nebben

Recipes 

Ok, so I assumed I could figure this out and do it right the first time. Now,...umm.....

I adopted a recipe from these forums (Yooper's Anchor Steam Clone) , but wanted to reduce it to fit in a 3 gallon carboy. Many hours later, I found Beersmith, which seems to be able to easily scale recipes down or up. I changed the recipe around a little : added 3lbs light malt extract syrup instead of DME, and added 1lbs LME that I had laying around. No biggie. Obviously I need to read more about hops and their uses/effects since I got myself into this mess though.... I had two packets to work with, and I had already got all the stuff out....that sort of point of no return that one feels just before starting.

So due to equipment shortfalls, I had a 12 quart pot to work with, and filled it with about 1.7 gallons water (including the 3/4 gallon I steeped the crystal malt in), and then added my sugars. As soon as the boil started, I set my watch, threw in the hops according to beersmith's latest calculations, and followed the rest of the procedure just fine (60min hops, 30min hops, flameout hops).

I had 1 oz Northern Brewer 9.5% AA and 1oz 6.6% AA . It computed 29.6 IBU for 1oz 9.5%AA @ 60, 7.9 IBU for .5oz 6.6% @ 30, and nothing for the final .5oz 6.6% AA at flameout. 37.5IBU projected. I checked tastybrew.com's calculator this morning, which I had originally started with yesterday, and it projects 86 IBU!

Both batch sizes are 3.3G with boil volumes of 1.69G. Both places are set to 70% brewhouse efficiency.

Think this might be 37.5% IBU like beersmith says, or off the charts for the style and closer to 84 IBU like tastybrew.com says?

--edit> I just put in "FWH" for the first hop addition in tastybrew , and it brought the IBUs down to ~40 ... what is the difference between computing for 60 minute addition as opposed to FirstWortHops addition? I mean, they're the same in my case, right?

Revvy

Recipes 

More than likely the default IBU calculations of the software are different... There are three different calculations/scales, Tinseth, Rager , Garetz.

IIRC the default on Beersmith is Tinseth...I dunno what tastybrew uses. But you can in Beersmith, change the default to whichever scale you use.

Do a search for them to get a handle on them...

I believe most recipes are in Tinseth.

__________________

nebben

Recipes 

I have done a little more reading this morning about how IBUs are calculated...and as has been the case with so much of learning about brewing goes, I was initially horrified by what I read. Apparently Tinseth calculations are based on average gravity of the wort, which sounds like what I used in my recipe.

Another rookie mistake I made is that although with making wine and cider I take measurements as often as I can, I didn't realize that I should have taken an initial gravity measurement pre-boil and post-boil before diluting the wort to make the 3.3G batch size. I only took a reading right before I pitched the yeast, which was 1.060 @ 70F.

Based on really rough math that I am probably screwing up, 1.69G pre-boil wort was reduced to approximately 1.5G through evaporation during the boil (I didn't measure the post-boil wort volume ... but I did take pictures of it so I could estimate...it was 2AM..der!). I added approximately 1.8 gallons of water to the cooled wort for a total of about 3.3 gallons. Would the corrected gravity of the original pre-boil wort be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.16 or so for this ?