PistolPatch wrote:iijakii: Great to hear it was fantastic! Good on you. Just worked out what 62 quarts means :D - 60 L (The Converter doesn't seem to like quarts or qt ). You should be fine doing what you propose though you'll have to add some top-up water. I do 11 kg in a 70 L pot regularly. I just add the extra when I can after I pull the bag and during the boil. Go for it!

pkearney wrote:Hi I would appreciate some help with this conversion ,it is a dry stout from Jamils book .I have made it as Partial .Want to try BIAB
OG 1.042
ADF 75%
IBU 41
60 min Boil
Boiler is 40 l
Dia 35.5cm
3170 g British pale ale Malt
900g flaked Barley
450 g Black roasted barley
Hops Kent Goldings 5% AA 60 min 57 g
Pre boil Vol 26.5 l
Thanks Phill

Welcome to BIABrewer Phill!

Jamil's and John's "Brewing Classic Styles" book is great and deserves a place on every brewer's shelf.

I have done your recipe conversion but there are some explanations that I'm not happy with. (For a start, it's way too long ). Will try and post it up better in a day or two. If you want the long, not well-written answer, PM me and I'll send it through .

Converting recipes is sort of easy once you know how. Using software and spreadsheets and explaining their nuances to a third party sometimes gets a little mind-boggling! There's actually something not adding up in my answer to you that I can't put my finger on now - it's either an error in The Calculator I haven't noticed before or an error in me. Let me give my brain a rest and get back to you.

Cheers,
PP

Hey Phill

PP rang me with a concern about the recipe here.
I'm a little suss about the 12.5% Black Roasted Barley. Roasted barley is the single quantifiable difference between a stout and a porter. Even then there is not much in it, and a 'porter' can still (carefully) contain some roasted barley. This recipe seems though, a little two dimensional. Without knowing volumes/IBUs I'm still pretty sure that that's not a stout I'd like to drink.
BLACK anything malt is BURNT. Imagine the burnt taste that takes over a soup or nap sauce that's cought and burnt on the bottom.
I'd be really careful adding 12 percent of anything that wasn't a 'base' type malt to anything I'm making. A stout of any kind has it's roots in a "Stout Porter", having said that, later porters were pale malt and burnt sugar! . But I'm still really suss about 12% Black stuff in a beer.
Dry or not, my gut call would be to build a well structured grain bill (porter) with anything and everything from pale to brown to chocolate to even some darker types crystals. Then I'd use the mash and/or yeast to organise body type issues. You can't make a good pizza on a crap base, as you can't make a good APA on a crap malt profile .
Mash it low (dry), and use a London type yeast (dry), and you'll have a drier stout with plenty of character (forgiving).
Hope that helps Phill, give us a PM for a chat if you like (phone beer).
Cheers Lloydie

Hi there smilinggilroy and welcome to BIABrewer.info,

Congratulations on your first brew. Great to hear it was a tasty one. A good all-grain recipe with an accurate thermometer will nearly always give tasty beer even with a few fumbles .

What I think I'll do here is convert your first recipe and then let you have a crack at the the second one as the same process will apply. You'll almost certainly have some questions though so feel free to post them - recipe conversions are always a bit tricky. For example...

Your original recipes have no volume figures provided. They do however provide an original gravity figure. As I mentioned in this thread earlier, all software gives different original gravity figures so unless we have the original software program, we just have to use the figure provided. In your first recipe, 1.061 is this figure.

So...

The first thing I'm going to do is plug the following figures into The Calculator.

On Sheet 1 (Volumes etc.) I'm putting Brew Length = 25 L (you'll see that this will give you 27 L into the fermenter which you'd like), Original Gravity = 1.061 and Diameter of Kettle = 34.3 cm.

On Sheet 2 (Grain Bill) I am going to type in all the original recipe's grain weights which The Calculator automatically converts to suit the volume and gravity we desire in column G. The total in cell G5 says 7923 g and this will be automatically copied back to Sheet 1. (Make sure you delete any percent figures that appear in Column B.) The amounts of grain you need can now be seen Cells G5 to G12.

