Quart, US / UK, WTF?

[Kronin]

Okay I got meself a nice pot today for my new foray into steeping / mashing, etc.
It is 32 Quarts and so now I am really confused about the sizes... my carboy and recipes I've made in the past say they are 5 gallons or 23 liters. this is UK gallons then, because 5 US gallons is only 18.9 liters.

I guess I need to fill my carboy with liters, and then dump into pot to find out for sure what this pot holds...

I am more confused also by Orfy's Hobgoblin II clone as it states (in the beersmith file) that it is 18.9 liters..... so actually smaller than the typical 5 UK gallons (23 liters) I usually make?

If I make a recipe (like the hobgoblin) based on 18.9 liters, and top up to 23 liters.... would it have a huge negative effect? the OG would be a lot lower than it should be in that case I think, right? so I need to convert the 18.9 liter recipe to a 23 liter recipe so it comes out proper....

lots of stuff, trying to RDWHAHB but im all out of ready stuff so I am RDWHA-rickards. :cross:

 

[Got Trub?]

You need to convert the recipe to 23 L in order to maintain the balance.

You need to thank Ronald Reagan for backing out of converting the US to the worldwide metric standard...


GT

 

[CBBaron]

In the US the common batch size for beer is 5 US gallons or 18.9 l. Many wine kits claim to make 6 gal or 23 l, although 23 l is slightly larger than 6 gal. And it appears that 6 US gallons = 5 Imperial gallons.

Orfy probably made a 23l batch but scaled the recipe to 5 US gallons for all of us yanks. You should scale the recipe by 6/5 if you wish to maintain the intended results.

Because of the difficulty a dealing with all of these odd measurements I usually use metric measurements myself. It is much easier to do kg and g instead of pounds and oz. Or liters and milliliters instead of gallons and quarts. Especially when you have several different definitions of a quart and gallon.

Craig