Using Brewer's Friend Beer Recipe Calculator

Morning all, and happy easter!

I've been playing around with the online beer recipe calculator, Brewer's Friend, and have a few questions:

http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator/

Under "Mash Steps" what do you select from the dropdown for "types" if you're doing all grain full volume BIAB? Also in the same area (Mash Steps) where it says "Amount/qt," I'm assuming that if I'm doing BIAB, I'm supposed to be putting my entire water volume in this field?

Thanks for the help, folks

Jeff

I would just do infusion for your mash option. I believe Amount is referring to your mash thickness i.e. how much mash water you intend to use per pound of grains. I usually shoot for somewhere between 1.25 and 1.5 qts/lb but it's pretty open for tweaking.

I haven't used that calculator, but it seems pretty good in the small amount of time I've spent looking at it. I may have to run some recipes through it and see how it compares to BeerTarget.

I put in the recipe I brewed today, from memory, and it seemed to hit close. The only aspect that was way off was the IBU calc, but that's understandable as this creator auto-populates AA values and I can't remember the values my other software was using. The gravity, SRM, and ABV seem to be really close.

In the "Type" field, I used infusion, as BIAB just has you dough-in with no sparge (if you want to be a purist). For my process, however, I also added a sparge step, because I dunk sparge in a separate pot to try to get the efficiency up a little. So this meant that I actually wanted a mash thickness of approximately 1.5 qt/lb. If you are doing true BIAB, then I would imagine that you would have to manually calculate out the mash thickness and use it. But that doesn't seem to have any impact on the recipe's characteristics, so this field probably really only applies to brewing directions.

This is Larry from Brewer's Friend. Correct, the mash steps are for informational purposes.

Everybody has a different process and system (fly sparge, batch sparge, no sparge, RIMS, HERMS, BIAB, etc...). Instead of trying to deal with that in the recipe, the system supports a 'brew' button where you can track your batch progress, calculate efficiency, attenuation, and add journal entries.

The next release will include a mash water management tab on the brew session page where you can track water usage as you brew, calculate infusion temps, etc.