How to calculate gravity contribution of steeping grains?

Hello all,

I'm scratching my own itch and developing my own little recipe builder and ran into loads of conflicting info in a few areas. My current concern is properly calculating gravity contributions when steeping grains on extract brews.

Steeping grains should have an impact on your OG and FG but I can't find any concrete info.

John Palmer published a chart with some info:

http://www.howtobrew.com/section2/chapter12-4-1.html

Based on his research any crystal or roasted grain will contribute something but it seems like everyone does it differently.

Brewers Friend doesn't add any points to the recipe.
BrewToad calculates it the same as if you were mashing, this incorrectly inflating you FG.
Haven't determined how it's done in BeerSmith but I added 5 lbs of 20L to a 5 gallon batch and got 1.005. EDIT: Looks like BS has a default 15% steeping grain efficiency.

Does anyone have any reliable info on the topic?

No there is no accepted baseline for your question.

Palmer is a good start, but I have seen a lot of data that would indicate the information on the roast and black is incorrect and should be much lower.

In BeerSmith, you select the 'mash' efficiency. I'd set it to 40% for steeping grains. I don't have a clue about Brewers Friend or BrewToad.

NOTE: Base grains (2-row, Pale, Munich, Vienna, etc) will generally contribute zero points with a steep. It will depend on the water volume, time and temperature as to whether you get any conversion.

That's basically the conclusion I came to. I think I'm going to run a bunch of 1 gallon / 1 pound test steeps to get some real data.

The way it is now, some recipe building software could be off by up to 10% and I can't live with that. haha.

Brewers friend uses 35% for steeping grains but thats just for some, not all grains give off sugar while steeping especially dark or black grains , and it depends on how long and what temperature you steep, to get true fermentable sugar out of your grain you need to steep it just like mashing for the same times.

in most kits they mainly use steeping grains for color and flavor not for added sugar, so the directions to steep like they say are only for color and flavor

madk said:

I think I'm going to run a bunch of 1 gallon / 1 pound test steeps to get some real data.

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Post your results. A lot of people would be interested in what you get.

You might want to scale it down to a quart/4 ozs.

madk said:

The way it is now, some recipe building software could be off by up to 10% and I can't live with that. haha.

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You have to use a lot of steeping grains to be off by 10%. Assuming their sugars were not included, a 1.060 beer would need to have a couple of lbs of crystal

My understanding is that the amount of sugars you get from steeping is little to none at best. A 10-15 minute steep on 1 pound of grain @ 150 F` is not enough time to extract any sugars. Your OG/FG would primarily be controlled by your extract. The steeping grains are just for color and flavor.

When I do extract brewing, I found that beersmith is usually way off on my numbers because they do have some type of formula in there.

I'm sure you could contact Brad Smith and he would be more than happy to give you the formula on how he calculates it. I have emailed him a few times, really nice guy.

With beersmith if you select the extract profile, you won't get very much out of the steeping grains. But I wonder if that was assuming just throwing the grains in and steeping as the temp goes up? Because I did a steep much like a 30 min mash: up to about 155, hold there and steep for 30 mins, then start raising the temp and take out at 175.
I always came out with a higher OG with this method, and that was before topping off, because I then use the dilution tool to tell if I actually hit my predicted OG. If I added what was planned I would be high. In other words the reading wasn't off because of top off water.
So then I selected partial mash, and at that point it started being accurate.

Takuie said:

My understanding is that the amount of sugars you get from steeping is little to none at best. A 10-15 minute steep on 1 pound of grain @ 150 F` is not enough time to extract any sugars.

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You can get a lot from some Crystals. All you are doing is dissolving sugars that have already been created. The darker the crystals/malts are, you generally get less sugars. With C60 you might get 18 points/lb, whereas with Black/Choc/Roast, you may only get 8 points/lb.

1 lb of C60 steeped in a 5 gallon can get you about .003/.004 increase in OG.

madk said:

That's basically the conclusion I came to. I think I'm going to run a bunch of 1 gallon / 1 pound test steeps to get some real data.

The way it is now, some recipe building software could be off by up to 10% and I can't live with that. haha.

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madk - did you ever run the tests? I would be very interested in the results.

nilo did something very similar, if not exactly that, back in 2010-2011:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=208361

Cheerio!

Dee_Lynn said:

nilo did something very similar, if not exactly that, back in 2010-2011:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=208361

Cheerio!

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Awesome experiment!!! Thanks for pointing it out. Interesting that these malts are not fully converted and that there is still starch residue. Also interesting how dmuch the ppg for the 10L crystal malt differs from the 40L and 120L.