Dedicated Grainfather Guide, Problems and Solutions Thread

[paulyman]

1. I can't comment as I got my unit after they shipped with the current filter.

2. Using brewing software is easiest.

3. Brewing with Style by Jamil Alphabet is an awesome resource. Tried and true recipes for the common styles that you can use and tweek slightly. Or Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels.

4. I use Beersmith. With the current version and the profiles linked above it is brilliant. It's a steep learning curve but once you get used to it you can input a recipe and adjust it to your system quite quickly.

 

[kaiserben]

If you want to get a quick idea about building recipes before stumping up cash then go to http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator/ and:

Firstly:
Change Units to metric.
Change Batch Size to 23L.

And then play around with the variables:
Enter some grains in the Fermentables section and see how the OG, FG, ABV and SRM values change when you alter grain weight and type.
Enter some Hops, and enter them at different times and amounts, and see how they alter the IBU value.

If you get your head around that, want to save recipes and delve more deeply into recipe building then get BeerSmith.

 

[doctr-dan]

If you want to get a quick idea about building recipes before stumping up cash then go to http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator/ and:

Firstly:
Change Units to metric.
Change Batch Size to 23L.

And then play around with the variables:
Enter some grains in the Fermentables section and see how the OG, FG, ABV and SRM values change when you alter grain weight and type.
Enter some Hops, and enter them at different times and amounts, and see how they alter the IBU value.

If you get your head around that, want to save recipes and delve more deeply into recipe building then get BeerSmith.

Thanks.
So I've been plugging away on Brewers friend trying to do a 4pines pale ale clone from on here. DrSmurtos golden ale, even danos feral hop hog clone.
I'm just plugging random numbers in I have no idea, it's like stabbing in the dark
They don't have a lot of the grain names the same etc etc not that I understand the difference anyway.

I'm becoming one of those annoying constant question asking dumbarse forum people.
Should I start a different thread so I'm not clogging up this one.

 

[kaiserben]

Beersmith will likely have the exact malts you'll be using set out by brand, but for Brewer's Friend it's set out by country of origin:

Say the recipe is something like

85% Pale Malt
10% Medium Cystal
5% CaraPils

What you'd do is plug in:
4.25kg of something like, say, "American - Pale Ale" (if you were using something like Briess Pale Ale Malt)
0.50kg of "United Kingdom - Crystal 60" and
0.25kg of "American - CaraPils (Dextrine Malt)"

That will get you bang on 1.050 starting gravity.

You can adjust that gravity up or down by making those grain weights bigger or smaller (while trying to keep the same 85%, 10%, 5% ratios). Have a play with that and you'll quickly understand how changing the amounts of grains changes your gravity.

OH AND ALSO:
In answer to your question 2, in Brewer's Friend you can plug the original recipe in (remembering to include the batch size of the original recipe) and then simply hover the mouse over "Recipe Tools" at top of the page, then select "Scale" and then entering "23L" in the "New Batch Size" field.

You can do the same in BeerSmith, assuming you've set up your equipment profile and you've imported the original recipe as a BeerSmith .bsmx file which was created using someone's different equipment profile. It's just a single click of one of the icons/buttons on a recipe page.

 

[BKBrews]

I reckon just jump straight into beersmith mate. It's confusing as hell when you first start, but once you've got it working it's brilliant. The grainfather equipment profile isn't perfect, but with a few tweaks is nearly spot on. For example a 5kg grain bill requires 17L mash water + 15L sparge according to the GF calculators. I've got my beersmith to the point where it calculates 17L + 15.17L, so near perfect. The best part is you can add all of the grain brands into it as well, so you can actually select exactly what you're using e.g. Briess Pale Malt.

 

[kaiserben]

I have finally dialed in my Grainfather equipment profile and the Mash & Sparge Water calculations in beersmith
Feel free to use and abuse B)


Grainfather Equipment Profile

Grainfather Profile.bsmx

Finally got around to installing this profile last night (but not yet tested it or anything).

When doing that, I noticed that Beersmith now includes a setting for adding whirlpool time into your IBU calculations. For Grainfather brewers this is particularly useful because at the end of the boil you would normally recirc through the chiller for 10 minutes to sanitise the chiller. It's also useful just generally for late hops additions.

It calculates how many IBU you might get from whatever hops are still in the kettle while the temperature remains above 85C.

So I set that to 10 mins.

 

[BKBrews]

Did my 2nd GF batch today and it went pretty well. Went for something simple just to get another brew under my belt and increase the experience. Went with 5kg MO with Chinook hops at 5g FWH, 20g 10min, 35g 5min, 40g flameout.

Shaved some time off my brew day, but still took about 6 hours start to finish (including shifting my equipment around and up and down stairs).

Issues:
- grain crush was wrong. Ended up with a tonne of grain matter in the boil (I was freaking out).
- finally had the ball valve issue. Just removed it and away we go. Probably won't put it back in.
- I seemed to have transferred cold break to the fermenter? Not an awful lot but there's definitely some sitting in the bottom. Used a whirfloc this time - anyone else had that issue? I didn't whirlpool this time either
- feel like I might not have got the most out of the hops. They were in a very compact pile at the bottom of the machine when I'd transferred all of the wort. Some of it even seemed a bit dry. I used Crosby Farms Chinook. We'll see I guess!

