Adjusting recipes for electrical system

Brewing software with inputs for volume loss should help you with this. But experience on your system is very important. It's a good idea to do that test run

 

BrewCipher and I assume Beersmith have parameters to cover losses. If you're going to measure them, you might as well account for them properly.

 

You can measure the HERMS coil loss and MLT dead space with your water test. Otherwise the only change I would recommend to your first recipe is to scale it up 0.5 - 1 gallon if you want to be sure of a full fermenter. You can use the post-boil measurements from that batch to refine your parameters for the next one.

Also FWIW, I don't lose a significant amount of wort to the HERMS coils and hoses. It is pretty easy to drain them and recover most of that liquid. Overall I lose about 1/3 gallon pre-boil, mostly to MLT dead space (20 gal Blichmann boilermaker).

 

I mean you can put your mesured loss values in the software. Then it will compute your strike/sparge volumes for you, regardless of batch size, grain/hop bill sizes, etc.

 

I think he means based on the changes in water volumes, what recipe changes would he need to recreate the effects of his previous process? Raise mash temps? Increase specialty malt %? Hop utilization changes? etc

 

When I went electric I noticed a much more vigorous boil, thus more boil off.

 

When you use electrical elements, the energy goes into the wort. With direct fired systems, only a fraction gets to the wort, the rest of the heat goes to the surrounding area. One can achieve a vigor boil with direct fired system, you just might need more BTUs.