No boil / raw ale hop tea calculations with Beersmith

I guess software count as ‘equipment’. I’ve asked this on the BS forum without much luck so far and thought I’d ask the club.

I’m trying to create a recipe for a 10L batch of no boil / raw ale. I plan to boil some hops in 500ml of water during the mash and add that to the wort afterwards. In Beersmith I have gone to the Hop Bitterness Tool and entered 10L batch size and 500ml boil volume and 1.000 SG boil volume for the water, then added some hops to achieve the bitterness I want. Then in my equipment profile for the recipe I’ve adjusted my usual setup to include 500ml of ‘Top-up water’. Does this make sense? I feel like I’m missing something - like maybe how much hop tea I’ll actually have after boiling to add to the wort since some of that 500ml will evapourate. If I use the Boil Off Tool to estimate at a 10% rate it says I’ll lose 50ml, so left with 450ml but that doesn’t seem like much at all for an hour of boiling. Any help would be appreciated.

Hi,
Boil évaporation rate mash be higher than 10%…
How long do you plan on boiling your hop tea? Boiling 500 ml for 15 minutes and you will be sticking hop sa in your pan…

Hi Robert. Yeah that’s what I thought. I was going to try a 30 min boil, maybe I’ll do a test run with a liter of water and a low boil and see what’s left at the end.

Marc

Good idea Marc.
I would start the experiment with 2L for a 30 minute boil.
Keep us posted on your findings.

I brewed a raw ale today and added 39g of hop pellets to 1L of boiling water for 30 minutes while the mash was mashing. I was left with 400ml of hop tea (300ml boil off minus 300ml hop absorption) that I added to the wort and the gravity sample tasted close to the estimated 30 IBUs. I poured the tea through a fine-mesh strainer into the wort, which worked well, but I also considered just dumping into the bag with the grains (BIAB) before pulling it from the mash, or putting them in a bag or SS hopper inside the boiling water pot.

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