Scaling a recipe

[khorn]

Hi all,

A couple of years ago I brewed a couple of 1 gallon kit batches from Brooklyn Brew. I'm back to try my hand at homebrewing again but I'm apprehensive. This time I'll be starting from scratch rather than a kit so I'm trying to search for a reliable all-grain recipe to work off of. The problem is that most recipes I've found are based on a 5-gallon batch. I'm wondering if there's a tool or an easy way to scale these recipes so that I have enough brew to ferment in the two 1-gallon carboys that I have. The last thing I want to do is end up thirsty after all of the work!

I think the sensible thing in the future will be to buy equipment for 5-gallon batches but I'm not going to be able to do that this time around.

Thanks,
K

 

[TasunkaWitko]

Hi, K -

According to both of BBS's recipe books, you should be able to convert any recipe just by dividing it by 5 (or vice-versa if converting from 1 gallon to 5 gallons). I realize that for a few specialty recipes, it might be more complicated than that, but for the vast majority it is quite easy.

Have you seen the recipe books from BBS? There are a lot of great and very creative recipes in them, all written for 1-gallon (and 5-gallon) batches. The books are a little expensive at the website, but they can be found for a very reasonable price on Amazon. If you have any questions about a specific recipe, send a PM and I can check on it for you.

Ron

 

[khorn]

Thanks Ron,

I haven't looked at that book - I'll check it out! Since I have two, 1-gallon carboys, would it make sense to divide by 5 and then multiply by two? I've read that scaling up can change addition times and temps. I'm fine with not worrying about it if it's not going to ruin the batch.

Cheers,
K

 

[TasunkaWitko]

Here are the titles:

http://brooklynbrewshop.com/books

Like I said, kind of expensive there, but they are on sale right now. If that is still too much, I was able to find both books on Amazon for a total cost of less than 1 book.

I like the "seasonal brewing" concept that is in the first book. The neat thing about the second book is that the recipes reflect a touring of some great American and European breweries.

Highly recommended - both books.

 

[chickypad]

Dividing by 5 will work if your efficiency is the same as that of the given recipe, and the recipe is written for 5 gallons finished. I'm not familiar with those particular books, but if you start trying recipes from different sources like the database here you'll see that batch sizes are often not an even 5 gals. Not only that but efficiency will vary widely brewer to brewer. With all grain you really need to adjust any given recipe both for your batch size and your own efficiency. I would recommend you try out some software like Beersmith, or become familiar with one of the free programs online. You can then easily scale any recipe to your system using grainbill percentages.

 

[TonyKZ1]

I just picked up both of those books on eBay, there's several still on there atm. They're pretty good not only for the recipes but also info about the brews, where they came from, food that goes with them, etc..

 

[Punity]

Get a nice program like beersmith to help you plug in recipes and scale them

 

[Biscuits]

In general you can scale the grains by whatever volume the original recipe was. Again, like other mentioned, this doesn't account for your efficiency, but start there and work it out. The only thing is that, hops don't always scale proportionately. You're going to want a way to figure that out if you're a stickler for details...otherwise, scale them by the original amount as well and it will get you in the ballpark. I have an excel spreadsheet that I created and use to scale batches...PM me if you want a copy.

 

[JJL]

You can pretty much do the math yourself. Everything can be scaled by 1/5. But there are a few recipe websites that will automatically scale.
Brewgr.com
Brewtoad.com

 

[khorn]

Thanks for the tips everyone!