I got a recipe from a local brewery and I’m wondering how to scale it down appropriately. They do 15bbl batches so the amounts I got were for that size. Is there anything funky to consider (without getting too wonky) when scaling down to a 5 gallon batch?
I would assume the biggest things would be efficiency and AA% of the hops that were used. If you know their efficiency you should be able to make any gravity adjustments easily. I calculate 15bbl as 465 gallons so if we are talking apples to apples, I believe you could literally divide everything by 93 to get amounts for a 5 gallong batch…I could be wrong.
BeerSmith!
Math. You can calculate all the grains into percentages like say there is 750 pounds 2 row 100 pounds crystal you have total of 850 total pounds of grain so you have 88% 2 row (750/850) * 100 = 88% and 12% crystal.
::) It never occurred to me to use my brewing software to downsize! I did the math and double-checked it with the software and they were very close to the same. Thanks for the insight!
Something else to keep in mind is how fast you chill the wort versus how fast they chill the wort because they will affect the result of your late hop additions. For example, if they whirlpool but you don’t then you need to let the wort sit for the same amount of time they whirlpool before you chill (or you could add your late hops earlier in the boil). Otherwise, you will end up with less IBUs and a slightly different beer because you don’t have that same isomerization timetable.
I do remember him saying that they whirlpool but I’m not sure how long. Good advice :0)
Hops are definitely your biggest challenge. Use some common sense when you evaluate what the computer program tells you and then adjust the hops so they make sense for your system.