Josh, you have to come clean and say that you are an extremist (put it in your signature!)
. Didn't you have some exhaust fan or something going to try and make the evaporation equal on all your brews? I'm definitely on Contrarian's side here sorry mate
.
Let's back up a bit...
Firstly, nice job chesl on Post #8. Perfect and great decision-making
.
chesl73 wrote:One question I had about measurements, at the end of the brew, the BIABacus works out various efficiencies such as EIB, EAW, EIF and on the previous brews, my actual has been very close to the estimated.
This is the aim of The BIABacus. It makes the difficult estimates for you whereas...
chesl73 wrote:...other measures I've seen (outside BIABacus) such as 'brewhouse efficiency' or 'mash efficiency'?
are terms used in other programs which are, firstly, very poorly defined. For example, brewhouse efficiency, in one program, can mean kettle efficiency whilst in another it will mean fermentor efficiency. Worse still two brewers using exactly the same program might think brewhouse efficiency means kettle efficiency while the other thinks it means fementor efficiency
. The only useful and standardised terminology has been developed on this site
here.
Most people who use the word efficiency actually have no idea that there is even a vast differences between kettle and fermentor efficiencies. It's a term widely used by all-grain home brewers, not just on forums but in magazines etc,. Thanks to the BIABacus, it is no longer a term that beginners and even advanced brewers need to be familiar with or knowledgeable about. It is only when your actuals stray significantly from your estimates that we need to pay a bit more attention.
Make sense or not?
chesl73 wrote: I would have thought that there would be an ability to feedback these measured efficiencies as Contrarian mentioned, there is but it should not be necessaryfor your own brewing back into BIABacus rather than just keeping the same values for everyone every time? I assume there must be a reason that the spreadsheet doesn't allow for this?
The hardest thing about the BIABacus is when people have used other software or have read other forums (which 99% of brewers will have done
).
This is a fantastic question and I'm not too sure I can answer it anywhere near as well as I would like to but will have a crack.
Let's look at other software first...
Other Software Works Like This
1. Type in your batch size (there is no standard definition of batch size so this can vary from program to program and from brewer to brewer).
2. Estimate your evaporation rate (even the most popular commercial software used a percentage instead of a fixed amount per hour until BIABrewer.info corrected it.) Your evaporation rate should not be measured as a percentage when home-brewing.
3. Estimate your 'efficiency'. As mentioned, most brewers have no idea if these means kettle or fermentor efficiency. Furthermore, all software besides the BIABacus, treats it as a constant whereas it is a variable.
4. Estimate your kettle and fermentor losses.
So, the other software makes no decisions for you but will recommend the same defaults for everyone.
The BIABacus Works Like This...
1. Type in your desired Volume into Fermentor.
2. Type in your kettle dimensions.
3. Type in the OG of this batch.
So, type in three knowns of your system and the BIABacus actually tailors (considers) the individual batch and then gives you excellent estimates on the ingredient weights and water required but also with a sensible safety margin.
It is a whole new paradigm where the software is making the important decisions for you whereas all other brewing software requires you, the brewer, to make very uneducated guesses.
That is an incredible difference.
One Important Thing
Sorry Josh, going to disagree with you again here. I've written this a heap of times... "Commercial breweries do not produce the same beer on each batch. They do blending etc to make sure they are in the ballpark but each batch is different. In craft breweries, the difference between each batch becomes more noticeable." As a home brewer, you have one advantage, you can freeze pellet hops etc of this year's vintage and so get consistent brews until they run out but net year's crop could be a whole new ballgame. Any good brewer, commercial or home should get very comfortable with the fact that...
many aspects of a brew are not in your control.
All skilled brewers do not expect to be consistent in their readings or flavours because they
know they can't be. What they are skilled at is manipulating the ingredients they have available on the day correctly and adjusting post-boil.
In fact, you limit yourself to a large extent when you think things can be controlled as you miss the opportunity to blend your beers etc. Gordon Strong who won the massive comp in America several times did it by submitting thirty entries but many of those were blends.
Rambled for way too long here now but one last thing...
Really Taste Your Home Brew Batch Before You Criticise It.
One of the best home brews I have had was a kit beer fermented at about a billion degrees in a shed. I didn't know that before I tasted it. All I knew was that I was gong to have a taste of the guy's home brew. It was the clearest and cleanest of lagers but with some dimension to it. It was brilliant!
Upon questioning, I found out about the fermentation conditions etc but it went one better...
The kit he had brewed was for an India Pale Ale. Seriously!
PP
