Scaling Down Recipes

I am going to be brewing some recipes out of Brewing Classic Styles over the next few weeks and I think I need to scale them down just a bit. The recipes in the book call for 5.5 gallons going into the fermenter which would require a 7 gallon boil. I brewed one of the recipes a few weeks ago and didn't scale it down at all and it boiled over a time or two so I want to try and go for getting 5.25 into the fermenter. So after saying all of that when you guys scale down your grain amounts do you normally only scale down the base grains in the recipe?

you scale down grain, hops, and water. get a program like beersmith; it'll help you immensely. it's got a free trial at beersmith.com, so you can try it and see if you like it

+1. Invest in some good brewing software. It will help you so much in the long run, you'll wonder why you didn't buy it sooner. It's not just as simple as scaling down. The grains are easy...because you can just use the same % of grains and scale it down to however small you want to go. It's really the hops that get tricky. You need to take alpha acids into account and know that different amounts of water will effect them differently. A program like beertools, beersmith, or promash will help you with this...

Thanks guys for the input. I have BeerSmith already, and like an idiot I didn't even think to check and see if there was a scaling option which there is. I was just messing with the increase and decrease buttons to try and keep my percentages the same. Wasn't too bad but just hitting the scale button makes things easier.