Questions / Help post brewday?

Yes. With two caveats...
- you may be dialed in on every parameter, or you may be high on some and low on others, so that the net result is the same (with this batch). More batches will tell you that.
- when you sparge with less water, you'll automatically have lower mash efficiency (all other things being equal), because the wort you leave behind (trapped in the grain bed) will be less diluted. Thus you'll be leaving more sugars in the grain bed.

 

When you are under the mash tab you will see underneath mash profile it should give you a choice what kind of profile you want, single batch sparge w/light body etc. Next to that there should be a little check mark. Click that which should take you to another screen that will give you input options on grain temp, sparge temp, mash ph etc. About halfway down the page there is an option that you can check that says, drain mash tun before sparging. Click that and it should give you your sparge water amount. I'm not sure why it defaults to sparging twice with batch sparging but for whatever reason it does. Hope this helps for next time.

 

You would not need to add sugar to the grain weight as sugar wont absorb anything. The point of adding the grains to that calculator is to calculate the grain absorption, not calculating gravity (which sugar does have an effect on).

 

Dump the calculators for batch sparging. Its confusing you and it doesn't have to be that hard.

1. Run your first runnings into a bucket and measure the volume
2. Subtract that volume from what your want your total boil volume to be (on average this can be batch size plus a gallon to start, depends on how vigorous the boil is and the amount of evaporation anticipated).
3. Add that amount of water to the mash tun, stir and recirc.
4. Collect those runnings along with the bucket runnings into the brew kettle.
5. Boil, hop, ferment, drink.

Keep it simple while you get your feet under you again. I love my beersmith software, but it works best when you understand the calcs yourself first. Then you use the software because its convenient.