a stupid question but one thats bothering me.

hello all im Paul and i've been homebrewing using the kits for about 2 years now and im finally ready to move away from the kits, so i've decided to start with a spruce beer with a honey base because 1) im a history nerd and James cook used this beer when sailing the world 2) i am lucky enough to have access to both spruces and honey without going very far, i have a honey farm just a mile from my current location.

so my question is, i found a recipe online that taught me all about this very old form of brewing but the everything is listed in the recipe is for 5 litres. the recipe is:

SPRUCE BEER
5 litres of water
100g spruce needles
20g hops
One thumb-sized piece of bruised root ginger
600g malt extract (alternatively molasses, treacle, or honey)
1 packet ale yeast (available from home brew stockist or online)

so here comes the incredibly stupid question, i want to utilize my existing brewing stuff (a store bought kit) which has the standard 20 litre drum, so in order to fill that drum will i have quadruple the ingredients?

thank you in advance for helping me get better.

 

Generally, yes, recipes scale geometrically. However, there's no harm in fermenting 5l of beer in a 20l tank.

 

20 liters of beer in a 20 liter fermenter doesn't give you enough headspace and you may wind up with a gallon or so wasted as blow off. Try 3 times the amount ( 15 liters ) as this will give you a decent safety margin for krausen formation.

bosco

 

You can plug it into one of the calculators as well. They'll let you scale up a recipe and/or switch from extract to all-grain. I use BeerSmith, but I suspect some of the free online calculator may have this option too.

 

Some brewing software (I use Brewtoad.com) has an auto-scale function. You can enter your ingredients and scale the recipe to the size you want.

EDIT: webby beat me to it. Brewtoad is one of the free sites though.

 

+1 to head space consideration. Besides that yeah I generally have heard recipes tend to be linear as far as scaling goes. The yeast won't be linear but you will want to figure out what your OG may look like so you can use a calculator to figure out how much yeast to use. And while you're at it and trying to make a historic brew, find out if there was something special about the yeast used for it and if there are any modern day substitutes.

Ex. If the recipe used something that, let's say, was like a Scottish ale yeast, you won't want to use US-05

 

ok thanks for the help, sorry the barrell is 23 litres but i dont want that much, i think i'll go with 10, its a nice round number and should allow me and my brewing partner enough to get sufficiently tipsy. so that means i'll have to double all ingredients, does that include the hops?

 

from what ive read this is a very uncomplicated beer, the yeast is normal, it was actually used by people on ships to keep scurvy at bay, so it might even be good for me.