HbgBill

Is not VAP the same thing as VIF..? What I have transferred to the fermenter is the VAP.. or it was in my case. I pitched my 250ml of hydrated yeast into 10.6 Liters of wort.. which actually raises it to 10.85 L.. but, I'm not that critical. I just don't understand the VAP in "O". I need H-E-L-P

PP has an answer for you here, in case you haven't found it yourself.

I saw it.. Thanks Mally

Brew day today, just about to get started and have just finished inputting a Graham Wheelers recipe (Flowers IPA) into Biabacus PR1.3.

As a quick check I set the default Eff to 75% and adjusted my volumes until I had EOBV to 23L which is what GW's recipes are designed to and the grain bill was out by just 14g !! and the hop bill is within 0.9% of the book.

This is absolutely fantastic and a huge for the Biabacus.

With a high integrity recipe you can be 100% sure that the Biabacus will deliver the goods.

Gotta go and brew it so I'll report back later, much later as I want to brew twice !! Timothy Taylor Landlord next if I get time.



Yeasty

listen to trivia music while brewing! Good luck!

Just approaching flame out on the second of two successive brews. Hitting my numbers ( got to double check)

One thing is that on both brews my VIK was 1.2L short (squeezed the bag as well). I'm going to dig up my last few brew records and look into it further. I have noticed it before but paid it little attention as I always hit my VIF due to my super douper syphon/hop filter.

Anyone else seeing the same ?

The Biabacus has a carbonation calculator. I used it for my pilsner that I will be drinking today when I brew. It gives amounts in Corn Sugar.

What if I use regular table sugar? Can it be reset to table sugar?

trout

Trout, if you have a look at the second sheet of the BIABacus called 'Unit Conversion,' in the right hand column towards the bottom, you'll see a section called, 'Priming Sugars.' That will get you sorted on table sugar etc.

You guys think of everything!

What these are for porch is to make gravity readings a bit more transparent. For example, 1.048 /3 means 1.0483. Or if you took a gravity reading and it looked as though it was half-way between 1.048 and 1.049, you would write it as 1.048 /5. (Note that when typing that in, you only need to type 1.0485 - the slash isn't needed.)

When this higher precision is visible, some effects are much easier to see and understand. For example, adding 100 grams of DME in Section N might change the 'Expected Original Gravity' in Section Q from say 1.050 /0 to 1.050 /4. If the extra level of precision wasn't visible, it would look like adding the DME had no effect.

The one danger of having this extra level of precision is that it might lead some brewers to thinking they should be able to take gravity readings to a level of high precision whereas the real truth is that all the readings we home brewers take have a high degree of error.

rpt wrote: Finally, I can fill in the end of boil gravity and the original gravity at pitching. Why would these be different? I haven't added any water to the FV and yet they are different (in fact, the gravity at pitching is higher than the end of boil gravity). Is this just bad temperature compensation on my part?

It is the temperature difference, rpt.

From Pat's post here you can see that ambient is calculated as 5.0 C (41.0 F). That is a big expansion and contraction difference from boil.

rpt wrote: In section L I can enter both KFL and VIF. If I enter VIF (which I can easily measure from the scale on the FV) I would have expedted KFL to be automatically calculated. What have I missed?

Section L is your actuals, this is were you can get very granular, if you like. For some of us, we may want to measure the KFL, e.g. if you no chill and do not include the trub in the fermenter, you can measure this amount.

EDIT: If you chill your wort and siphon, leaving the trub.

rpt wrote: How do I use section Y? In particular, if I add sugar how do I fill this in? As well as calculating the potential extract, does the BIABacus allow for the sugars to be fully fermentable?

rpt, this was covered by PP here. Open the spreadsheet to see the way it's filled out.

Prosts,
~richard

Hey BIABrewer! Hey guys!

I dropped out of the brewing world for months and am finally ready and able to get back in. I downloaded BIABacus PR1.3 and I am very impressed with the work that has gone into it. I'm working with it now to convert Jamil's Wittebrew recipe from "Brewing Classic Styles" to my se

I bottle, not keg. I noticed that the priming sugar calculator gives results as grams of sugar per bottle. I was taught (and believe it is accepted wisdom) to add the full amount of sugar to the bottling bucket and not small amounts of sugar to each bottle. The reason is that it it too easy to get varying amounts of sugar into each bottle when priming them individually.

The brewer can use the priming numbers shown after "Secondary Vol." to get the amount of sugar for a bottling bucket. The (eventual) write-up that goes with the BIABacus should probably mention that secondary = bottling bucket, though. The terminology threw me.

