Hello this is my first post on this website. I just got into home brewing in August 2008 and have made 5 (5 gallon) batches of beer from kits and one batch from a recipe out of a book. I just got this new book from a friend called Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels. I am wanting to create a stout and I have been following the directions in the book for calculating a malt bill for the beer. Let me show what I have done so far: According to the book a classic stout has an OG (original gravity) between 1.038-48. So I assumed a 48GU for my batch. I calculated 48GU x 5.5 gallons of wort= 264GU total gravity. Then I figured I would do 80% pale dry extract, 10% roast barley, 6% crystal malt, and 4% oatmeal which I calculated = 211GU pale dry extract, 26.5GU roast barley, 16GU Crystal malt, and 11GU from oats. I then tried calculating how much of each ingredient I would need for the malt bill. For pale malt extract I calculated 211GU/(45/1.00)=4.68lbs pale extract, 26.5GU/(27/0.65)=0.64lbs roasted barley, 16GU/(34/0.65)=0.31lbs crystal malt, and 11GU/(33/0.65)=0.22lbs of oats. My question is whether this seems reasonable for a stout? It seemed intuitively not enough sugars. Can anyone who understands this tell me whether I have made some sort of error in calculations or does this seem reasonable?