Scaling ABV

[Hwk-I-St8]

I've been using mostly Brewer's Friend, which has worked out well. I paid and store all my recipes there also. I saw a black friday deal on Brewsmith, so I snagged a license for that too so that I could compare and decide which to use long term.

My question is this: Does either one have a feature to scale a recipe...not by size, but by ABV? Say I found a Wee Heavy recipe that looks good and gets good reviews, but I'd like to brew a beefier version. Is there an easy way in either of those apps to maintain the percentages of the various grains but bump up the quantities to increase ABV?

 

[day_trippr]

Indirectly, yes. When viewing a recipe BS2 provides an "Adjust Gravity" tool in the tool ribbon which ultimately translates to ABV changes.
I haven't used it aside from just clicking on it and seeing what adjusting the OG does to the grain bill but it appears to do what one might expect...or even a bit more, as it adjusts the hop schedule to try to maintain the original IBUs...

Cheers!

 

[kevin58]

I use this all the time. Beersmith has an adjust OG option plus an adjust IBU tool and and adjust SRM tool. I transcribe a lot of historic recipes and I have no idea what efficiency percentage these were calculated at. So I transcribe them as is and then use the provided OG, IBU and SRM numbers to adjust my Beersmith version to match.

 

[Silver_Is_Money]

Since ABV scales relatively quite well to OG, using that as your guide should get you into the right ballpark.

1.040 OG ~= 4% ABV
1.050 OG ~= 5% ABV
1.060 OG ~= 6% ABV
1.070 OG ~= 7% ABV
1.080 OG ~= 8% ABV
Etc...