Could anyone give my first BIAB recipe a quick look over?

Hi Guys,

I'm starting to get myself set up for my second brew and I thought I might give an all grain BIAB recipe a go. I've designed it using brew-target. I'm aiming for a simple American style IPA, which is just on the hoppy side of well balanced and is around 5% ABV. I'm aiming to produce a 2 gallon batch and brew target gives me a target boil size of 2.812 gallons to achieve this. Does that sound about right?

So the recipe...

[86%/ 3.52lb] Pale Malt 2 Row (I thought I might use maris otter)
[14%/ 8.82oz] Crystal Malt

I will mash the grains for 1 hour at 154f with the aim of producing a balanced but somewhat dry final beer.

I will boil the wort for 60 mins with

0.212oz Chinook (60mins)
0.141oz Cascade (20mins)
0.141oz Cascade (5mins)

I will also add Irish moss with with 15 minutes to go.

Finally I will ferment this with Safale US-05 yeast for 2 weeks at 66f before bottle conditioning for a further 2 weeks+.

According to brew target this should give me a beer with the following characteristics

OG 1.051
FG 1.013
ABV 5%
IBU 32
Colour 12.4

I am missing anything? Is this likely to come out tasting ok? I was planning to mash with about 2.3 gallons and then dunk sparge the bag in about half a gallon of water. Does this sound reasonable or is it easier just to suspend the bag and wait till it stops dripping?

Thanks in advance guys!

Personally when I dunk sparge I mash with the final volume then use the extra water needed for dunk sparging. No logical reason other then that's how I do it.

Do you know what your boil-off rate is by any chance? I ran your numbers through this BIAB calc and came up with 3.51 gal if you have a 1 gal per hour boiloff rate. But I know that program gives a little extra in my experience. Brewtarget has told me not enough water a couple of times and been right on a couple of times. Personally I probably would go with 3 gal of total water .2 gal extra won't hurt a thing.

Hi Mate,

Thanks for this. I'm not sure what the boil off rate is likely to be. Apart from calculating one from the observed change in volume over a boil do you know how I would determine it?

Ta

That recipe looks OK for an American Pale Ale, 30-45 IBU per Beersmith. The crystal malt (60?) may be a little high and not give you a dry beer which you indicate you are looking for. I'm certainly not an expert on how much crystal malt is too much. 3lb 12 oz of 2-row and 4 oz of crystal 60 will drop your color down to 7.8 with 6% of the mash being crystal. All your numbers are on the lower end of the APA style. If you get more than the 70% efficiency you may end up with a malt forward APA. In the end it will still be beer so give it a try and see if you like it.

When I calculate volumes for my BIAB system I get a total volume of 2.8 gallons. Yours could be different depending on how much boil volume you expect to use but it looks reasonable. If you have a vigorous boil you may end up short. I would only loose ~0.55 gallons in a 60 min boil.

When I'm done with the mash, I will occasionally dunk sparge the grain in a second pot if I don't have enough space in my kettle then suspend the bag in a colander above the kettle and squeeze the liquid out of the bag with my kettle lid. No reason to wait for it to stop dripping.

I think 14% crystal is too high if you are going for a dry beer. Cut that back to 5-7% and it will give you more of what you are looking for.

Your BU:GU ratio is .627. The average for an APA is .714. So you might want to up the hops slightly.

Thanks for the advice guys, I'll take your advice and lower the crystal proportion. Any thoughts on using Chinook as a bittering hop for an american style pale ale? I'm sure I've seen this done previously but I'm not exactly sure where!

I like chinook as both bittering and flavor. Good call on lowering the crystal. I like a little bit of munich oe vienna in ipas to balance it out a bit

swackattack said:

I like a little bit of munich oe vienna in ipas to balance it out a bit

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Hi Mate,

What sort of ratio of those to the maris otter would use? something like 10% Munich, 83% Maris Otter and 7% Crystal?

Thanks again

You also might want to lower your mash temp if you're shooting for a dry beer. 154 is on the higher side - I would shoot for 149-150.

BPal75 said:

You also might want to lower your mash temp if you're shooting for a dry beer. 154 is on the higher side - I would shoot for 149-150.

Click to expand...

+1 to this.

You also shouldn't have to tinker with the crystal malt too much if you have a lower mash temp since that will help dry your beer out more. If I am giving the beer a big malty caramel backbone with crystal or some other malt, I like to throw in a few more hops though to balance it a bit more. It is all up to the brewer and what they like though. I lean more towards the hop bombs so there is never enough.

Yeah, id say 10-15% is what i normally use. Helps them from feeling like thin hop juice