Best way to calculate recipes

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sgraham602

sgraham602

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so i've started getting more into calculating recipes per my set up. Is there a prefered software that people are using? I've been using Beersmith, but I have found that when I enter in known recipes (say some from Brewing Classic Styles) none of the numbers match up (i.e. IBUs, SRM, so on). If I enter the same data into iBrewmaster, I will get a completely different set of numbers. I have made sure that all of my system settings are correct and true.

Is this normal to have so much fluctuation between different pieces of software?

for example. I entered the exact same recipes into Beersmith and iBrewmaster. Same boil size, boil off rates, so on and so forth in the software.

Beersmith:
OG:1.067
IBU:63.9
SRM:21.4

iBrewmaster:
OG:1.062
IBU:50.3
SRM:19.5
 
You are correct. Brewing software sucks. No two pieces of software can agree. Plus it's a dime a dozen for brewing software... tells you how "easy" it is to put something together. Heck I wrote my own brewing software in C# and can't get my numbers to align with any other piece of software I've looked at. Even using math from common sources like 'How to Brew'.

The algorithms and formula used are slightly different for each piece of software.

Some things in brewing like SRM can never be determined exactly.

Other things like Final Gravity and ABV can only be calculated through best guess algorithms based on known variables.

Look at grain analysis sheets some time. They vary from year to year. Each software has a database of grains. Depending on what data they used each database will have slightly different numbers (fine grind/lovibond/etc...) giving you a different result.

For most things like hop bitterness, lovibond, lintner, fine grind etc... there are min/max values and of course these vary from year to year and crop to crop. Each piece of software deals with these min/max values in different ways.

Brewing is a process. Don't rely on software, it will never help you achieve a good brew.

Good brew is made by:

1.) Establishing a repeatable process.
2.) Using the simplest recipe possible.
3.) Gaining an understanding of the various ingredients contribution to your recipe (grains/yeast/hops/finings).
4.) Gaining an understanding of the various processes used in brewing (mashing/fermenting/lagering etc..)

Having said that, software is useful for tinkering around and getting an estimate, as long you have the experience to know better than to trust it.

The two things you can trust:

1.) Your experience.
2.) Your hydrometer.

If you don't have one or the other they're easy enough to come by, however, one of them can't be bought.
 
I use this Android app called "BrewR" just to get an idea on what my recipe is going to look like.

Beyond that, I just try to focus and simplify my process.
 
I use beer alchemy for recipe formulation. It also keeps track of inventory of grains hops yeasts and adjuncts. Easily editable ingredients. Makes it easy to adjust recipes per brewing setups.
 
I use Brew Pal for iPhone and it's pretty awesome. Sure, the numbers are a bit off sometimes and it has some quirks, but overall it gets really close. Much of it has to do with the ppg, aa%, etc that is entered into the program. These numbers can vary based on malting company, hop harvest, and other things, as I'm sure you know. As long as my numbers come within the same ballpark, I'm usually happy about it. I've been able to produce two identical (to my eyes) beers using it. And I'm relatively green to brewing.
 
I also use brew pal for iPhone. I have been dialing in my system and my process. The app lets you adjust the efficiency, losses due to trub or grain absorbstion, strike temps based on grain temp and a bunch more. It saves tho data do next brew I know my efficiency and can get the right volume and gravity. There might be some errors but I just update my settings as I go and it is getting better and better. I also save all my recipes with notes on pH as well so I can fine tune brunwater spreadsheet.
 
I like to use a pen and paper, but I spend way to much time thinking about beer.
 
This is why Brewmasters in commercial breweries typically have a binder or notebook full of chicken-scratch calculations & recipes.
The 3 I have worked with have all said online calculators, even yeast calculators, are worthless to them.
 
I use BeerSmith and really like it for handling calculations, storing recipes and all other functions but remember it's a tool and nothing more. The fact is that from year to year the factors involving Hop AA values and grain specs change due to the different seasonal variables that go into production. In addition, there are many different producers, regions and maltsters creating the product so there are numerical variances that will throw off the calculations from one brewer to another.

This is one reason why many people create and post recipes based on percentages of ingredients instead of actual measurements. It allows the next brewer to input the information on their system to arrive at the same recipe constraints more or less.

