Scaling a recipe and other questions

Hi

I want to try brewing an Oatmeal stout this coming weekend and was looking at doing Jamils recipe but as a partial mash.

I have some questions about this.

First, my thinking on converting to partial mash would be to keep all the specialty grains as is and swap out the Pale Malt (2-row) for the equivalant amount (75%) of Pale LME. Is this correct? Would it work?

Second, I'm doing this on my stove top and my space/boil size is limited... How big of an effect will it have on the final product if I do a smaller boil and then top up the fermenter?

Finally, this recipe is for a pre-boil size of over 7.5g boil which reduces to 6g. I want to end up with 5 gallons (after topping up in my fermentor) so do I need to scale all of the grains or just the amount of Pale extact that I would use? How do I go about doing that bearing in mind I don't have any brew software?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Alboy said:

Hi
How do I go about doing that bearing in mind I don't have any brew software?

Click to expand...

Option One: Download free trial of brewing software. You won't regret it.

Option Two: Buy his book. You won't regret that either.

Option Three: The PM version in his book keeps the specialty grains, as you said, and uses 6.8 lbs. pale LME.

Your biggest issue with the stovetop will be getting the bitterness right. You can get around that problem by doing a late extract addition. Assuming you can boil 3.5 gallons (about half the size of the original recipe), just add about half the extract at the beginning of the boil as you normally would, then add the rest at the end to make sure anything nasty in it is taken care of.

As for six vs. five, there's not really as big a difference there once you consider that you usually (probably?) do 5.25 or 5.5 gallon batches to account for the trub and such. Personally I'd RDWHAHB and enjoy a slightly bigger beer, depending on how it all plays out, but you could also cut out some of the extract to get your gravity down.

None of this is very exact, but for exact, go with option one. Again, you won't regret it.