Good morning,
I've been thinking about brewing my first beer for a while, unfortunately, even though craft beer is growing exponentially here in Thailand, we can't find all the ingredients. My project, a kind of Orval.
I plan to use the BIAB method while making a few deviations from it, particularly in terms of sparging and multi-rests.
My brewing tank is a stainless steel pot H50 x Ø 50 (98l) in which is placed another stainless steel pot H45 x Ø 45 (71 l.) pierced with holes and housing my BIAB bag.
My BIAB style brew stand
I have just received the yeasts from a friend returning from Belgium, we cannot find Brett here, nor Orval in bottle... I am attaching an EXCEL file giving the main parameters, integrating what I was able to find like formulas and explanations on the net...
Due to the basket, there’s a ‘dead volume’ where the grain is not mixed with water.
How do I calculate this dead volume? For a given volume, I calculate the height in the tank, then I subtract 5 cm (50-45) from this height to have the height in the basket, then, I calculate the volume in the basket which I subtract from the initial volume.
Initially, I wanted to use a ratio of 3.5 L./Kg, but due to the dead volume, I took 3.2 to keep some sparge water available.
The final volume will be 42 litres of water, the volume in the tank will be 47 litres.
If my reasoning is correct, the pre-boiling volume would be 47 - 6.92 x (0.667 +0.6) grain volume and water retention or 38 litres. I deduct the Boil Off losses and get 32.16 litres, which in effect is the size of the mash plus the loss due to yeast in the fermenter.
2.5 litres of sparge water is not a lot, indeed, but it's all that's left.
The 22 litres of water for the first Rest are obtained by taking a ratio of 3.2 l/kg. Due to the size of my installation, I have a 'dead volume' of 13 litres, which drops this ratio to 2.0 if my way of calculating is correct. This ratio increases to 3.2 at the 2nd Rest and to 4.0 at the 3rd Rest.
My recipe is a hybrid between two recipes that I found on a French forum brassageamateur.com, adapted to the malts available here. (clone Orval and Dent de Loup)
The ID and FD come from the calculation tool on the brewersfriend site, and this is an area that I don't know, I haven't yet found the formulas for this kind of calculation. By selecting 77% attenuation, I got an ABV of 6.9 vol%. There are only 3 options, 66, 72 and 77%
The BR8 was the only Brett available at the time when the person who could bring it to me in Thailand was in Belgium.
The formulas come from 'How to Brew - John Palmer / Calculations for Boiling Water Additions'.
I have a long experience in distillation and fruit wine (mangoes), but I have never made beer, completely new…
There are many experts on this forum, I thank in advance those who like to criticize my approach.
In fact, I need to attach an Excel file, but does not seem to be possible...
Hope we are allowed to use Google Drive - copy/paste the link to an MS Word document, or Excel sheet and
remove the blanks before docs.google...
https:// docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18pOYAu-KZMyiyjTwbr0B-qdOXeRt3gKL/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=101669576250977321995&rtpof=true&sd=true
