Is Beer Smith sufficient for scaling hombrew recipes to 3 bbl, 7 bbl, etc? Is this program enough for starting a microbrewery? What considerations, if any, need to be taken into account when scaling recipes of that magnitude?
I use Promash and it is working well for me.
Each equipment is just a little bit different so you might need to adjust your recipe to your equipment at that time.
The biggest things I’ve noticed are hop utilization and specialty malt contributions.
I’ve tried scaling some recipes on a smaller scale with success. Knowing/understanding your equipment is fundamental to making this work well. Then the efficiency factor must be manipulated to calibrate your process. I think beersmith works well with all of these factors plus some.
I use beersmith to scale from 5 gallons to 75 gallons. Like was mentioned, you will need to account for the new equipment - some things will change, but how much will come with experience. I am getting better hop utilization, so some batches are more bitter than expected. That is common. I’m still tweaking recipes.
(from the previous post on scaling):
The Brewing Network has a few great referencs, both on CYBI and Brew Strong.
For CYBI - look up the show on Pro-AM beers - JZ talks a lot about making commercial beer from a homebrew recipe. Also, you can get some idea of how hop utilization/extraction scales from pro to homebrew by listening to the Firestone Walker shows. Tasty talks about how he replicates the whirl pool on a homebrew scale. You can use the info in reverse.
For Brew Strong - I can’t remember the show name, but if you look through their “Going Pro” series there is a show on equipment or recipe building, or both.
Hope this helps!
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