Not many people list the maltser of their grain bill so if one person uses Rahr and one uses Briess and their factors are different of 1-3 points all calculations will differ. IMO these differences are really not a big stumbling block.

I like to pencil out my recipes based on percentages and then when I'm happy with it I will input it, tweak it and brew it. Once completed I will then evaluate it, make notes and tweak it again until I am happy with the product.
 
The reasons the IBU's, and other things often don't match in one software or another is simple, and are easily correctable.

This comes up alot, when folks compare programs head to head.

A couple of the biggest issues that cause consternation to folks, especially if they compare programs, or if they take for example a recipe from byo or someplace and input it, and find differences have to do with batch size settings and which IBU formula the software is defaulting to.

The final volume of a lot of Palmer and Jamil's recipes, and some of them in magazines are usually 5.5 or 6 gallons whereas most of the time we write recipes for the standard 5 gallon recipes. That often accounts for differences between what we might input in software. Make sure the final volume is matching.

The other thing is, that there's several different calculations used to figure out IBU. And they give different numbers. Somewhere in either a book or on the software it should tell you what the default setting is, and even give you the option to change it to match. But often they don't make it obvious.

Here's an explanation of how Beercalculus calculates it from their Hopville Blog for example;
Previously, the default IBU calculation for Beer Calculus was based on an average of a few popular formulas. It did four calculations (Garetz, Rager, Tinseth, and the legacy Hopville calc) and averaged them together. I chose to blend a few conflicting numbers together instead of committing to a single one by default. That neutral position tended to cause some confusion among both types of brewers: those who cared which formula was in use, but didn’t know you could change it, and those who didn’t care at all. Plus, the only indication that a formula selection was being made was a subtle message “avg” near the IBU result – pretty vague about what was happening behind the scenes. Recipes now default to the Tinseth formula. Hopefully this will satisfy those who prefer this formula, and also clarify the default calculation to folks who don’t really care.
Click to expand...

IIRC beersmith is defalted to tinseth (maybe). So comparing the two in terms of IBUS is going to show up differently.

One of the most recent thread discussing this is here. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f84/different-ibus-provided-different-software-218066/

The other thing has to do with the efficience a given recipe was created with and the efficiency setting in the particular software. 75% is usually the default in the software, but a lot of folks, especially people who have their systems dialed in may have a higher or lower efficiency setting in their native software, so the anticipated og and fg may be different.

None of these are the software, or mean that one software is better than the other. Often it's the user's own settings that are off.

But in terms of accuracy, they're all accurate, you might think of it simply being that they're in different languages....as long as you stay consistant in using one over any other it will be right.

But in reality it's all arbitrary anyway...they're just numbers. I think a better analogy than what I posted above would be instead of languages think about Fahrenheit vs Celcius or Brix vs specific gravity, they're valid and accurate scales. Just present the same "data" differently.

All you need to do is make sure that anything that you are imputing is matching the settings of the software you're using.
 
There are some important points above. One thing to keep in mind is that almost all of the calculations in any of the software options are approximate. The only one I can think of to put much stock in is the in-kettle SG of an extract batch. That's probably pretty accurate from the moment you start up the software. Everything else can only be as accurate as the measurements you make of your process and the consistency from one batch to the next. That's before we even get into questions about whether you can accurately predict IBU (hint: not really).

I started off doing things by hand. It's useful, as it gives you a feeling for how the calculations work. Crucially, it pulls the curtain back on some of the magic that the software seems to perform. Behind the (sometimes) slick interface, there's just a simple mathematical model that takes a few numbers and estimates another. Once I figured out how that worked, I found it was too much effort to calculate and recalculate things by hand, so I went to software.

I used a nice free one called BrewTarget for a while. I recommend it. I've since moved over to BeerSmith because it has a few additional features, but I haven't found it to be much better or worse, just slightly different. It took some tinkering to get recipes to agree between them, but once you sort out the various settings, like Revvy says, it turns out they are doing the same thing under the hood.

So, to give this post a conclusion, I'd say that the best way to calculate recipes is "approximately." If you've taken a science lab class, you've probably learned (and likely since forgotten) that it's important to record measurements with a precision that reflects the precision of your instrument. If your ruler has mm markings on it, don't write down "12.47375 mm," just call it "12.5." The same applies here---unless you are very experienced and very careful, your brewing process is probably not precise (and certainly not accurate) to better than 10%, so don't worry about recipes being any more precise than that.
 
