Adjusting Recipes for Efficiency

[Black Island Brewer]

I'm hoping to hear from some of you about how you approach making adjustments to other brewers' recipes when you are accounting for different conversion/lautering efficiencies.

I have been using BeerSmith to make some adjustments to recipes to account for the way the recipe is listed versus the efficiency I get. What I have been doing is entering the recipe, and adjusting the entire malt bill so that the intended OG of the original is close to the projected OG based on my system's efficiency. Since I get higher than typical efficiency for most recipes, I have reduced the the malt bill equally, both base and specialty malts, so that they match the original percentages of the original recipe.

So if the original recipe calls for 10 pounds of pale malt, a pound of Crystal 20 and a pound of honey malt, I would make sure my alteration had 83% pale, 8.5% crystal and 8.5% honey malt, but all in amounts to get the same OG as the original recipe.

What I've noticed, and what seems to be confirmed by the most recent results I got in competition, is that for some malt-forward styles, like Oktoberfest, it's a drinkable beer but not quite flavorful enough for the style.

So now I'm thinking I might want to keep the specialty malts at their original weight, and adjust my base malt amount down to match the OG of the original recipe.

What do you do?

 

[LLBeanJ]

What I've noticed, and what seems to be confirmed by the most recent results I got in competition, is that for some malt-forward styles, like Oktoberfest, it's a drinkable beer but not quite flavorful enough for the style.

I have done this in the past, i.e., scaled the entire grain bill to retain original percentages, and also found that flavor was lacking on some recipes.

So now I'm thinking I might want to keep the specialty malts at their original weight, and adjust my base malt amount down to match the OG of the original recipe.

What do you do?

Now, I just modify the amount of the base grains (usually down, as like you, my efficiency is typically higher than what the original recipe was based on) and leave the specialty grains per the original recipe and the results have been much better.

It's funny you asked this, there was another thread on this very topic posted just a couple hours ago.

 

[chickypad]

Yes, I commented in the other thread too where I noted that I always go strictly by percentages. Thing is, most recipes IME are written for 70-80% efficiency. Since I tend to hit 77-79% (or low 70's for some beers like high gravity), my adjustments tend to be minimal. As I noted in the other thread I read about there being a possible adverse effect of very high efficiency on body and flavor, wish I could remember the reference for you. It sounds like your issue OP is on your beer that had over 92% efficiency? Maybe if you're getting something that high you need to take a different approach when adjusting recipes.

 

[Black Island Brewer]

Yes, I commented in the other thread too where I noted that I always go strictly by percentages. Thing is, most recipes IME are written for 70-80% efficiency. Since I tend to hit 77-79% (or low 70's for some beers like high gravity), my adjustments tend to be minimal. As I noted in the other thread I read about there being a possible adverse effect of very high efficiency on body and flavor, wish I could remember the reference for you. It sounds like your issue OP is on your beer that had over 92% efficiency? Maybe if you're getting something that high you need to take a different approach when adjusting recipes.

That's what I'm wondering too. I learned from experience not to scale back late addition hops, that 1 ounce at 10 minutes needs to be one ounce at 10 minutes no matter what the alpha acids and predicted IBUs. I'm thinking that at high efficiencies, there may be a diminishing return on flavor, aroma and color compounds from specialty malts, even if we are still getting more gravity points.