Brewing Classic Styles recipe ????

I ordered some ingredients to do a few recipes from the Brewing Classic Styles book. But when I was getting ready to brew one, I noticed that the recipes in the book list a pre boil volume of 7 gallons.
I always do 5! If I do five, does this affect the amount of ingredients?

Yea, you'll have a higher gravity. If you use any brewing software, I think they all have a recipe scaling function. Hope your grain isn't all milled together.

If I were in this situation, I'd either do the 7g boil if equipment allowed, or just have a higher gravity version of the beer I intended. I suppose you could also just dilute at the end.

FYI the BCS recipes are all scaled (except where noted) for 7g pre-boil, 5.5g collected into the fermenter, and 5g into the keg/bottles.

The way I would convert it (and this might be less than precise because of other factors) would be to do a simple ratio equation with each ingredient:

amt of ingredient called for in original recipe/7 gallons= actual amount needed (x)/5 gallons

cross multiply to get (amt called for)*5gallon=7gallon*(x)

solve for x by dividing both sides by 7 gallon to get the conversion

just make sure that you're consistent with the units (ie -ounces compared to ounces, gallons compared to gallons)

Hope that makes sense, kinda hard to explain in writing. If you have brewing software you could try plugging it in to compare preboil gravities.

If that's wrong, maybe someone else has a better trick to convert it.

SevenFields said:

I ordered some ingredients to do a few recipes from the Brewing Classic Styles book. But when I was getting ready to brew one, I noticed that the recipes in the book list a pre boil volume of 7 gallons.
I always do 5! If I do five, does this affect the amount of ingredients?

Click to expand...

The recipes end up with 6 gallons post-boil, and 5.5 going into the fermenter- basically a 5 gallon finished batch.

If you're usually doing a 5 gallon batch (even with a 5 gallon boil), you could keep the recipe the same and just plan a 5.5 gallon batch. That gives you extra wort (beer) for racking and trub losses. In my mind, it's not a big difference between a 5.5 gallon batch and a 5 gallon batch into the fermenter so I wouldn't worry about it. There might be a slight difference in IBU calculations, or in OG, but not very much.