Scaling up recipes?

[Paradigm]

Hello all,

I tried searching for this topic, because I'm sure it's been raised before, but I was inundated with people looking for scales. Call it an unfortunate issue with the English language.

Anyway, I found this recipe on here and I'd like to scale it up, just a little, to 6 gallons. I brewed my first 6 gallon batch the other week and I'm in love. I know it's not the most efficient use of resources, but having the ability to dump 1/2 a gallon of boil with the trub makes the beer clearer and the whole processs much more pleasant.

Back on topic. I know scaling recipes is not linear, but I don't know how to do it exactly. Is there a calculator I can use, for example?

Thanks!

 

[Yooper]

Hello all,

I tried searching for this topic, because I'm sure it's been raised before, but I was inundated with people looking for scales. Call it an unfortunate issue with the English language.

Anyway, I found this recipe on here and I'd like to scale it up, just a little, to 6 gallons. I brewed my first 6 gallon batch the other week and I'm in love. I know it's not the most efficient use of resources, but having the ability to dump 1/2 a gallon of boil with the trub makes the beer clearer and the whole processs much more pleasant.

Back on topic. I know scaling recipes is not linear, but I don't know how to do it exactly. Is there a calculator I can use, for example?

Thanks!

It's more than close enough in small volumes like this to just scale up. You can half a batch, double a batch, or even reduce it to one gallon. There isn't any problem doing that. For a 6 gallon batch, just scale it up.

 

[hunter_le five]

I know scaling recipes is not linear

Actually, it's generally pretty linear. The recipe you posted doesn't look too complicated or have any unusual ingredients, so for 5 gallon batches to 6 gallons, you can pretty much just increase everything by 20% and call it a day.

Edit: I see the recipe you linked to is 5.5 gallons. Just increase it by ~9%. Doesn't need to be exact, approximations generally work. (Ex. use 8.75lbs pale malt instead of the scaled up calculation of 8.7272).

 

[Bob]

The grist scales linearly because malt gives you parts per unit of measurement (usually parts per gallon).

Hops, not so much. There are a lot of variables with hops that make scaling a *****. But with the kind of scaling you're talking about, it's not worth obsessing over. If you were going from 5 gallons to 7 bbl or vice versa, well, that's different.

Cheers,

Bob