Converting 7 gallon recipe to 5 gallon?

Greetings All!

My lovely and/or talented wifey has been paying attention! She got me the brew kit in August for my birthday and for Christmas, she got me "Brewing Classic Styles" by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer. God, I love her!

The book is excellent - I highly recommend it to those getting started and to those who want to broaden their knowledge. But it has one small problem. The 80+ recipes listed in the book are all for 7-gallon batches. I know most people getting started are set up for 5 gallon batches. So how do I make a 5 gallon batch from a 7 gallon recipe?

My initial thought was that I could divide the ingredients by 7 to find out how much went into 1 gallon. Then multiply my 1 gallon amount by 5 to get a resulting 5-gallon-equivalent recipe. I know you can double and half ingredients to do double or half batches...but will my above method work to find out how much per gallon and then just do the math to get a 5 gallon recipe?

-Tripod

Jamil, and many other brewers do batches slightly larger than 5 so that in the end they will have 5 gallons of finished beer. If you account for trub/hops loss when transferring to your fermenter you can lose a quart to half gallon, or more depending on recipe/ingredients. Even if you get a super clean transfer chances are you will still have a good amount of trub and certainly yeast in the ferementer. If you have some extra beer to begin with you can rack well above that and still end up with 5 gallons.

OF COURSE!!

I feel silly now! I was reading it as if the final outcome were to be a 7 gallon batch. I see now that they are intending a pre-boil of 7 gallons so that you actually end up with at least 5 gallons to bottle, etc. I read a little further and saw the partial-boil-conversion section.

I forgot to mention that, although incredibly handsome, I can be a bit dense sometimes. Thanks, Zymurgrafi, for reeling me back in...

-Tripod