The amount of sugar calculated for "Secondary Vol." and for "Vol. into Keg" are different. I don't understand why they would be different. Is this a bug?

Also, in Section Q Packaging, the number of bottles required did not calculate (i.e., is blank) in the "Bottle Capacity" line, but it does get calculated in the "Secondary Vol." line.

That's all for now.

No explanation, but I ran a new spreadsheet and this time the number of bottles calculated. I guess it depended on a field that I had not filled in.

Dave, Dave, Dave ,

Our long-lost, premier BIABacus Beta Tester . (You might think I have forgotten you but yours is the oldest email in my 'emails I need to reply to' folder .) As always though, forum stuff takes priority so here's a welcome back for you....

1. New Non-Macro Format - Glad to see you are making sense of the new BIABacus. It's quite a change from the ones you saw last with macros and the main info spread over several sheets.

2. "I guess it depended on a field that I had not filled in." - Yep, there are a few fields that need to be completed before you will get an answer there. Other programs will give you priming rates based on estimates and these usually do not even alter when (if you even can) plug in your actuals so dangerous stuff ....

If you don't get an answer from the current BIABacus, it usually means you just have missed 'consciously' inputting an actual figure. It tries to keep you safe. If a number doesn't appear, it will force you to ask questions - just like you have.

3. Priming Figures 1: I agree with you Dave - it doesn't make sense. We have had threads here on this 'keg' priming number while you have been inactive but nothing made sense to me . A search on 'priming' should find those threads I reckon.

4. Priming Figures 2: My latest thoughts on this thing can be found in this post. In other words, we need more user feedback and data. The current BIABacus priming formulas are the best of the best but I think they are based on formulas that no one has ever tested. My suspicion is that the weights recommended would lead to under-carbonation in most, if not all, situations.

Nice to have you back Dave. I hope this isn't just a fleeting visit. All the best ,
PP

PP,

I appreciate the warm welcome. I was afraid your reaction would be the opposite!

I doubt that I have the time to catch up on all the missed posts, so thanks for the post reference.

smyrnaquince wrote:I'm working with it now to convert Jamil's Wittebrew recipe from "Brewing Classic Styles"

Dave, I forgot to mention that with Brewing Classic Style Recipes, just type 22.7 l (6.0 US gallons) into the first field of Section D.

smyrnaquince wrote:I appreciate the warm welcome. I was afraid your reaction would be the opposite!

Send me an email and tell me why . I love the way you see things I never can or could imagine! It's one of the reasons why the BIABacus and I now always say 'fermentor' instead of, 'fermenter.'

Reply via email though as this thread is pretty formal.


PP

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this question. Please let me know if there is a better forum.

Starting with the posted NRB's All Amarillo APA recipe fom BIABacus PR1.3, I played with the efficiency in Section X until I got the Target grain bill to match the one that comes up with the BIABacus default efficiency. I had to set the efficiency to 83.14% to get the grain bills to match.

I understand that BIABacus lets the user adjust pretty much any parameter to match their own setup, but is such a high default efficiency really a good idea? I would have expected new BIABers to be getting in the 70's. Won't this higher default efficiency hurt, rather than help, first-timers? (If you are an experienced BIABer, then you probably know your efficiency and can adjust the spreadsheet accordingly.)

I also noticed that the default efficiency changes with the boil time, with the grain bill going up as boil time goes down. I assume that this is because BIABacus assumes that the extraction efficiency goes down as the mash water volume goes down.

If this last assumption is true, then the accompanying write-up will have to explain how to adjust the parameters in Section X. Let's say that I average a 78% efficiency when mashing for a 90-minute boil. I can set a fixed efficiency of 78%, but then that efficiency will be used for the lower volumes associated with a 60-minute boil, as well. How can I instead set the "Adjust Auto-Efficiency by" value so that I get a 78% efficiency for the 90-minute boil volumes and have this same adjustment be used for a 60-minute boil? The only thing I can come up with is to play with the fixed efficiency until I get the grain bill to match the auto-efficiency grain bill, then subtract that efficiency from my average (78% in this case) to come up with the adjustment to use.

Dave, a bette thread for this might be Advanced BIABacus Pre-Release Questions. Who knows?

I'm not sure what the right place is. You are sort of asking the right questions and the wrong questions. What I think is best is if I ask you to be more specific. In other words, what is it that the BIABacus isn't giving you? You said you had to set the efficiency to 83.14 to get the grain bill to match. Well, I'm not sure where to begin with that. Is your kettle exactly the same as that in the original recipe? Is your EOBV-A exactly the same as the original recipe? Lots more questions.

...

You mention, is such a high default efficiency really a good idea?. Well, there are lots of things to consider here Dave and some of them are new things that you won't be aware of.