On Sheet 3 I am going to type in all the orignal recipe's hop weights, AA percentages and times in columns, B, C and G. I'm also going to type in 4.5 in column J. Column I will now tell you the weight of hops you need assuming the hops you have are also 4.5% AA. If not, change the values in J* and J9.

Your recipe is now converted but....

If you go back to Sheet 1 in Cell B21 you will see your Approximate Mash Volume is 50.97 L but you only have a 40 L urn!

What should you do?

I'm going to start another post on this otherwise the above is going to be way too hard to read etc.

In the meantime, I have attached The Calculator file for your first recipe.

Okay, as mentioned, the results in The Calculator file at the end of the last post show that your urn is not big enough to full volume mash this recipe.

The first thing I am going to do is play around with the Brew Length figure (Cell B5) on Sheet 1 until the Approximate Mash Volume cell (B21) comes out at about 35 L.... 17.5 L gets pretty close. When I look at the Water Required is (Cell B20) it says 31.46 L. Now I am going to change the Brew Length figure back to 27 L. Water required now says 45.33 L. 45.33 L - 31.46 L = 13.87 L so...

You have about 14 L you can't include in your mash. There are many ways to deal with this. Here's a couple...

1. The easiest way is to add the 14L after you pull your bag and during the boil when and as you can. If you do this, your efficiency will be a bit lower as you are "washing" the grain with less liquid. If you decide on this then change the efficiency figure on the spreadsheet from 79% to say 72%. This will mean you'll have to use 9388 g of grain rather than 8557. I am of course guessing a bit here but it is not a bad way to go.

2. You can dump your bag into your food-grade bucket and add 14 L of water that you have just boiled into the bucket. The high temp should cause no problems if pH is right and will probably only raise the grain temp to that of mash out temps if you are lucky I reckon. Give it a stir and then hang your bag so it drains. Add what you get into this "sparge bucket" as and when you can during the boil. Try to make sure these runnings get boiled for at least 60 minutes - you may have to do some of it on your stove or something :(.

Hope the above helps a bit. As I said, recipe conversion is not easy. I've been trying to work out a simple, "how to," in this thread but every time someone posts a recipe there seems to be one bit of info missing from the original recipe that throws something new at my latest "how to" template .

I think we're getting close . People asking questions here speeds up the process so don't hesitate to ask them smilinggilroy.

Cheers mate,
PP

Sorry about the slow reply sg - busy weekend...

I'm getting a 1.423 k difference as the original is adding up to 6500 g rather than 6100 g. I also couldn't find any volume or efficiency figures in the original recipe so had to work off the original gravity figure supplied. There's definitely two, possibly three, things happening here assuming that there are no errors in the original recipe...

Batch Size: The original recipe's batch size I am now assuming to be 28 L and I am assuming that the original brewer means their volume at the end of the boil. Our converted recipe has an end of boil volume of 31.5 L. I made this higher as I knew you wanted to get 27 L into your fermenter. If I reduce the converted recipe so it matches the volume of the original, the grain bill required drops to about 7000 g.

This still leaves a 500 g discrepancy so...

Original Gravity Calculation: The calculation for this varies from software to software. The Calculator uses a standard gravity formula but often reads 2 - 3 points lower than Beersmith. If I knock 3 points off the original gravity, we now need about 6700 g to give an end of boil volume of 28 L of wort at 1.058.

So we are now down to a 200 g discrepancy...

Efficiency: As the original brewer did not provide any volume or efficiency figures, we had to guess these. If there efficiency was 81% (two points higher than ours) then this would drop our grain bill to 6500 g.

In cases like this, if you can't correspond with the
original brewer, you have to make some educated guesses. It could be even something as simple as a typo in the figures they provided you.

