New to Home Brewing

[Dpk]

I successfully brewed my first small batch (1 gallon), extract IPA. This beer came out so good I now want to scale up this recipe to 5 gallons. I used online software to scale up the ingredients but I'm not sure if the Boil time should change. The small batch recipe (1 lb. single malt, 1 oz. single hop) calls for a 15 minute total boil time. When you scale up a recipe does the boil time have to scale up with it? I'll be using 6.6 times the water, extract and hops.

I'm assuming that if I don't want additional bitterness, a 15 minute boil on a 5 gallon batch is sufficient to sanitize the wort and give me the same flavor/bitterness profile I achieved with the 1 gallon batch. Am I wrong?

 

[RM-MN]

I successfully brewed my first small batch (1 gallon), extract IPA. This beer came out so good I now want to scale up this recipe to 5 gallons. I used online software to scale up the ingredients but I'm not sure if the Boil time should change. The small batch recipe (1 lb. single malt, 1 oz. single hop) calls for a 15 minute total boil time. When you scale up a recipe does the boil time have to scale up with it? I'll be using 6.6 times the water, extract and hops.

I'm assuming that if I don't want additional bitterness, a 15 minute boil on a 5 gallon batch is sufficient to sanitize the wort and give me the same flavor/bitterness profile I achieved with the 1 gallon batch. Am I wrong?

At the boiling point, sanitization of the wort is pretty much instantaneous. The amount of bitterness is related to the alpha acid of the hops and the amount of time that it has at temperature above ~170F with 60 minutes being about as long as bitterness is being added with most of that happening in the first 30 minutes. If you were satisfied with the bitterness with your 1 gallon batch at 15 minutes of boil, then using 5 times as much of the same hop for your 5 times as much wort should give you approximately the same bitterness.

 

[Dpk]

At the boiling point, sanitization of the wort is pretty much instantaneous. The amount of bitterness is related to the alpha acid of the hops and the amount of time that it has at temperature above ~170F with 60 minutes being about as long as bitterness is being added with most of that happening in the first 30 minutes. If you were satisfied with the bitterness with your 1 gallon batch at 15 minutes of boil, then using 5 times as much of the same hop for your 5 times as much wort should give you approximately the same bitterness.

Thanx for the help. This 1 gallon batch came out so good I want to make a bigger batch next time without having to do 5 separate one gallon batches.

 

[nrjones89]

Boil times is one of the things that does NOT scale up. Long hop boils will lead to more bitterness and less hop flavoring. Best thing to do is calculate the IBUs of your batch and scale up from there. Figure out how much bittering hops you need for the boil, and then dry hop or do late boil hop additions.

You're pretty much only boiling the wort for the hops. So if you only have 15 minute hop editions, you're correct that you only need a 15 minute boil.

 

[myndflyte]

If you want, you can post the 1 gallon recipe and your scaled up version and it can at least be a double check that it all looks good.

 

[Dpk]

If you want, you can post the 1 gallon recipe and your scaled up version and it can at least be a double check that it all looks good.

The reason I questioned all of this is because the original recipe is an all extract brew so I wanted to know how everything would translate into a bigger batch. The original recipe is for a six pack of IPA. It calls for 15 Boil w/3qts water, 1lb light dry malt extract, 10g Simcoe for 15 min. and 18g Simcoe at flameout, 3g Safale US05 yeast 1.061 OG/1.010 FG - 53.37IBU

I used online software to increase the batch size and it spit out this:
1.061 OG
1.010 FG
53.36 IBU
5 gallon batch
5 gallon Boil for 15 min.
6.67 lbs Light Dry Malt Extract
66.67g Simcoe for 15 min.
120g Simcoe at flameout
21.25g safale US05 yeast

does this all look right?

 

[brewshki]

that seems correct. you will be using a lot of simcoe though. a positive of boiling for an hour, which would be typical for a 5 gallon batch, would increase your hop utilization and you wouldn't need to use so many hops. you can save a few bucks by doing that.

 

[Velnerj]

If you have the time I'd also suggest cutting back the hop amount and increasing the boil length. But if money isn't a concern, it'll work like this too.

 

[Mothman]

Chiming in for some clarification for myself... if OP did decide to increase the boil time, and reduce the hop dosage to compensate to achieve the same IBU, wouldn't that still change the end flavor?

A 15 minute boil with all of the hops would provide what would normally be considered a late hop flavour profile, right?

Shifting some of those hops to a longer boil, and reducing the overall dosage, while resulting in the same IBU, would also reduce, or alter, the flavour that was provided by the original recipe's late hop dosage, correct?

If that's the case, then while there'd be nothing wrong with doing that, if the OP is looking to match the original flavour as close as possible, I'd think he'd want to stick with the short boil?

 

[brewshki]

Chiming in for some clarification for myself... if OP did decide to increase the boil time, and reduce the hop dosage to compensate to achieve the same IBU, wouldn't that still change the end flavor?

A 15 minute boil with all of the hops would provide what would normally be considered a late hop flavour profile, right?

Shifting some of those hops to a longer boil, and reducing the overall dosage, while resulting in the same IBU, would also reduce, or alter, the flavour that was provided by the original recipe's late hop dosage, correct?

If that's the case, then while there'd be nothing wrong with doing that, if the OP is looking to match the original flavour as close as possible, I'd think he'd want to stick with the short boil?

There will definitely be a change of some kind. It would not be that hard to remedy. Additionally, a longer boil helps to drive off DMS, but that is not what we are really talking about. The 15 minute boil will definitely work, it will just result in increased costs. As an example, I did a short boil half batch of a pale ale I normally brew and I actually had to use more hops than I normally would in a 5 gallon batch with a 60 minute boil. It isn't bad, just inefficient in terms of dollars put into hops.