Single all-extract water calculator, kettle size upper bound

[lawn chairs]

Water calculations for the new extract brewer can't be easily made with the variety of far-more-advanced tools. I did manage it, but it was two separate calculators.

I need a single calculator that takes as inputs:

1. Input Water into kettle (gal/l/qt) (which may not be a full-batch volume)
2. Input Pounds LME/DME into kettle
Calculate: Pre-boil OG

3. Input Post-boil wort into fermentor (gal/l/qt) -- I'm new and not using fancy equipment and I do NOT know the boil-off rate of my POS kettle. The equipment profile screen doesn't help me here, nor does it allow me to fix the size of my kettle -- it's a 4 gallon kettle so if I have a recommended pre-boil of 6.2 gal, no go.
Calculate: Post-boil OG

4. Input one of:
- Target pre-ferment OG: Calculate top-off water
- Top-off water: Calculate pre-ferment OG

 

[Pricelessbrewing]

Water calculations for the new extract brewer can't be easily made with the variety of far-more-advanced tools. I did manage it, but it was two separate calculators.

I need a single calculator that takes as inputs:

1. Input Water into kettle (gal/l/qt) (which may not be a full-batch volume)
2. Input Pounds LME/DME into kettle
Calculate: Pre-boil OG

3. Input Post-boil wort into fermentor (gal/l/qt) -- I'm new and not using fancy equipment and I do NOT know the boil-off rate of my POS kettle. The equipment profile screen doesn't help me here, nor does it allow me to fix the size of my kettle -- it's a 4 gallon kettle so if I have a recommended pre-boil of 6.2 gal, no go.
Calculate: Post-boil OG

4. Input one of:
- Target pre-ferment OG: Calculate top-off water
- Top-off water: Calculate pre-ferment OG

The only thing that's going to be able to do all of these is the recipe builder, and in order to do so you will need to put in at least some of the equipment profile info. In this case, I would start with a guess of 0.5 gallons/hr for a 4 gallon kettle.

I've created an example equipment profile, and an example extract recipe.

Unfortunately I've found a couple bugs, and have opened tickets to have these resolved by our team of developers as soon as possible.
In the mean time, you'll need to do a couple manual adjustments.


If you open the recipe tools, and click "quick water requirments", you'll see the volume increase from sugar/extract in this case, it's 0.85 gallons. You'll need to manually subtract this amount from the recipes "preboil" volume, otherwise if you entered the correct 3.85 gallons, it will put you over your kettle volume.

Then you can click the - - - button in the top right of the mash guidelines section, and click "add quick water requirements" which will automatically add the two steps below, which should bring you up to the recipes batch size.

From here, you can change the recipe batch size, recipe preboil size, and ingredient amounts, save, then click the view/add quick water requirements button again to get your starting water amount and top off amounts.

 

[lawn chairs]

Thanks for getting after it. I saw some odd results from the "Calc" button on the recipe builder: I think that's how I ended up down this rabbit hole in the first place. (It happens -- from one software engineer to another, no worries)

It would still be nice to see an additional part of the equipment profile specific to extract equipment. As it happens, the gravity calculations are purely mechanical and require no interesting inputs other than post-boil volume, which I can predict with low-but-adequate precision. (I boiled 3 gal yesterday and I roughly ended with a loss of 0.75 gal -- for my purpose, that measurement is definitely good enough.) When I did go to the View Quick Water dialog, I was also getting "too much kettle loss" warnings -- I couldn't tell if that was actually true or not. (But my OG yesterday was indeed dramatically off, I blew past it by some 30 points. Something, but perhaps multiple things, went very sideways.)

But thanks for the tips on the mash guidelines: it wasn't clear to me how the mash types affected an extract brew water calculation.

 

[Pricelessbrewing]

Thanks for getting after it. I saw some odd results from the "Calc" button on the recipe builder: I think that's how I ended up down this rabbit hole in the first place. (It happens -- from one software engineer to another, no worries)

It would still be nice to see an additional part of the equipment profile specific to extract equipment. As it happens, the gravity calculations are purely mechanical and require no interesting inputs other than post-boil volume, which I can predict with low-but-adequate precision. (I boiled 3 gal yesterday and I roughly ended with a loss of 0.75 gal -- for my purpose, that measurement is definitely good enough.) When I did go to the View Quick Water dialog, I was also getting "too much kettle loss" warnings -- I couldn't tell if that was actually true or not. (But my OG yesterday was indeed dramatically off, I blew past it by some 30 points. Something, but perhaps multiple things, went very sideways.)

But thanks for the tips on the mash guidelines: it wasn't clear to me how the mash types affected an extract brew water calculation.

Another potential point of explanation is that when you top off with water, wort doesnt really mix very well.

It's best to measure the post boil gravity directly, then use a dilution calculator to determine what your resulting OG will be after topping off, or reversily, to use the dilution calculator to determine how much water to add to hit your intended OG. (It's just basic dilution algebra if you'd prefer to do by hand, nothing weird going on there).

 

[lawn chairs]

I got there in two stages: one, that I have to do that measurement, and two, that the math is indeed mechanical. Five minutes in a spreadsheet and I had my dilution calculator.

 

[Nosybear]

I got there in two stages: one, that I have to do that measurement, and two, that the math is indeed mechanical. Five minutes in a spreadsheet and I had my dilution calculator.

As long as you remember the amount of extract in the wort is constant, dilution calculations are really easy.