Partial mash efficiency?

Extract/Partial Mash Brewing
1

Even that BrewSmith idea has me confused now.
BrewSmith said my pre-boil Gravity should have been 1.103 for 3.5 gallons. Look like I actually had less volume, but measured a pre-boil gravity of only 1.045 (after adjusting for sample temperature.)

So I spent the rest of the brew session feeling utterly useless, and lamenting the Tripel that my poor mashing had ruined.

Here’s the kicker though, we finished the brew, and measured the actual OG right before pitching; and we nailed it.

So CLEARLY I entered something into BeerSmith wrong. Thinking about it 1.103 seems ridiculously high for a pre-boil number. Since we hit the actual OG number clearly our efficiency matches NB recipe’s assumption.

But the question is still out there, how would I measure my efficiency if I was not on a recipe kit?

2

weird. My original post is gone. I must have hit “Edit” instead of reply last night.

So what I did was find another calculator, and computed as if it was a 3-gallon all-grain recipe. Where 3 gallons is, I’m pretty sure, what I had at the start of my boil. That calculator looks correct. So I’m calling this one, that I need to adjust my BrewSmith settings. looks like I put garbage in, and got garbage out.