Grainfather + Beersmith water volumes

[leojez]

Hi,

I'm going to be getting a grainfather in the next couple of months and I'm also new to all grain. Big step up from kits!

I'm going through recipes with Beersmith and think I've pretty much figured out how to use it. One thing I'm unsure of is the water volumes. I've downloaded the grainfather profile addon - with that installed do I still need to do the water calculation for the grainfather using the calculator here: https://www.grainfather.com/brewing-calculators?

I'm not sure about this as I thought that the beersmith addon would calculate the water volumes correctly, however, when adding a recipe to beer smith I get different volumes to the grainfather calculator:

Batch Vol: 23l
Grain weight: 5.41kg

Beersmith with grainfather addon:
- total mash mash water adds: 21.1l
- sparge vol: 20.38l

Grainfather calculator:
- mash water: 18.11l
- sparge water: 14.22l

These are huge differences. Not sure what to do. Any help is much appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[Linalmeemow]

The Grainfather calculation is right, I think. The water from the Beersmith calculation won't fit in the Grainfather!

 

[IainM]

Yeah, the Beersmith one seems way off. Even with 1L/kg grain absorption it would leave about 13L for boil-off, dead space, trub loss and shrinkage, which seems far too high. The ~5L given by the GF calc seems a lot more realistic.

 

[DoctorMick]

I never use the beer smith one, it's easy enough to use the calc from the grain father website. If you'd rather do it all in one place there are a few forum posts which detail how to get it spot on.