Recipe Advice/Check - SMASH MO/Mosaic

Post #1 made 5 years ago
Hi Folks,

Recently joined this excellent forum and have been soaking up as much info as I can before posting my noob questions! I have a 31L SS pot and an 8kW gas burner and am hoping to start some SMASH brews very soon. My pot size will allow for about 12L VIF which is fine for now. I'd like my first brew to be a Marris Otter/Mosaic SMASH running at about 5% ABV and 40-50 IBU. I've been playing around with Biabacus and there are still a few things I haven't quite figured out. I copied in a recipe and used these figures to adjust for my grain and hop bills, then set my desired IBUs a little higher. Would appreciate if someone could throw their eye over my attached recipe and provide some feedback as to how it looks generally.

Thanks for your help,

Alan
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Re: Recipe Advice/Check - SMASH MO/Mosaic

Post #3 made 5 years ago
Alan,

Good job on filling the BIABacus in so far :thumbs:

First question I must ask, Is your kettle really as wide and short as you have entered in Section B??? (Snapshot below)
The BIABacus shows your corresponding evaporation rate in Section K as 8.07 L or 2.13 gallons due to the very large surface area. If the dimensions are reversed, the evap rate changes.

In Section C -
You do not need to fill in both of the OG boxes, one will do (filling in both is OK)
You can delete the EBC values for the unused blank malts as they don't add anything here.

In Section D the hop bill-
first box to the right of the name of the hop is for its form, and P for pellets works, but blank = pellets, too
On the right side you only need to enter the changes from the left side, not all the duplicate info (name, %AA, etc)

Section G has a box for whether you use a hopsock or not. Leaving it blank as you did = N for NO.
If you choose to use a hopsock, you'll find that you will need less grain because you will get less trub, more liquid potency throughput toward your target volume into fermenter. Try switching back and forth among blank, N and Y - notice it olnly impacts the grain bill, not the hops bill.

Lastly, for now, I recommend the 90 minute mash for optimum extraction of good things from your grist. The 90 minute boil sort of goes with that as part of BIAB. I have posted elsewhere on the forum about graphs that show more extraction of starches with a 90 min mash than with a shorter (60) mash time. Longer than 90 min? Diminishing returns...

Keep at it, the BIABacus has a learning curve, but it will get easier.
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Re: Recipe Advice/Check - SMASH MO/Mosaic

Post #4 made 5 years ago
Thanks for the replies guys, much appreciated. My pot is actually that wide - I picked it up cheap just to get a few brews under my belt, and will hopefully upgrade in the near future. The down side of the large diameter is the ridiculous evaporation rate - 8L out of 24, so 30%! When I reverse the diameter/depth the evap rate is closer to 15%. I'll definitely be brewing this in the shed or outside to prevent the kitchen being mistaken for a sauna. In terms of hop sock or not, is it a case of a less than perfect hop infusion with it, but less trub and less grain required? Also, in the hop bill section, I can see the dry hopping and flame out addition don't contribute to the IBU - is there a ball park level for percentage of hop bill used for dry hopping (50% too high??) or is it down to personal preference? I like hoppy beers, but maybe that figure's too high? Out of curiosity, where does the final gravity figure come from? I can't seem to influence it by changing any other figures.

Cheers,

Alan

Re: Recipe Advice/Check - SMASH MO/Mosaic

Post #5 made 5 years ago
Alan,
Your roasting pan-shaped kettle will be an interesting story. :think:
A hop sock should provide enough volume to accommodate all the expanded hop pellets you will put into it. That way there will be enough fluid movement through the wet hops to extract and disperse what the hops provide. If packed too tightly in a small hop sock, the interior of the ball might get wet, but what you are trying to extract will not get far enough to get out. Also, the material of the hop sock can be the same as your BIAB bag. If you use a paint strainer mesh bag or muslin, the spaces allow more hops matter to pass through and you will get more trub.
IBUs (Tinseth scale in the BIABacus) come from hops time above ~75 ºC. 60 minutes in the boil is usually enough time to get maximum IBUs from what you put in. Shorter times in the boil will provide less bitterness than the maximum that can be had. The BIABacus is amazing in how it does those calculations. How long after Flame Out will your hopped wort be above 75 ºC? That’s up to you. It keeps the window open a little for slightly more bitterness. The hops charged to the kettle near and at FO and later (DH) don’t contribute to IBUs in the BIABacus. Using high %AA bettering hops at 60 min in the boil means you will use fewer grams than low %AA hops at 60 min and the flavor difference is supposed to be small or not noticeable since flavor hops are added later.
There are other ways that hops are added, but that is for future brews.
Personal preference from experience will be your guide on how much of what kind of hop flavors you want in the finished product. And the hop contribution does change over time after packaging. The hoppy beers you like might have high IBUs and lots of flavor/dry hops or they might have high IBUs only, and they might have low IBUs and tons of flavor/dry hops. It can be anything.
The FG comes from the OG and the yeast and the mash temp and the grist and the crush and the water content and the temperature and more. Mostly the FG figure comes from the yeast. The BIABacus obviously makes assumptions about what is called attenuation - the power of the yeast to convert what the grains provided into ethanol and carbon dioxide. If your mash temp results in an OG with lots of easy food for the yeast, it will give lower FG. If your mash temp results in the same OG but less digestible food, the yeast will afford a higher FG. The temperature history of your batch from start to finish is a big factor.

It results in beer, so it is all worth it. :drink:
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