Scaling All Grain Recipes for Small Batches

[Tommy M]

Hey All,

I would like to jump into all-grain brewing. I also would like to work in small batches (preferably 1 gallon)

Do recipes scale linearly? Or is it more complicated than that?

e.g. Can I take a 5 gallon recipe and just use 20% of each ingredient?

Thanks,

 

[Renegade Brewer]

Recipes scale very easily especially if you break down your original to percentages.

I use my 15 gallon recipes to build our 5 gallon kits that end up on the shop floor and just scale them back and convert them to extract.

Also brewing software such as beer smith will help with this and make the math a little easier

 

[BGHSmt7]

You can scale linearly, but specialty grains don't scale that way. I'd recommend using a program like beersmith and using that to scale your recipe
http://beersmith.com/order/

 

[Leezer]

I use Brewers Friend to scale down 5G recipes to 2G, I find it to be pretty user friendly. Sometimes I have to make small adjustments to the grain and hops amounts to match the recipe's OG and IBUs.