The way you have written that question onke shows you have a very good understanding of the problems of recipe integrity. Nice job
. (A ot of the below won't be news to you so forgive my long reply.)
It's such a shame to see that pretty much every recipe we come across, even in books, magazines, brewing recipe clouds, let alone forums, lack the most critical information to copy/duplicate them with some degree of accuracy.
The BIABacus forces the user into asking the right questions. For example in Section D, it asks for the, 'Volume of Ambient Wort - VAW' (the volume of the wort after flame-out once it is cooled) of the original recipe. It asks this because unless you can determine this critical volume figure from the original recipe, then you really have to start making some very broad assumptions. The problem is, at this point in time, due to prior software, brewers have not been educated into the importance of VAW.
For non-BIABacus recipes (let's call them external recipes) we have to resort to guessing the VAW so as we can get the hop bill right. Here is an analogy...
Imagine you are having ten people over for a cup of tea and you are using a very large tea-pot, if you are using a tea strainer, you might be able to get away with using ten teaspoons of loose leaf tea and serve the whole tea party from the one pot. But, what if you did't have a tea strainer? You would end up wasting a lot of perfectly good tea. It would go down the drain because it would have too many tea leaves in it to be palatable. So, one tea pot would not serve your ten guests and you would also have to use more tea.
Terry Foster is saying, "With this amount of tea (hops) I served ten people," but we don't know if he used a tea strainer or not. In other words, we have no idea on his wastage (trub) in both the kettle and the fermentor. This can be very significant. In other words, depending on how you interpret a recipe, it is not too hard to under or over hop a recipe by 25% or more. In fact it can get worse, as often a recipe will not even tell you what strength of tea leaves were used!
...
From what you and Josh have said above, the 5 gallons is, 'Volume into Packaging - VIP'. I tried to 'look inside' the book but couldn't. So we have to begin an investigative journey. The BIABacus is a brilliant tool for being able to decipher info if we can get any. Josh's suggestion of using the IBU's in the book (does Foster give a total at all) is a good one but it is a last resort as God knows, if he does give total IBU's where he derived them from. So, a few questions...
1. Onke, can you post one of the recipes up here with as much detail as possible? (If we can work out the VAW then I'm sure this would outweigh a copyright breach).
2. Also post any page that gives info on volumes etc.
3. Is the book aimed mainly at extract brewers or all-grain?
4. Are there any clues on how the total IBU's are derived - Tinseth, Rager, Garetz, laboratory, perceived etc?
5. Are there any clues on colour? This is often a great clue.
...
The most important thing though about this thread is that it shows how much time/confusion would be saved if all recipes used
Clear Brewing Terminology and/or, all publishers of recipes at least understood the importance of 'Volume of Ambient Wort - VAW'.
PP
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