There's no question that it takes some tweaking for every single recipe that's probably my biggest annoyance with brewsmith. I found that I started hitting (or getting close to) my numbers when I began keeping closer track of my volumes. Figure out (as precisely as you can) how much you're collecting and how much you're leaving behind. Use the same equipment every time if you can. 3 gallons as the MLT deadspace for Lucas's tun, and another. 3 for chiller/trub losses to the counterflow. I make sure that I've collected enough pre-boil volume before I start my boil, and I use about 1.2 gallons/hour boil off rate for your pot on a blichmann burner. That's a vigorous boil, but you can actually boil off slightly more if you really get a crazy boil going. I'm always happy to help walk you through, and I can email you the profile I use for lucas's tun and your pot if we're not going to be at the brewhouse at the same time in the near future. You need to enter the estimated efficiency for your system. That's how beersmith calculates the numbers it gives you. If you routinely get 60% efficiency, and you enter 60 in the 'Tot Efficiency' field in the recipe design screen, that will help you to hit your numbers more accurately. Remember, the goal is consistency, not necessarily high efficiency (unless low efficency is an indicator of something wrong with your process). Who cares if you have to put an extra lb or two of base malt in your recipe to get the OG where you want it, as long as you know to do that? With the equipment at the brewhouse, I can usually count on an efficiency of around 75% for beers up to around 1.060. Above that and I estimate 70% efficency, unless it's a really big beer (> 1.090), in which case I estimate 65%. Measured efficency is what Beersmith calculates based on you entering your measured OG and volume into the fermenter. If you don't record those numbers and re-input them back into beersmith, your measured efficiency is going to be totally wrong. I also try to record and enter pre-boil volume and pre-boil gravity, as that lets me know if I'm approximately where I should be prior to boiling. IBUs are always going to be a bit different because there are several different ways of calculating them, and they all involve some guesses/assumptions. OG will be different because whoever posted the recipe will have different efficiency than you. I believe the profile I sent you is meant to put 5.5 gallons into the fermentor so that you get close to 5 gallons of finished beer. So the short answer is yes, you have to tweak recipes when you put them in beersmith to get the numbers that you want. BUT, that only works if you have beersmith set up properly, which involves knowing what efficiency you get with your system.

Beersmith 3 torrent