My suggestion, how about you round up or down to whole numbers for weighing ingredients. I get inputing these recipes as is from home brewers, but if you’re wanting newer home brewers to not over think this awesome hobby, lets make it easer for them. my rant for the day
Ha! Some people scale their recipes in that fashion. I like to work in percentages as it is much easier to input that into a recipator.
When I see things like this, I wonder if it is scaling up or down, or converting from SI units to English. I have not done any math to see which it is.
You could be right. I use beersmith and if I was scaling you can’t even enter to the 1,000th of a decimal. It’s rounds it up automatically
Yep, recipes speak a common language in %. A guy’s efficiency is then irrelevant.
I like to work in percentages as it is much easier to input that into a recipator.
Yep, recipes speak a common language in %. A guy’s efficiency is then irrelevant.
I don’t agree that efficiency is irrelevant. I recently read a post of this forum where someone got
55% efficiency with a high-gravity brew. If you were wishing to use the same recipe and brew a beer with less gravity and perhaps 70% efficiency, I think that difference of 15% would result in a substantial adjustment to your malt bill.
I think the point was if you express your malt bill in percentages, then it is in a common language regardless of your batch size, efficiency or units (i.e., lb vs kg). You simply use enough grain to hit the target OG for your system.
Saying a grain bill is 8 pounds of one malt and 1.5 pounds of another is only relevant on that brewer’s system. Percentages of a whole is relevant on every system.
Yep.
Recipes like that drive me nuts. But even if it just gave %'s, you would still most likely have to round the amounts once you adjusted them for your efficiency.
Percentages don’t always scale right either. Let’s imagine I’m brewing a beer with 3% black patent at 80% efficiency. I give it to a buddy to brew on his 50% system and he scales it up. He will likely much more roast flavor in his beer.
I think the 70% 5 gallon standard is useful as a starting point. Sure it’s tough for new users that aren’t brewing 5 gallons at 70%, but once a brewer learns his/her system it’s easy enough to adapt.
I recently was given a recipe from a local brewery that they brew on a 700 gal. system. Their efficiency is 7% better than mine. I’ve scaled it down to a 5-gal batch and adjusted for the difference in efficiency. According to the spreadsheet I use, the hops calculation was significantly off.
It will be the next beer i brew.
Try to scale the hop additions is more difficult, IMHO.
There is no perfect way, but I try matching IBU contributions from any addition > 15 minutes, and match ounces per gallon on any additions from 15 minutes to whirlpool to dry hops.
I used the formulas in Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels to calculate the hops.
+1
The tricky part is the difference in utilization on a commercial system vs. Homebrew systems.
Jeff - do you adjust utilization between 5 and 10 gallon batches or from 5 to 15? I go with linear between 5 to 10, but have always wondered about it and what others do…
It seems like there are so many more variables to consider in hop utilization. I think mash efficiency works out more consistently because the results seem to “bend” toward a specific point, the “knobs” we can use to control it are fairly well understood, and the results are more easily measured.
Most agree that all IBU’s are not equal, but even if they were most people don’t measure IBU’s on every batch (or maybe any). So we’re left to taste the beer and then try and reverse engineer what changed the hop profile. Was this batch of hops fresher, was my pH a little bit higher, did my wort stand above 180 a few minutes longer than usual?
I heard an interview with Glenn Tinseth once (I think on Brew Strong). It was a great reminder that there’s so much more to learn on this front, and that what is already known is still pretty rough and impacted by a lot of variables that are not well understood.
Totally agree. Scaling grist % is pretty straightforward to me, but hop schedules and IBU are another matter, especially coming from a brewery where you don’t know how much of the hop character comes from the whirlpool (or how long/ what temp) . I can usually get in the ballpark on hop schedule, and once there’s that baseline, I can fine tune the next time I brew.
Not from 5 to 10, but 10 gallons to 7 bbls is different.