Don't worry about it too much. The Calculator will get you in the ballpark and with enough info from the original recipe, will often get you spot on.

I'll attach another spreadsheet with the changes mentioned above but I would still work off the first one I posted.

Cheers mate,
PP

smilinggilroy wrote:Hi Pat,
I can do a "Dunk Sparge" (I think it's called that) with water from stove top using a stock pot and a huge megga squeeze of the bag.

The problem with the first "dunk" sparge you do is not knowing if you will be able to fit your bag into the "dunk" vessel without it overflowing. If I ever do a sparge, this is what I do...

1. Heat required volume up (in your case 14 L) to about 80 C. (If I am not doing a mash out in the main pot, then I would bring this water up to boiling point and then let it cool off a little.)

2. Dump bag in a bucket - preferably a wide one especially if you are double batching - then open the bag.

3. Pour as much as you can in of the 14 L. Hopefully you will get all of it in but you'll need probably a 30 L bucket to do this comfortably. If not, just pour what you can't fit in straight into the main kettle.

4. Give the grain a good mix up and then hang it as your main kettle approaches the boil. When the main kettle starts boiling, give the bag a bit of a squeeze, (you don't have to do much, just enough so as it isn't dripping everywhere) and then dump the bag.

5. Add your yield to the main kettle and then bring it back to the boil.

If, as in your case, your equipment is not large enough to do a full-volume mash, try and make sure you have a bucket big enough to do the above. If you have a pot big enough, then you can of course skip the bucket and do a "dunk" sparge i.e. drop the bag straight into the 14 L of hot sparge water.

So, that's todays' reading for you sg . Hope it makes some sense - fingers crossed!
PP

Good to see you are questioning your ways iijakii ...

(I used The Converter to read your post and it worked perfectly so I will talk in metric below and assume this ease is reciprocated - don't use it in Internet Explorer though )

I have a 70 L pot/kettle and nearly always now brew double batches. A 62 L pot/kettle will do a 30 L batch (volume at end of boil - not into fermenter) easily if I am reading your figures correctly. (Straight away we are stepping into terminology problems!)

My advice is that if you can mash your grain with all the volume of water required then you should do so. This is the primary purpose of BIAB - it is a single vessel, full-volume brewing method that will produce quality all-grain beer. BIAB has produced gold medals in this format so why change the formula?

There are two reasons to sparge I can readily see, one is valid and one is not when we are talking about quality ingredients...

1. If you cannot fit all your liquor (mash plus sparge water) into your pot with your crushed grain then you might consider sparging but not for a while*.

2. If you want to, "record," high efficiency figures into the 90's plus more, then you can easily do this by a variety of, "tricks." I am a bit worn out tonight so describing the tricks let alone the fallacies of extremely high efficiency figures is not something I want to get into.

The expression. "dunk-sparging," should not be readily used for reasons I mentioned in my last post to this thread as there are several ways to sparge with, "dunk-sparging," being the least practical and the least efficient though there may be situations where I am incorrect on this.

* The only time I would recommend a new brewer to experiment/investigate or use sparging is if their kettle was significantly small. New brewers who have this dilemma should read the Mini and Maxi BIAB Guides that Ralph has written. Studying these will serve those brewers well but there is more 'work' involved in some ways.

So, iijakii, I reckon full-volume brew the beer if you can and forget the sparging! Why? Because it is the easiest, most uncomplicated, and proven advice I can offer and it yields higher in efficiency than most other methods without complicating a thing.

If I have misread your volume figures then let me know otherwise I think my advice is sensible.

iijakii,
PP

You de man!

You replied before I even finished my edits - hope I haven't made too many errors. It was a bit of a ramble

It's a great subject and I will ramble on it more I'm sure, here and there

Yeah, PP's quite right, only consider sparging if you can't do full- volume BIAB in your kettle, it makes MaxiBIAB possible with reasonable efficiency.

Efficiency shouldn't be the aim of novice brewers though, it is only something to be concerned about after the first decade of brewing...

