Magazine Recipe Scaling in BeerSmith

[hinkensj]

I am wondering what you smart people do about snagging recipes from a magazine and scaling to your system in BeerSmith.

I have a 10 gallon HERMS with keggles for all three kettles. I have an equipment profile created in BeerSmith which works well and gives me accurate results.

When I spot a recipe in BYO, I typically enter it into BeerSmith doubling the ingredients. Then I use the sliders to adjust the SG, SRM, IBU back to what the recipe states.

Brad Smith talks about the ease of scaling for an equipment profile, but that presumes the recipe entered is based on a different profile than what you are using.

Would it make sense to create a "BYO" profile with the batch size and efficiency stated in the magazine the simply use BeerSmith to scale the recipe to my system by selecting my profile from the scaling dialog box? Or am I already doing this in the most efficient way?

 

[55x11]

I am wondering what you smart people do about snagging recipes from a magazine and scaling to your system in BeerSmith.

I have a 10 gallon HERMS with keggles for all three kettles. I have an equipment profile created in BeerSmith which works well and gives me accurate results.

When I spot a recipe in BYO, I typically enter it into BeerSmith doubling the ingredients. Then I use the sliders to adjust the SG, SRM, IBU back to what the recipe states.

Brad Smith talks about the ease of scaling for an equipment profile, but that presumes the recipe entered is based on a different profile than what you are using.

Would it make sense to create a "BYO" profile with the batch size and efficiency stated in the magazine the simply use BeerSmith to scale the recipe to my system by selecting my profile from the scaling dialog box? Or am I already doing this in the most efficient way?

there are small corrections in scaling recipes (deviations from proportional scaling, for example hop utilization and water losses) but efficiency differences are more important.
Creating a separate BYO profile will take care of it for sure but you can also just figure out efficiency correction and add an appropriate fraction of base malt.

What you are doing is probably close enough. My concern is that when you are tweaking for SG, SRM, IBU to get the numbers "just right" you may be affecting the flavors or various balances. You can get to the same SRM in a number of different ways but resulting in very different flavors, for example. Not a big deal for minor adjustments, but generally this approach could be troublesome.

 

[Oginme]

what you are doing is how I enter recipes from any printed source. I once had a generic profile for entering recipes from sources like BCS, but lately have found it easier and faster to enter the recipe as printed into my standard equipment profile and recipe template and then using the sliders to make adjustments as you figured out. In the end, the adjustments to get SRM are pretty minor once you get the OG adjusted to target.

 

[Sadu]

If the recipe lists percentages as well as weights I find it easiest to add the grains with an arbitrary weight then use the grain percent button to enter the percentages. Then adjust gravity and bitterness so it is correct for my system. I find percentages to be a lot more meaningful than weights since I brew different batch sizes.

 

[hinkensj]

I agree that percentages make more sense that actual weights. Easy enough to calculate from the printed recipes. I wish BYO would include that in the recipes--they are almost anal-retentive about listing both imperial and metric measures.

@Sadu: How do you handle the flavor/aroma hop additions when scaling with percentages?

 

[Oginme]

I agree that percentages make more sense that actual weights. Easy enough to calculate from the printed recipes. I wish BYO would include that in the recipes--they are almost anal-retentive about listing both imperial and metric measures.

@Sadu: How do you handle the flavor/aroma hop additions when scaling with percentages?

I thought this way, and then I realized that I was just using the weights in the printed recipe to calculate the percentages. Just as easy to enter the weights and scale to target OG. Saves a calculation step.

For scaling any boil/whirlpool additions, the IBU adjustment will scale all additions based upon IBU contribution of each addition. What is harder is the dry hop or zero IBU contributing additions. For those, I usually scale them based upon the ratio of batch size.

 

[Sadu]

@Sadu: How do you handle the flavor/aroma hop additions when scaling with percentages?

In general I will enter the grain and hops from the recipe, then adjust/scale the grain amounts. This normally results in the IBUs being a few points out so I adjust the IBUs for the 60-20 min additions to match the recipe IBUs. Most of my recipes start from Brewing Classic Styles and Jamil gives the IBU of each addition. Late hops I will leave the weights alone (even when the aa differs from the recipe) for lagers and malty beers, for hoppy beers if there is any doubt ADD MORE HOPS.