Things I did better:
- put the chiller on a stool next to the machine. Cooled quicker without the lid holding the heat in.
- cleaned all malt pipe components during the boil, made the entire clean so much easier.
- remembered to re-hydrate the yeast! Haha

So I've got it fermenting at 20 degrees this time, as my IPA that was fermenting at 18 degrees has dropped from 1.062 to 1.014, so I figured 20 degrees for the next week to let it finish will be good. Still within the recommended range for US-05 so I'm not worried. Good to know 2 30L fermenters fit in the fridge though!

 

[doctr-dan]

Also did my second brew on Friday, this what it looked like goin into the fermenter

 

[BKBrews]

Also did my second brew on Friday, this what it looked like goin into the fermenter

image.jpg

That looks like cold break too. I didn't get anywhere near that much (only noticed that I transferred some at the end). Did you use a whirfloc tablet or anything? I had no trouble the first brew without the tablet - I could see all of the cold break at the bottom of the kettle. This time.... Nothing, but not much transferred at all.

 

[Neuthirteen]

Hey guys fairly new to the site, I am now in the process of mashing a Guinness clone. Silly me forgot to put the hop catcher back in, anyone think it's worth transferring liquid out to put it in or should I hop sock and hope for the best?

It's light on hope about 50g and I never though that catcher did all too much anyway.

 

[doctr-dan]

That looks like cold break too. I didn't get anywhere near that much (only noticed that I transferred some at the end). Did you use a whirfloc tablet or anything? I had no trouble the first brew without the tablet - I could see all of the cold break at the bottom of the kettle. This time.... Nothing, but not much transferred at all.

Last time I used a whirfloc and I had the same thing, this time I used a deltafloc tablet with the same result, I don't know if they are the same thing it's just what was supplied.
I thought it was just crap from the grains getting through, but I don't know a lot.
I will look up,cold break now

 

[BKBrews]

Last time I used a whirfloc and I had the same thing, this time I used a deltafloc tablet with the same result, I don't know if they are the same thing it's just what was supplied.
I thought it was just crap from the grains getting through, but I don't know a lot.
I will look up,cold break now

This time I didn't whirlpool, I just added my flameout hops and started cooling after 15min. Last time I whirlpooled for about 5min and those white 'clouds' you see in your fermenter were sitting at the bottom of the kettle on a pile. I think the GF still benefits from a whirlpool.

 

[Killer Brew]

I wouldn't be concerned with the cold break guys. Ideally you could remove some but yeast also need some. More of a concern in bigger operations I believe where they run it out of the cone.

 

[wildwhitty]

Whirlpooling leaves a cone of hops in the center and the filter clear.

 

[welly2]

I have finally dialed in my Grainfather equipment profile and the Mash & Sparge Water calculations in beersmith
Feel free to use and abuse B)


Grainfather Equipment Profile

Grainfather Profile.bsmx

Mash Profiles

Full Body Mash.bsmx

Medium Body Mash.bsmx

Light Body Mash.bsmx

This is brilliant and pretty close. I'm finding the mash water is spot on but the sparge is about a litre too high. The grainfather calc says for a 23L batch with 4.5kg of grain and 60 minute boil, the mash water should be 15.65L and sparge water 15.95L but this profile is showing 15.65L for mash water (bang on) and 16.86L for sparge water. I'm going to test it with a few different amounts of grain and see if that roughly 1L margin is the same throughout and can just adjust for it. But other than that, nice job. Thank you!

 

[BKBrews]

This is brilliant and pretty close. I'm finding the mash water is spot on but the sparge is about a litre too high. The grainfather calc says for a 23L batch with 4.5kg of grain and 60 minute boil, the mash water should be 15.65L and sparge water 15.95L but this profile is showing 15.65L for mash water (bang on) and 16.86L for sparge water. I'm going to test it with a few different amounts of grain and see if that roughly 1L margin is the same throughout and can just adjust for it. But other than that, nice job. Thank you!

I've got my profile to a point that I manually enter the mash water number (according to the GF calc) and then beersmith automatically calculates the sparge water number, which is normally roughly 0.2L higher than the GF calc.

For example, I did a 5kg SMASH last weekend which the GF calculator stated needs 17L mash and 15L sparge. Once I put the 17L mash water into beersmith, it spat out a sparge of 15.17L. works for me!

 

[nfragol]

What version of Beersmith are you using ?

With the latest version (2.3.7) my profile gives me exactly the volumes calculated by the online grainfather calculator.

Thats either using a 60 or a 90 boil.

 

[welly2]

What version of Beersmith are you using ?

With the latest version (2.3.7) my profile gives me exactly the volumes calculated by the online grainfather calculator.

Thats either using a 60 or a 90 boil.

Same version. 2.3.7. See attached.

View attachment Bitter.bsmx

 

[paulyman]

This is brilliant and pretty close. I'm finding the mash water is spot on but the sparge is about a litre too high. The grainfather calc says for a 23L batch with 4.5kg of grain and 60 minute boil, the mash water should be 15.65L and sparge water 15.95L but this profile is showing 15.65L for mash water (bang on) and 16.86L for sparge water. I'm going to test it with a few different amounts of grain and see if that roughly 1L margin is the same throughout and can just adjust for it. But other than that, nice job. Thank you!

I had a play around and the sparge water was consistently out by pretty well 1L for many different grain bills I put in. As I said earlier in the topic both the scales on the GF and the GF Urn are only accurate to 1L, so to me it's not a big deal.

 

[nfragol]

Same version. 2.3.7. See attached.

Bitter.bsmx

Actually, all you have to do is set the mush tun addition to 3.5 or 3.7 (i am at work and cant remember the exact number) for the grainfather deadspace.

Have you changed the grain absorption rate in the advance settings tab ?

I will take a look at your profile when i get home from work.