Reduced Recipes and Ingredients

[ArmyATCBrewer]

Hey everybody! First post here...I'm a pretty new brewer and I'd like to start experimenting with some different recipes and eventually some of my own. Obviously if I experiment, there's no guarantee that I'll turn out something that I want to drink 5 gallons of so I'd like to cut by at least half and maybe more. The fermentables seem pretty self-explanatory, but how does recipe cutting affect other things like adjuncts, hops, and yeast? Yeast is really my biggest question, but I figured it can't hurt to check on other ingredients, too. Thanks for your help!

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Primary: None
Secondary: None
Bottled: Maple Bacon Smoked Red Ale

 

[freisste]

All ingredients will scale. So if you do a 2.5 gallon batch, jus cut a 5 gallon batch in half. Similarly, it you do a 1 gallon batch divide everything by 5. Always use a yeast calculator like mrmalty.com or yeastcalculator.com for yeast.

Things to be aware of are boiloff and hops utilization. If your recipe was planned for a 3 gallon boil for a 5 gallon batch (assuming a couple gallons of top off water), boiling the full volume will result in better utilization - meaning more bitter beer. Boiloff is also sometimes higher on a smaller batch.

 

[frazier]

I started with a Mr. Beer Keg, which does 2.5 gallons just fine. Find a 5 gallon recipe and cut it in half.

Freisste gives good advice, but I will differ slightly on one small point: Don't bother scaling the yeast, just pitch the whole dang packet in. Those online yeast-pitch calculators are all about splitting hairs. Whatever happened to "Relax Don't Worry ..."?

Cheers,

 

[ArmyATCBrewer]

Awesome! Thank you both for your advice!


Primary: None
Secondary: None
Bottled: Maple Bacon Smoked Red Ale
On Deck: maybe a good IPA...?

 

[Braufessor]

Also - if you use some sort of recipe software (beersmith, iBrewmaster, etc.) they usually have a "scale" option that let's you instantly convert one batch size to another.

 

[ArmyATCBrewer]

Also - if you use some sort of recipe software (beersmith, iBrewmaster, etc.) they usually have a "scale" option that let's you instantly convert one batch size to another.

Awesome! Thank you!


Primary: None
Secondary: None
Bottled: Maple Bacon Smoked Red Ale
On Deck: maybe a good IPA...?