BIAB Recipe Formulation

[Merkur]

Hi - I have been mystified by this for some time and thought this forum could shed a light on the approach to be taken. I like the fact that the AHA publish the recipes for the NHC award winners and I have made several of these brews. Similarly I read through Zymurgy or BYO, Craft Beer & Brewing and see recipes I would like to make.

Now some recipes are designed for 5 gallon batches, some 5.5 into the fermenter, some into 40L Speidel fermenters, some 'traditional' all grain, some BIAB. What is the right approach to take when entering these recipes into BeerSmith, Brewfather or whatever program you use? Should I enter the recipes as published with a default equipment profile and efficiency? Then tweak the efficiency and volumes to arrive at the OG, SRM, ABV and IBUs as specified? Then scale the recipe to the volume being brewed. Then change the equipment profile to BIAB.

Is that the right sequence or is there a better approach to brew a proven award-winning recipe on a different rig. The recipes in magazines or recipe stashes online rarely specify the details of the rigs on which they were brewed.

Paul

 

[downzero]

The recipes are going to tell you the expected OG. From there you can adjust the efficiency to figure out what they assume for efficiency, adjust the efficiency parameter to your expected number, and scale the recipe from there. Your equipment profile needs to match the equipment you're using. Ultimately what you want is wort at their OG with the expected other characteristics (color, ibu) of the beer you're brewing. No need to overthink this; beersmith makes this easy.

 

[Oginme]

There is an easier way with BeerSmith to enter recipes instead of having to make up a dummy profile.

Open up your standard recipe template which contains your equipment profile. Now enter in the ingredients as they appear in the recipe you want to transfer. Ignore the volumes, and targets for right now. Program has built in the automatic conversion so that if you regularly work in lbs and you get an ingredients which gives you ounces of a grain, you can enter it in as '5.5 oz' and the program will convert it to your standard units.

Once you have entered everything in, go to the sliders below the ingredient box and click on the 'Estimated Original Gravity' first. Now enter in the target value from the recipe and the ingredients will be scaled directly to match this OG using your efficiency and your process losses. Now, I recommend doing the same with the color slider and then the IBU slider. You will need to manually scale dry hops and zero IBU hop additions as a ratio of the batch sizes.

The last thing to do is to change the mash profile to the mash temperature which will give you the target FG for the recipe.

And there you go! No messing around and trying to scale a recipe where you don't now the base profile.