Hi all! I’m trying to put together a recipe for Stone’s Sublimely Self Righteous Ale using Mitch Steele’s book on IPA’s. I’m pretty new at this, so any help or insight you could provide would be awesome, my main problem is that I don’t know how to use the percentages given to create a grain bill. The recipe calls for
Pale Malt 90.6%
Crystal Malt 4.5%
Carafa Special III malt dehusked 4.9%
The water to grain ratio for mashing is 1.36 qt/lb
It’s a 90 minute boil with the following analytic targets:
Easiest method is to use software. Most allow for entering grain as a percentage. You would then adjust the weights to hit the target OG. If a given application does not allow percentages, move the decimal one place to the left and enter as pounds (9.06 lbs, .45lbs, .49lbs) and adjust from there.
It wouldn’t hurt to learn how to figure it out by hand. How to brew has he formulas needed.
It’s simple once you figure it out, you want an OG of 1.080 so call that 80. Assuming your final volume is 5 gallons then 80 x 5 = 400 points. Now your efficiency comes into play, 400 / 0.7 = ~570 pts so that is what you need to get from your grain. I always default that grain yields 36 points per pound per gallon, ppg. So 570 / 36 = 15.8 lb, since you don’t know your efficiency, call it 16.
16 x 90.6% = ~14.5 lb
16 x 4.5% = ~3/4 lb
16 x 4.9% = ~0.8 lb
If you get a higher OG then expected your efficiency was higher than expected. You can water down the beer to the gravity post boil to achieve the gravity you want and have more beer. Also you can boil off less, boil shorter if you determine your runoff gravity is higher than expected. I run my calcs using The Recipator, but calculate using a calculator during brew day. Most use the commercial programs.
I normally use this website. It has most of the popular grains and hops (though the alpha on the hops may have to be tweaked a bit). It does what I need it to do.
Software is most definitely the easiest way to do this but these calculations are great to know if you are getting started creating recipes. With this knowledge you can basically create recipes on the fly on a bar napkin to rough something out, easy peasy and then tweak when you get time and software:)
The way I do it in Beersmith is to add 1# of all grains listed, then use the grain percentages button to set them where I want them. I then use the adjust gravity button to hit the 1.080I want to hit. I already have my efficiency and batch size dialed into the software, so it accounts for those as well. Beersmith was one of my favorite brewing purchases, to me it really follows the KISS principle as well as the 6 Ps of success
+1 to good brewing software. I prefer Beersmith. Spend some time messing around with it and plugging in your grain weights to get a feel for your percentages. Takes a little getting used to but once you do you’ll be able to have an idea on grain percentages moving forward with future recipes. The math formulas are great to know but I’m not very “mathy” and the brewing software cuts out the leg work in that regard. Good luck!
+1 on beersmith. To use percentages with it, as other have mentioned, input the percentages as pounds, then use the “adjust gravity” feature to scale it to the desired batch size.
As for the math, I’d use it more if someone collated all of them into a brewing formulas handbook of some sort.
When I write recipes I use the Brewersfriend.com free calculator. Very helpful and it allows you to play around with the grain until you hit your target OG
Yeah, I can’t recommend Beersmith enough for this kind of thing. I spend way more time than I’d care to admit doing various “what ifs” with it. What if I subbed in X amount of this grain? What if I swapped my bittering hop? And on and on.