Home Brew Forum

so not really sure if this is a brewday post or a grainfather review or a bit of both !

Picked up a grainfather in the attempt to shorten my brewday due to family commitments etc. and i have to say on that score it 100% fit the bill, 4.5 hours start to finish including clean up. I opted for the new Bluetooth controller which had its good points and bad ! on the upside i set it to heat up to mash temp ready for when i got back home so about 40 mins saved the staight out, the only issue i had with it was just as i hit boil something went wrong with my bluetooth connection and i couldn't reconnect half way through the recipe so the rest was done through the control unit and not my phone. It still worked fine just a minor inconvenience.

I brewed an american IPA with cascade/ahtanum/nelson sauvin, 38 ibu
I was aiming for 23l at 1056 but made 21l at 1060, looking back i could have probably hit target if i had left the grain to drain more, a bit more patience next time maybe

The best bit of the grainfather i think must be the chiller, so effective and much quicker to chill than the plate chiller i had previously. although getting towards the end the flow did slow considerably and even though i used a hop spider for the hops the pump filter seemed pretty clogged up with trub.

Pitched some mangrove jack m44 at 20 degrees, never used this yeast before but its readily available at my lhbs so thought id give it a go.

Plan to dry hop with whatever i have left in the freezer, probably a cascade/ahtanum/mosiac mix

If you use beersmith software then you can set up an equipment profile for it which is bang on. I also set up a Corney size I profile too so that when you want to brew and fill a Corney than that's what you get after all the gunk is left in the fermenter.

Yes I have beersmith, I downloaded the grainfather profile and made the changes suggested online so should be good, like I said leaving the grain to drain a bit longer or adding in the extra that drained from the bucket would have got me to nearly 23l I think

Can you point me in the direction of the corrections required for the brewsmith profile?

Clobber wrote:Can you point me in the direction of the corrections required for the brewsmith profile?

Can't find where I got them from now but il update this thread later with my settings !

This is my standard set up for grainfather

Sorry for the dodgy pic but when you set this up like so then set up a second profile called "grainfather corney" and adjust boil volume from 28 to 26 and adjust batch volume from 23 to 21. The corney one is great as you only brew what is needed to fill a corney. T'is a piece of piss

Thank you for that Jean Luc!

Mines different to that in a few places, but it was my first brew with it so a bit to early for me to say the settings work well

Sorry... what does it say in the notes about grain absorption?

Sorry about that,
This is what you need to do,
"Grainfather Profile for BeerSmith V2.3
Water to Grain ratio should be set at 2.7L/kg when selecting a mash profile
Default grain absorption should be changed in the Beersmith Advanced settings (tools->options->advanced). The default setting is 0.96 fl oz/oz. This will need to be changed to 0.7669 fl oz/oz (0.8 L/kg) to line up exactly with the Grainfather official calulations"

Thanks John Luc, I will try that.