My biggest complaint with brewing software is its water utilization tools, or lack thereof. It's kinda nice to know exactly how much you're going to need in advance, without using the marked wooden spoon method. I say this as an all-grain brewer who grows his own hops.
I've only dabbled in home brewing, but water use is not an issue for almost everyone. To make a five gallon batch you'll need about 5 gallons of water, plus in unknown amount for washing...
Sorry to say but that's just not correct. You want to hit your target gravities to get your beer to come out as expected, and to do so, you need to look at how much water you are boiling off over a period of time. There are a lot of other factors with regard to this as well. Your altitude will cause you to have differing levels of boil off as well. Ever seen a recipe with high altitude variations for preparation? It's the same principle. If you want five gallons of beer, you need to know about how muc
Just curious - how much do you boil off? I've never bothered to measure. When it goes into the fermenter I add water to reach the desired OG; I can't imagine how it would make any difference if you add the water at the beginning or at the end but I suppose some aficionados would see it differently.
For an extract brewer, adding water after-the-fact has some hop and specialty grain utilization impact but little else. On top of that, for an extract brewer you have additional volume because the extract has volume, too. 5 gallons plus 1qt of extract (the rough volume of 6lbs LME) yields somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 gallons post-boil. For an all-grain brewer, your only sugars are what you can wash out of the grain. Adding water after-the-fact generally means you got a terrible extract efficiency
Water utilization? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sorry to say but that's just not correct. You want to hit your target gravities to get your beer to come out as expected, and to do so, you need to look at how much water you are boiling off over a period of time. There are a lot of other factors with regard to this as well. Your altitude will cause you to have differing levels of boil off as well. Ever seen a recipe with high altitude variations for preparation? It's the same principle. If you want five gallons of beer, you need to know about how muc
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