this year I think

[David R]

My knowledge of water parameters is aquarium based rather than brewing based, but pure clean rain water should be completely devoid of almost anything, what ever it picks up between the sky and the tap comes off your roof and your water tank. My tap water has a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) of 6-8ppm, compared to 0ppm for pure Reverse Osmosis water and ~90ppm for east Auckland tap water. I'm guessing the tiny amount of TDS in my case is mostly organic, but if you have a concrete water tank it may well be a different story. If you don't have a concrete tank (and haven't added anything like lime chip to your water supply) then for all intensive purposes rain water should be treated the same as RO water if you're re-mineralising it.

With such soft water I wouldn't expect any problems getting the mash pH low enough, in fact with dark beers I'm guessing the problem could be going too low.

[Scott H]

Yeah I did a little bit of looking round on teh interwebz seems that concrete tanks provide a tiny amounts of minerals (calcium, magnesium, sulfate and chloride all <8ppm in gereral.)

[Scott H]

Hey Pete thanks for the heads up, with how you have set it up above will it scale the additions depending on your total water usage or only calculate for the 20 L?

[Peter Smith]

it seems to but also seems to base the additions on the batch size not the total water required in side mash section (ie mash in water, sparge, grain absorbtion etc)  going to do some paper calcs to see what its dooing but doubling the batch size does double the water in etc

Druid on here needs the thanks for the heads up , he is the BS guru not me

[Darren Wood]

And excellent idea for a thread. I use BeerSmith and it is, indeed the mutt's nuts! I've yet to toy with the water additions, but what I did find useful was this video on how to adjust/setup of you efficiency: http://youtu.be/bIoeFuNbDbU

I'm still not 100% convinced this is correct... so any other pointers would be ace.

Also I've taken to sharing my BeerSmith recipes in their cloud: http://beersmithrecipes.com/listrecipes/37764/darren131

What would be great are the full range of local grains/hops with accurate numbers. 

Anyway, Peter, a BS session at the next 1 Queen St meet up is an excellent idea!