Not hard to tell when I am having a few beers while posting. I sound like a bloody know it all lecturer

Hashie has started a thread Mythbusters which I'm sure will end up being a good one to subscribe to.

I should also say that when I mentioned above that there are tricks to get your efficiency into the 90's, this comment has some truth in it but not as much as I implied. Whilst tricks can be applied to get an extra few points in efficiency all through the mashing, sparging and kettle draining process, there are only a few that can be done to affect "mash" efficiency in BIAB and they are pretty ridiculous . For example, you could increase your boil time as this means you will have more liquor to mash with. Another is to keep draining your bag throughout the entire boil. These, of course, are silly things that I hope no one would even consider.

Adding a heap of trub to your fermenter is a way of significantly, "fudging," your, "into fermenter," efficiency. You get the idea...

The point I probably should have made is that when it comes to reading figures from other brewers, you should not treat them as being accurate. Some know it all lecturer has made a post here and a poll here that might help explain why.


PP

iijakii wrote:I'll take another reading tomorrow when transferring from cubes but unless I botched my hydrometer adjust temperature calculations, which is entirely possible since I was a bit toasty from some homebrew , I hit over my SG and well into the 80s efficiency wise.

NME came over here the other day and we did a double batch and scored an efficiency into the kettle well in the 90's. I can't remember the exact figure - NME might. This is certainly not the first time. I once scored an efficiency of well over 100 but put this down to some sort of error though I was fully confident of my measurements.

I get really confused on this whole subject. I keep advising people to work on averages. I think this is good advice. But, the reality is that even when I have had two or three brewers checking everything, I have often had wildly varying efficiencies.

I have done well over 100 AG brews - probably closer to 200. The fact that on the brews where I make a conscious decision to measure well and double -check (usually with another brewer) my yields vary so wildly is probably the most fascinating and disturbing thing I find in brewing.

We probably should talk about it more to make sure it is not just me ,
PP

It's one of those things Siggi.

My average is 83% But I only take one reading and one measurement. I measure the end of boil volume and the OG of the wort once it has cooled. These are the figures I use to calculate end of boil efficiency. I do it this way because I feel it removes ambiguity, as well as confusion from multiple measurements/readings.

Don't start PP on efficiency, he loves talking and he loves talking on efficiency most

Those figures are probably correct sig so good on you.

hashie wrote:Don't start PP on efficiency, he loves talking and he loves talking on efficiency most

Especially after a few beers. At these times, I tend to exagerrate things a little as well

G'day woopig and welcome to the forum,
Without having the spreadsheet in front of me, from memory the actuals columns are spaces to enter in your results, so you can keep track of your figures and it gives you an average so you can refine your brewday for any given recipe.
I know PistolPatch will correct me if I'm wrong . If I'm correct I hope it helps.
Cheers

Hi there and welcome woopig . Very good of you to wade through this thread and then still have enough energy to make such a positive post - good on you!

wiz, you did a lot better than I could have without having the spreadsheet in front of me. I saw woopig's post this morning before leaving for work and would have posted exactly the same as you. Now I have it up in front of me, I can see that woopig is asking about the bottom parts of The Calculator. I haven't had a good look at these sections for a while so Woopig's brief and nicely worded question gives me a good excuse to examine these parts of the spreadsheet in detail while I am having a beer. This will, unfortunately for him, mean a long post so my apologies in advance woopig .

Okay firstly woopig, Section B and C on the first sheet, 'Volumes,' of The Calculator, will only work for straight-sided kettles - i.e. stock pots. You probably knew this but I thought I better make sure.

So, what these sections assume is that you will use a long metal ruler to measure your volumes in such a pot. Let's have a look at Section B...

