Difference between dry, extract & grain malts

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Gee Tee

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I'm new to designing recipes and am trying to figure out percentage of malt to adjuncts. Does one calculate 10oz of malted grain, 10oz of dry extract and 10oz of liquid extract the same? Isn't 10oz malted grain the same percentage as 10oz of dry malt, or 10oz of dry malt etc? How do I calculate the different malts as percentage?
 
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The recipes you see are usually quoting percentages as a fraction of the total recipe. That’s useful for scaling recipes up and down, but isn’t so useful in recipe design.

For designing recipes you want to estimate the extract, and while you can do it pencil-and-paper, it’s a lot easier with either a spreadsheet or purpose-built software. As a rough start, dry extract and sugars are about 45 PPG, liquid extract is about 33 PPG, malted grain is about 25 PPG, and steeped grains are 0 PPG. One PPG is one point of gravity per pound of material per gallon “points/(pounds/gallons)”. To use them, multiply the PPG by the weight for each ingredient, sum them all together, and divide by your final volume to estimate the OG. Real software will do better than this, of course, but that will get you close.
 
I'm new to designing recipes and am trying to figure out percentage of malt to adjuncts. Does one calculate 10oz of malted grain, 10oz of dry extract and 10oz of liquid extract the same? Isn't 10oz malted grain the same percentage as 10oz of dry malt, or 10oz of dry malt etc? How do I calculate the different malts as percentage?
Note that brewing software is very useful when crafting recipes to calculate stats like Original Gravity, IBUs, Expected ABV, etc. The book "How to Brew" by John Palmer has good info on this topic. The older online version did as well, but it seems to be down.

I was not getting a lot of good hits, but this one is okay: https://www.highwoodsbrewing.com/gravity.php

It will vary a little between extract manufacturers and maltsters, but that page list the following:
  • Dry Malt Extract: 43 points
  • Liquid Malt Extract: 36 points
  • Base Grain: 38 points at 100% efficiency, or 28.5 points at a more reasonable 75% efficiency
That means that if you made 1 gallon of wort with those ingredients, you could expect a gravity of around 1.043, 1.036, or 1.028. Keep in mind that there is a lot more variables in play when brewing all-grain, vs using DME or LME.

As far as calculating as percentages, using percentages add much more value with all-grain brewing because different brewers will need to use different amounts based on their efficiency. With extract, it is easier to just say "add 5 lbs of DME" since that will produce the same gravity. For an extract with steeping grains, I would think of those grains by volume (say 1 lb of Crystal 80 + 4 oz Chocolate Malt) since the goal is mostly to extract colors and flavors from those steeped grains.
 
Palmer's How to Brew, E4 has a table (Table 9) showing the ppg for malts when mashing and when steeping. For mashing, the ppg runs from 22 to 38. For steeping the ppg runs from 4 to 22.

Edit: Sorry, these were from the online howtobrew.com. There is similar information in the 4th Edition but in a different form.
 
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