Scaling Down Recipes

Graeme · 10-12-2009, 04:07 PM

I am thinking of making a few small batches over the coming weeks, mainly recipes that I want to try out or test if you will, particularly a Weiss for my girlfriend, as I'm not that huge a fan of the style. I've been doing partial mashing for my last two brews with great results so I'll probably go 'all grain' for this seen as thought it will be on a small scale (around the 3 gallon mark, maybe a bit less). anyways, I'm awful at working stuff out like this...

Is there a formula to scale down recipes like this?

Cheers!
G

**Yuri_Rage** · 10-12-2009, 04:09 PM

I used to think that scaling recipes was some kind of cosmic science. In reality, simply multiplying all of the amounts by 3/5 (0.6) will work fine when scaling a 5 gallon batch down to 3 gallons.

thesanch · 10-12-2009, 05:52 PM

I'm planning on doing 3 gallon all grain batches until I can get a new pot. Anyway, if you use Beersmith, it has a button to scale the recipes down.

**weirdboy** · 10-12-2009, 05:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yuri_Rage

I used to think that scaling recipes was some kind of cosmic science. In reality, simply multiplying all of the amounts by 3/5 (0.6) will work fine when scaling a 5 gallon batch down to 3 gallons.

This doesn't quite work because you boil off fairly constant amounts of water during your boil. So, your sparge volumes at least tend to be different than just simple scaling.

Regarding Beer Smith, I tend to just rewrite my recipe for the smaller volumes rather than attempting to have Beer Smith scale stuff, because I think there's some kind of bug there where it will scale up OK usually, but scaling down gets wonky, at least in my experience. Also, if I rewrite it I can specify stuff like 1/4 pounds instead of ending up with crap like 0.38 pounds of crystal.