scaling down recipe gravity and late dry hop additions?

Beer Recipes
1

I took this Red Velvet recipe http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/pages/community/blog/show?title=beer-recipe-of-the-week-red-velvet and scaled it down to an OG of 1.051.
  I scaled down the 60, 30, and 10 minute additions to keep the BU/GU the same as the original recipe.
My question is regarding the 0 minute and dry hops, should they get scaled back or since they don’t contribute any bitterness should I leave as the original recipe says?

Dan

2

Scaled down to what? If it’s significantly smaller than the 6-gal recipe, then yes you should scale down the dry hops proportionately to the buttering additions.

3

@htaytobrewing he scaled back the gravity, not the size of the recipe.

I wouldn’t change the late hop additions (I wouldn’t touch the 10min either). However, I would up the mash temp quite a bit. That beer went 1.092 to 1.017 (82% AA). If you get the same %AA on a 1.051 beer, you are looking at 1.009 or so. If I were doing this, I would bump the mash temp up to 156 or 157 to try to shoot for a FG of 1.013-15. I think a single digit FG is going to taste thin, however YMMV.

4

That was confusing. I was thinking “82% AA” meant “alpha-acid percentage” because the OP was asking about hops. Then, I realized that that doesn’t make any sense. Then, I just learned the formula for calculated Attenuation. You learn something new everyday!! Hehe.

5

I don’t know if there’s a right answer to this. Your balance between malt and hops is going to be drastically different on a 1.051 beer vs a 1.092 beer if you use the same amount of flavor and aroma hops. Dry hops will act a bit different in a 9% beer vs a 5% one as well. If it were me, I wouldn’t scale down the hops as far as you scaled the bittering hops, but I’d probably roll them back maybe 20-25%.

With that said, you’d be fine leaving the late additions the same, but the resulting beer will probably end up a bit more hop-forward than the original. You could probably counter that a bit by bumping up the percentage of Munich, Victory and Crystal malt a bit in your scaled-down recipe.

And +1 to increasing the mash temp to leave a bit more body.

6

It also depends a lot on your mash chemistry. More SO4 ions bring out more bitterness.

7

I agree with this, but I like hops, so I feel like a bit more hop-flavor-forward is never a bad thing.

then again, I haven’t made a “gratuitous waste of hops IPA” so what do I know?  :o