Adjusting Recipe for Efficiency

I was just wondering how some of you more experienced brewers adjust a recipe to your equipment's efficiency. I get about 80% efficiency, which is great, but most recipes I see out there are for 70% or 75%. Typically, I adjust the recipe in proportion to the recipe's grain bill. If it's 70% 20% 10% I keep those ratios. But now that I am refining my process, I notice once I make these adjustments, often times my SRM and IBU's deviate from the recipes, sometimes quite a bit.

Any advise on how to adjust the recipe and keep everything close to the recipe....maybe just adjust base malt instead of speciality malts?

Thanks!

EDIT: I use BeerSmith

BS will actually let you do this! Easy!


When you enter the recipe set the efficiency to that of the recipe

Enter the recipe

Then go to scale and in the box, change the percentage and check the box to keep everything the same

Hit ok and you now have the same recipe at your efficiency!

Thanks!!! I actually found that button and figured it out right after I posted the questions. I was also curious what the "best practice" was. Should ratios be kept the same, or should specialty grain be left alone and only adjust base malt? I know there are no definites in brewing, but as it relates to sticking to a recipe.

RmikeVT said:

Thanks!!! I actually found that button and figured it out right after I posted the questions. I was also curious what the "best practice" was. Should ratios be kept the same, or should specialty grain be left alone and only adjust base malt? I know there are no definites in brewing, but as it relates to sticking to a recipe.

Click to expand...

If want essentially want the recipe to be identical in all aspects then all ratios should remain the same for the scaled version.

duboman said:

If want essentially want the recipe to be identical in all aspects then all ratios should remain the same for the scaled version.

Click to expand...

Yep. Scaling is scaling- adjusting just the base malt would change the recipe.

*delete

Scaling assumes you extract sugar, color and flavor more efficiently. Adjusting base malt only assumes you extract color and flavor at the same rate as the original recipe, but are better at sugar extraction. The truth--as always--probably lies somewhere in-between. I would lean towards scaling just the base malt, but I have no evidence or experience to support this belief.

kingwood-kid said:

Scaling assumes you extract sugar, color and flavor more efficiently. Adjusting base malt only assumes you extract color and flavor at the same rate as the original recipe, but are better at sugar extraction. The truth--as always--probably lies somewhere in-between. I would lean towards scaling just the base malt, but I have no evidence or experience to support this belief.

Click to expand...

This is what I was talking about, accounting for color and flavor extraction and just wondering what are peoples' best brewing practices in that respect. Especially, when I first started brewing with extract, you only use the specialty grain for flavor and color and anything else you got was considered a bonus.

RmikeVT said:

This is what I was talking about, accounting for color and flavor extraction and just wondering what are peoples' best brewing practices in that respect. Especially, when I first started brewing with extract, you only use the specialty grain for flavor and color and anything else you got was considered a bonus.

Click to expand...

If you truly want to recreate the recipe at your operating efficiency and keep all other elements the same then you scale the entire recipe and ask the software to keep everything the same

If you only scale the base malt for, say a higher efficiency then all the specialty grains, etc will change the balance of the original recipe and it will no longer be the same recipe.

In extract you are only steeping the specialty grains and the contribution is different then when you are actually mashing them in all grain.