bobeer
Fermentation Specalist
Hey all. I was wondering if there is a "rule of thumb" for making an imperial version from a regular beer? I'm using the brewers friend calculator to help but I'm having trouble with the ratios. Any thoughts?
converting a regular recipe into imperial
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TopherM
Well-Known Member
I don't know how Brewer's Friend works, but if I were pumping up the ABV of a recipe in BeerSmith, I would just do a normal scaling of the recipe up to about a 7-9 gallon batch of the original recipe to keep all of the ratios the same, then just change the batch size variable downward until I hit the ABV I was looking for. Might take a bit of fiddling, but it'd be pretty simple, and would keep everything in the same balance as the original recipe, just with more malt to contribute to ABV.
So lets say I havea SMaSH recipe I want to "imperialize" and the origional recipe was 10lbs MO and 4oz Fuggles...
I figure out I need 15lbs MO to hit my desired ABV, you would up thehops to 6oz? You would up the hops by the same percentage, and wouldn't play around with the IBUs to figure the hops addition?
kingwood-kid
Well-Known Member
An important consideration: the more grain you add to raise the OG, the more residual sugars you will have in the finished beer, assuming no change in grist percentages. As you go up in gravity, you will want to shift some specialty grains to base malts and/or base malts to simple sugars. An APA doubled wouldn't be a DIPA; it'd be a barleywine.
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