Revvy said:
The reasons the IBU's, and other things often don't match in one software or another is simple, and are easily correctable.

This comes up alot, when folks compare programs head to head.

A couple of the biggest issues that cause consternation to folks, especially if they compare programs, or if they take for example a recipe from byo or someplace and input it, and find differences have to do with batch size settings and which IBU formula the software is defaulting to.

The final volume of a lot of Palmer and Jamil's recipes, and some of them in magazines are usually 5.5 or 6 gallons whereas most of the time we write recipes for the standard 5 gallon recipes. That often accounts for differences between what we might input in software. Make sure the final volume is matching.

The other thing is, that there's several different calculations used to figure out IBU. And they give different numbers. Somewhere in either a book or on the software it should tell you what the default setting is, and even give you the option to change it to match. But often they don't make it obvious.

Here's an explanation of how Beercalculus calculates it from their Hopville Blog for example;


IIRC beersmith is defalted to tinseth (maybe). So comparing the two in terms of IBUS is going to show up differently.

One of the most recent thread discussing this is here. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f84/different-ibus-provided-different-software-218066/

The other thing has to do with the efficience a given recipe was created with and the efficiency setting in the particular software. 75% is usually the default in the software, but a lot of folks, especially people who have their systems dialed in may have a higher or lower efficiency setting in their native software, so the anticipated og and fg may be different.

None of these are the software, or mean that one software is better than the other. Often it's the user's own settings that are off.

But in terms of accuracy, they're all accurate, you might think of it simply being that they're in different languages....as long as you stay consistant in using one over any other it will be right.

But in reality it's all arbitrary anyway...they're just numbers. I think a better analogy than what I posted above would be instead of languages think about Fahrenheit vs Celcius or Brix vs specific gravity, they're valid and accurate scales. Just present the same "data" differently.

All you need to do is make sure that anything that you are imputing is matching the settings of the software you're using.
Click to expand...

I'll add to this another "gotcha" that can get you.

Most software will all have different default Alpha Acid %'s values for their hops.
Make sure that you are lining those up to be equal between the software and not just selecting 1oz of hops in each, the AA% is almost always ifferent.
 
Yeah, I was about to say that the stats of the ingredient may be very different. One of the reasons why when I add to the inventory i update the numbers to what it says on the packages. Same with when I do a brew.
 
IBU calcs are essentially meaningless. If you add 8 oz of dry hops it's not going to show much change in IBUS, but you're sure going to have a hoppy beer.
 
Does Beersmith 2 do anything that the original Beersmith doesn't? Trying to figure out if I want to spend money on the license...
 
TNGabe said:
IBU calcs are essentially meaningless. If you add 8 oz of dry hops it's not going to show much change in IBUS, but you're sure going to have a hoppy beer.
Click to expand...

Dry hopping doesn't add bitterness, so there is no reason for the IBUs to change.
 
pm5k00 said:
Dry hopping doesn't add bitterness, so there is no reason for the IBUs to change.
Click to expand...

My point exactly. Calculated IBUs are calculated, not actual and a theoretical bitterness level doesn't equate to hop flavor.
 
TNGabe said:
My point exactly. Calculated IBUs are calculated, not actual and a theoretical bitterness level doesn't equate to hop flavor.
Click to expand...

Don't mix things up here! As you say, bitterness and hop flavor are not equivalent. This isn't because the IBU calculations are inaccurate, it's because they're not the same thing.

IBU calculations are accurate enough to put you in the right ballpark for actual IBU, provided you give them correct data to work from. It's not fair to call them meaningless. It's not the whole story, but that's like complaining that your SG calculation didn't tell you that 11 pounds of crystal 20 malt and 10 pounds of pale malt would give you different beers.

Of course, even equating IBUs to bitterness is a bit misleading, since there's more to perceived bitterness than just the IBU measurement. But it's something that can be quantified.
 
differences in equipment profiles seem to be the difference in Beersmith for me

and many times I'm formulating a recipe I downloaded and it's saying 30lbs of 2-row is giving me OG of 1.008 in 5 gallons? what?

oh... switch that field from EXTRACT to ALL-GRAIN and WHOA! now it's 1.323!
 

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