Looking at the “quick water requirements” under tools on the recipe tabs it does say that I need 39.5 quarts for my recipe. I ended up using 41, had 4 extra and 23.5 in the fermenter. So total volume after everything was said and done I had 27.5 quarts wort. Now I did boil for 2 hours so that I could get as much of my sparge water into the kettle as possible (I really need to ditch the turkey fryer pot), looking at my notes I topped off my kettle with a total of 6 quarts over the course of the boil. This puts my boil off right around 3 quarts/hour, which makes sense due to my kettle being fairly tall and narrow, and not boiling very hard to prevent boil over. I do BIAB, and I believe the act of lifting the grains in the bag squeezes grain and I am only losing .45 quarts/pound. Now all said and done and adjustments being made to my profile, the water requirements come out to 34.4 on a 90 min boil. Which is right on par with my last brew that had 1.75 pounds less grain and I used 34 quarts of water, with only 1 quart extra that in all reality could have made it into the pot. Now you might be thinking I am still ending with a lot of wort, but I try and hit 5.75 in the fermenter, because I find that I lose about ¾ of a gallon to trub, and a short case of beer is just aggravating :evil: .
On another note, I have found that you will lose about 2 quarts of water in a fine mesh hop bag, because the hops plug up the bag and getting the wort back out is problematic at best, which is why I have done away with mine and filter the hops out with my funnel screen.
I have some time off coming up, and I am going test the boil off of my kettle with a full kettle boil and I will weight my grains after my next brew to see just how much water they soak up. This way I can truly dial in my profile. On the plus side the temp calculations from the site seem to be spot on.
Lastly, I have to say the yeast starter calculator is great, pitched my first ever liquid yeast and first starter into this brew at 4:30 yesterday afternoon and woke up this morning at 8:00 to the airlock bubbling about once every second. Shortest lag time I have had to date.