Advice - Step up 5 gal batch to 250 gal batch.

Hey Everyone,

It's been a long time since I've posted here, I recently got back into brewing and am loving it. I brewed a friends Belgian Wit recipe the other day and it turned out really nice.

I took it to a local get together and one of the brewers from one of the local breweries really enjoyed it. He asked if we would be interested in stepping up the recipe to produce it on his 250 gal system to be served as their summer seasonal. Of course we're thrilled. We're just having some concerns in scaling up a 5 gallon extract and steeped grains recipe to a full on professional brewery recipe. The brewer is going to help us with some of the fine details but we would really like to come to the table with a good start that shows we've done some homework.

This is the recipe we used.

Tax Day Witbier
Brewed 4-15-10

Grain:
.5lbs Wheat Malt
.5lbs Crystal 20L
.5lbs Belgian Aromatic
.5lbs Belgian Caravienne 24L
1lbs Flaked Oats

steeped in grain bag from 150 to 168 degrees F approx 35 mins.

Malt:
4lbs LME Wheat
2lbs LME Light
added just before boil

1lbs Clover Honey (15 mins)

Hops:
1oz Hallertau Pellets AA3.2% (60 min)
1oz Saaz Pellets AA 2.8% (15 min)
.5oz Saaz Pellets AA 2.8% (2 min)
added to hop bag

Spices:
3/4 oz Crushed Coriander (15 min)
1oz zested orange peel from AZ (15 min)
1oz zested orange peel from AZ (2 min)
1 tsp Irish Moss (15 min)

Yeast:
1 vial Liquid Belgian Ale Yeast WLP 550 best before 4-25-10 (did not take off after 15 hours)
Wyeast 3944 Belgian Wit Smackpack (18 hours later) MFG 4-5-10

Kegged on 4-3-10 (edit. 5-3-10)


Thanks for any advice you can offer!

Awesome!

Wheat extract is usually 50/50 of 60/40 wheat to pale/pils, so something like (assuming 75% eff):
8 lbs pale
3.5 lbs Wheat Malt
1lbs Flaked Oats
.5lbs Crystal 20L
.5lbs Belgian Aromatic
.5lbs Belgian Caravienne 24L
1 lb honey

You may need to cut your hops a bit if you did a partial boil, but the brewer should be able to help you out (big systems get better hop eff than homebrewers anyway).

Same deal on the spices, I might hold back a bit, you can always add more.

The brewer may not want to use a blend of yeasts for cost reasons, but you can talk about it.

You may also want to consider kegging the beer after you brew it instead of the other way around

Oh, crap, I didn't see that. Well, it's probably obvious at this point but I'll say it anyway.

Beer was kegged on 5-3-10.

Nice catch, and thanks for the advice, good stuff.

No problem, if you want some good prep-reading pick up a copy of Brewing with Wheat which has lots of interesting stuff of wit/weizen/berliner/gose etc...