Section B

Kettle Calibration Figure: The figure in cell D26 tells you how many cms of water you should add to your straight-sided kettle to add 1 litre. In the case of a pot with a diameter of 45cms, if you wanted to add 1 litre of cold water to your pot, you would fill it until your ruler said 6.3 mm (0.63 cm). The figure in D26, the kettle calibration figure, is used for most of the other calculations in sections B and C. The forumula is a bit hard to back-track follow but is based simply on the mathematical formula for the volume of a cylinder.

End of Boil Volume: This figure tells you how many cms of water should be in your kettle at the end of the boil. It allows for approximatley 4% 'swelling' of near boiling wort. Near boiling wort takes up more space than cold water and this formula saves you having to get out your calculator and adjust for this.

Start of Boil Volume: This figure tells you how many cms of water should be in your kettle at the start of the boil and the formula makes the same allowances for 'swelling' as described immediately above.

Water Required is...: This tells you how many cms of cold water you should add to your kettle before you mash in.

Water Required (at mash temp): Water doesn't just suddenly 'swell' at boiling point, it expands exponentially as the temperature increases. The cms listed in cell D30 allows for this and will tell you how many cms your ruler should read at around 65 C. This is a handy figure for brewers who add water slowly to their kettle while still applying heat. For example, you might add water to your kettle by bucket but like to start warming your water as soon as the first bucket is in to save a bit more time. I use this figure all the time as I have an instantaneous hot water system so can add water to my pot at about 50C. In these latter two cases, using the figure in cell D29 would be incorrect.

Section C - the bit wiz mentioned

This section is based on the same logic/formulae as section B but here, you can type in the cms you really got on your brew. There are really only two figures to ever fill in here. They are F27 (how many cms you had in your kettle at the end of your brew) and F28 (how many cms you had in your kettle at the beginning of the boil. F29 and F30 would, in all brews that I can envision, be unnecessary as these are totally controllable.

F28 you should fill in as that will then tell you in cell G28 how many litres you have left in the kettle after pulling the grain bag. In other words, this figure can be used to determine your liquor loss due to grain absorption.

F27 you should fill in as that will tell you in cell G28 how many litres you have left in the kettle after boiling. In other words, this figure can be used to determine your wort loss due to evaporation.

The results you get in G27 and G28 should then be manually copied to the section below...

The Actuals Section (top right)

As any single figure on any single brew should not be trusted, this section allows you to build up some averages over 5 brews. All the figures in this green area, not just those from G27 and G28, need to be typed in manually. Cells J5 to J21 will tell you the average figures of the brews you have typed in so far.

Once you have done five brews, you can look for any big discrepancies and determine if they were measurement errors etc. You might like to, after five brews, transfer your averages to say cells L5-L21 and then do another 5 brews and see how the 'new' average compares with the old. You could even create new parts of the spreadsheet to store info on double batches or heavy beers. Spreadsheets are good like this as they are flexible/adapatble.

I hope the above is not too long-winded woopig or, should I say, 'guinea pig,' . You asked for a 'dumbed down' explanation. A lot of brewing stuff isn't easy or clear especially when you are starting out. As you get a few brews under your belt you actually realise that many areas of brewing lack clarity - a lot of advice is anecdotal, very rarely measured or tested so, like you, I love dumbed down (clear) explanations.

The above is probably more long than clear though . So, make sure you keep asking questions. One day we might actually come up with something brief and clear that covers all situations. That'd be nice!

Cheers and welcome woopig,
PP

G'day natept and welcome to the forum ,

I'm a bit short on time today to look up where the above figures come from but they are definitely incorrect. The Calculator will increase or decrease all the grains equally percentage-wise. It's quite possible I made a mistake or typo in the base malt figure.

When I get time, I'll try and find the post that has the figures you are referring to.

BIAB will have a slightly reduced grain bill given the same end of boil volume as BIAB gets around 79% efficiency as compared to the 75% J & J work on in their book. The Calculator is set up though to allow quite large losses to trub so as to give beginners a bit more leeway. Because of this, often a recipe will require more grain as we will be ending up with more volume to give that leeway. Does that make any sense .

Cheers mate,
PP