But!!! I know you were or should have been aware at one stage of the difference between EIK and EIF. That might need some revision by you because until you let us know if you are talking about 'Efficiency into the Kettle' of 'Efficiency into the Fermentor' we can be up to 40% out of agreement .

So, that's the first thing to study - EIK versus EIF.

EIK is the intelligent efficiency figure to focus on and the default used by the BIABacus is actually a bit low, not high.

Finally, your last paragraph ignores one of the best and biggest breakthroughs of the BIABacus. All other programs force the brewer to literally, 'make up,' an imaginary efficiency figure. The brewer puts in an efficiency figure (which they don't even know is EIK or EIF) and then, the program tells that brwer that they will get exactly that efficiency no matter whether they are brewing a light beer or a an imperial stout!

So Dave, that is the biggest myth we have been busting while you have been away. Efficiency into kettle is a variable, it is not a constant.

In other words, if you are educated right, you will only ever 'set' the BIABacus, auto-efficiency figure to a fixed figure if you have the advanced skills to investigate a recipe.

And, that is another thing that may have happened here since you were here last. We now have the confidence to say that almost any brewing recipe you see published on the internet will lack integrity and probably can't be copied. If you doubt that claim, post a recipe up here and we'll prove why.

So, good questions but also lots of stuff to think on.


PP

Responding in "Advanced BIABacus Pre-Release Questions".

OK, time to finally give my first impressions, although this is really first impressions plus my impression after it all has sunk in.

First impression was confusion and feeling overwhelmed. This is because I was last using BIABacus V2.0 Build 127 and had grown quite comfortable with it. Gone were flow and fields I had known. Gone was my ability to enter pounds and ounces. Now I had a spreadsheet that was dense with information and that stretched beyond my screen limits in both directions.

But, I started using it. First, I cut off the other end of my metal ruler so I could measure from zero on the metric scale. (The ruler has metric up one side and English units in the other direction up the other side.) OK, now I can measure my pot depth in cm. While I am at it, I re-measure my pot in cm rather than converting from inches. BIABacus displays English units for all the metric ones, so not only can I verify my measurements, but I can do a sanity check at any point based on my experience with the other units of measurement.

Desired VIF. This one I have to convert into metric. I had to play with this number with the old BIABacus because what I am really interested in is the VIP, so no big loss. And, I only have to do this once for my setup.

I discover that I don't need to convert grain weights to grams for the source recipe. Entering pounds works just as well, because BIABacus really just uses the numbers to obtain ratios.

Hops. Well, that is the one weight measurement that I do have to convert. No way around it, but the Unit Conversion tab helps a lot. I only wish I could copy and paste the result from this page. The Hop Bill let me explicitly call out boiled, FWH, and dry hop. Nice.

I can adjust the extract potential for the lactose in my stout recipe so it is taken into account when calculating grain weights for hitting the OG.

While re-measure my pot in cm, I finally realize that the bottom is not flat. Then I find the Kettle Shape Adjustments in Section X. After figuring out how to use them (dump 1 liter of water into pot, measure center depth, enter 1 liter and center depth into Section X), I now have allowed for the curved bottom of my pot. Brilliant!

Certain fields do not get calculated until others (actuals) are entered, but there is no way to tell which ones need to be entered. I think it would clutter the spreadsheet too much to indicate these needed fields, especially because different ones are needed to calculate different result fields. Perhaps there could be a Dependencies tab that lists a fields that are calculated and which ones are needed to do the calculations. On second thought, no--half the spreadsheet is calculated off of other values. Probably best here to let it go as-is, perhaps with a note in the manual that actuals need to be entered into the Brew Day to Packaging column for certain fields to be calculated.

I take a few more passes through the spreadsheet and now I am understanding it, even getting somewhat comfortable with it.

Tried printing so I did not have to have my laptop in the kitchen on brew day. Not so good. Guess I'll have to wait for the Print Checklist tab to get finished.

So, my overall impression is that BIABacus is at first daunting, but with a little work it becomes useable. With a little more work, it becomes pretty much everything that I need.

I think that the BIABacus is a high hurdle for a first time AG brewer, but not too bad if coming to BIAB from traditional AG brewing. When the manual is written, having a section that steps through how to enter a recipe and use the spreadsheet would be very good.

My biggest disappointment: not discovering bugs to report. WAIT! I just found one! On the Unit Conversion tab, under Priming Sugars, the second note about demera sugar should have a period (.) at the end of the sentence and not a greater-than sign (>). Wow, do I feel proud of myself for finding such a trivial mistake!

Final rating: