James,
Glad to see I'm not the only one who visits from work! When you do have a moment, I'd love to hear more about how you corrected everything. I've found that with the equipment profile I generated, I need to set the efficiency at 65% to make the predicted OG match the measured OG. I'm referring to the Brewhouse Efficiency number from Beersmith. The Mash Efficiency is greyed out, but seems to be autocalculated. Maybe I need a Beersmith tutorial too!
Thanks everyone for the responses, this is a really helpful thread
Here is a post I wrote about it a while back
..."careful with the "lost to trub" number. It will throw off your efficiency calc. I set it to zero then set my batch size and final volume to the amount I want in the kettle after the boil before chilling and run off. (note that beersmith wants your batch size and final volume at the same number)
Assume 75% efficiency, 13.85G of 1.040 preboil w/ 10% boil off, leaving 1 gallon in the kettle/chiller, and I want 11Gallons in my fermenters.
Based on these numbers my final gravity should be 1.046 post-boil
However if I add the 1Gallon Trub Loss that makes my batch 11Gallons (keeping the pre-boil constant at 13.85 gallons and 1.040)
my 1.046 OG now is only 68% efficency.
That nmber is wrong. Beersmith seems to act as if the kettle loss is the same as boil off and concentrates my wort.. it want my OG to now be 1.051 - that's wrong.
I say it's easier to just leave the kettle/trub loss at 0 and formulate w/ batch size based on whats in the kettle post boil."
Note that calculating your efficiency manually as a double check isn't that hard. It's not that hard to set up a spreadsheet that will do it for you. Check out this section of How To Brew. If you can't get it you can PM me and I can send you the one that I put together (I warn you that it's for personal use and not labeled well)
http://www.howtobrew.com/section2/chapter12-5.html