Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing Water Volumes

• • SVA Brewer With Over 20 Brews From United States of America
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

Happy New Year Steve ,

When converting/copying any recipe, we are, of course trying to determine the correct weight of malt and hops to use. Malt is pretty easy. All you really need are the percentages of malts used and the original gravity.

Nearly every single recipe you come across in the brewing world though lacks enough information to copy the hop bill accurately.

To copy/duplicate a hop bill of a recipe with some degree of accuracy, the following information is needed...

A. Time of the hop additions
B. Weight of the hop additions
C. Alpha acid percentage of the hop additions
D. The 'Volume of Ambient Wort - VAW' (in other words, the 'Volume at Flame-Out (VFO) once chilled.
E. What type of chilling was used and when it was employed.

That's the bare minimum and most recipes will not provide the above. Of secondary importance is how the wort was chilled but let's forget that one for now.

The numbers and times you have quoted above are not important for us BIAB'ers (assuming you are able to full-volume brew / simultaneously mash and sparge with all your water). Putting all the above together, what we need are...

The Seven Most Basic Keys for Scaling a Recipe (Most recipes do not provide this.)

1. Original gravity required.
2. Percentages of malts used (and preferably weights as well)
3. Time of the hop additions
4. Weight of the hop additions
5. Alpha acid percentage of the hop additions
6. The 'Volume of Ambient Wort - VAW' (in other words, the 'Volume at Flame-Out (VFO) once chilled.
7. What type of chilling was used and when it was employed.

Of course, mashing temperatures, yeast, fermentation times etc are also of utmost importance but these are generally irrelevant to scaling.

What You Need to Do

I don't have the book but just had a 'Look Inside' at Amazon. (Looks like a great book actually. I think the title probably does it a disservice). Unfortunately I couldn't get a look at any one recipe. If I was able to, I can often use information in the recipe and the BIABacus to make a good guess at number 6 above. VAW is missing form nearly all recipes. Number 7, I have never seen except in a BIABacus report so don't hold your breath for that info.

We may be able to come up with a simple formula but the first step will be if you can let us know what info above of 1 to 7 that the recipes do give?


PP

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

• • SVA Brewer With Over 20 Brews From United States of America
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

Sorry for the slow reply Steve . Between working and having to subsequently re-hydrate in temperatures of up to 108 F (42 C), I have had to drink a lot of light beer lately and so am short on time (to reply) and hands (to type) .

That's great detail above . The way you have written the post makes everything really fast and easy to get to the heart of. Top job .

I imagine Randy won't mind us exploring/publishing the recipe in the hope that if we can come up with key number 6, it might encourage people to buy the book. (Click on the Amazon banner for this site if you do ).

Key number 6 is Volume of Ambient Wort (VAW). I'm going to thrown the info you have given me above into the BIABacus and use a few things in the BIABacus to see if I can make a decent guestimate of what the VAW is.

...

Okay, here is the BIABacus file in 'Recipe Detective Mode'.

BIABacus PR1.3T - Recipe Detective Mode - shetc - Basic Drinkers - Batch A0.xls

See how I changed some things in Section X? I forced the auto kettle efficiency to 75 and the kettle to fermentor loss to 0. The former I got from your notes above and the latter basically changes the VIF in Section B to the VAW. I was expecting to have to type, in Section B's VIF (which now means VAW - see prior two sentences), a higher number than 5 gallons because is many recipes, 'Yield' is regarded as VIF.

See how the left and right hand weights of the grain in Section C basically match? This gives me a very good indication that the VAW i 5 galons (not 5.5 or 6). The 49 IBU's in the recipe do not match the 45 in the BIABacus but this could be for many reasons (different formula used and/or formula error in other programs and/or different utilisation assigned to flowers in original program.)

What You Need To Do

Just delete the 75 and 0 in Section X and then change the VIF in Section B to whatever you want.

Also, delete 'See my Post' and 'PE' on the right hand side of Section D.

And, as far as I can tell, from now on use 18.93 L on the first line of Section D for all your future Randy Radical recipes.

Other Notes

Ignore Randy's instructions to mash for only 60 minutes. This will apply to three vessel brewers who will be mucking around sparging etc for at least 30 mins after they mash. You mash for 90 mins.

Randy's says reduce hop weights by 25% if using pellets and not whole flowers. There's a lot of debate on this. See on the right hand side of Section D where I wrote 'PE'? This only reduced the weight of hops by 10%. This seems to be the standard but it would be a great question to ask Randy about if anyone can do that. Personally I have no experience with flowers.

I think Randy would be recommending the immersion chiller because it is the fastest method of knocking the whole wort down to cool temps and locking in flavour and aroma. Immersion chilling is very eay to replicate as is no-chiling. Funnily enough it is counter-flow chilling and plate chilling that probably provide the most variables and are harder to replicate (and clean!)


PP

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing Water Volumes

• • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

Absolutely superb, PistolPatch

Don't worry about the delay -- I once visited Queensland in December so I can imagine how hot it is (drank lots of VB).

I have finished the book -- I highly recommend it to you. BTW, is there a general issue displaying recipes from books on the InterWeb?

Thanks again,

Steve

• • SVA Brewer With Over 20 Brews From United States of America
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

Thanks for the thanks guys - much appreciated. And welcome to the forum RedWino .

Steve, displaying recipes from any book, I would almost certainly think, is a breach of copyright law. So, if you wanted to play it safe, you wouldn't do it at all. Looking from the owner of the intellectual property's point of view, I think they would see that we are well-intentioned here and actually trying to increase sales of their books.... In other words, I'm sure that they wouldn't mind this sort of thread which I think would create a few sales as well as making the book easier to use for existing owners.

On this site, in official BIABrewer threads, if a recipe is used from a book, the publisher is contacted first. I'll buy the book and see if I can find a recipe that BIAbrewer could use as an official recipe.


PP

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

• • SVA Brewer With Over 20 Brews From United States of America
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0

Hi Guys,

Finally got around to reporting on the results for my attempt at Randy Mosher's Belgian American IPA. This beer is composed mainly of Belgian malts, noble hops for aroma and flavor, and Belgian yeast. The only American bit really is the use of American bittering hops. Based on his suggestions, the fermentation temperature was kept relatively low for Belgian yeast, and the rind of 1 grapefruit was added at the end of boil. It's been about 5 weeks since I kegged this beer, and she's starting to drink really nicely -- lovely mouthfeel, malty start with a nice peppery/grapefruit finish. Each of his recipes recommends a maturation period -- I think these recommendations need to be followed as the beer was just too funky on the finish when it was just a couple of weeks in the keg. As far as being somewhat like an American IPA, not so much -- I have communicated with Randy about this and he reminded that the book was written in 2004 so the hop strength of IPA has moved on (his book also suggest swapping the American and noble hops around during the boil to see what happens). I have attached my version of the recipe in BIABacus format (note that I have the strike water temp adjustment factor up to 4 in Section X). So thanks to Pat for all the help with this recipe, and I think his adjustments should work for other recipes in Randy's book.

Cheers,

Steve

• • SVA Brewer With Over 20 Brews From United States of America
  • Quote
• • • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    • 0