mally. I really like huhih's post as it tells me he is really thinking. Well done huhih . (I don't think he means it as a summary though. I suspect he is more asking, "Have I got it right so far?) I'll try and answer that below, and give a summary, but...

Before I do that

Even though nearly all readers will not read a long post, I think it is extremely important that some things are explained in detail. Some people will read it and some even actually want a long post . I know that you mally are a great reader. Wish there were more of you and I really am pleased to see and appreciate that huhih has read the posts above.

Imagine though if I had just typed...

"Don't bother sparging," and provided none of the logic. If I was huhih, I would have totally ignored me because there are literally thousands of posts on the internet telling people who BIAB to sparge because it increases efficiency. It doesn't if your kettle is large enough to handle full-volume mashing.

But why would anyone in their right mind believe me, and many others, if we didn't give an explanation? (I could actually write pages on just this one area of sparging and probably a book on how brewing myths are created and spread .)

So, detail is often a good thing. Often too much detail is a bad thing. Just like Maxi-BIAB!!!

huhih's question.

Amongst huhih's post was a question, I think, about what sparging actually is. "...didn't fit in the initial mash for so to top-up during the boil. However, I understand this as being sparging."

Bugger! Can't quite work out the question sorry huhih. I think the "for so" bit is a typo or something. Not sure if this helps but any water that doesn't come into contact with the grain is not sparge water. You'd call them dilutions.

Any water that does come into contact with the grain is either strike water (that used in the mash) or sparge water. In full-volume BIAB, these are one and the same.

A Summary

1. If you can full-volume mash then do it. [Go to 7]

2. If you can't full-volume mash, mash with as much of the 'Total Water Needed' as possible. (Don't be silly about this. Leave ample headspace in your kettle.) [Go to 3]

3. Sparging requires a second heat source, two more vessels and more labour. Doing all this will save you grain. The BIABacus can tell you how much grain you will save. In nearly all scenarios, it should be very little saving and can therefore be avoided. [Go to 4]

[You have to make a judgement call here on what your needs are. The Maxi-BIAB guide that currently exists on this site has errors and the pic in this post shows some of the extremes in that guide. It's not a very practical guide but maybe you are prepared to go to those lengths? Notice how some wort is held back from the start of the boil? There are a lot of practical and potential problems in that guide.][Go to 4]

4. If any of the 'Total Water Needed (TWN)' remains, it is best added to the kettle as soon as possible before or during the boil. (This sterilises that water and increases hop utilisation.) [Go to 5]

5. If any of the 'Total Water Needed (TWN)' remains after the boil, this should be added to the fermentor. As a general rule, fermentor top-up water should not be greater than 30%. [Go to 6]

6. If your top-up water is of low quality, you should boil it before adding it to the fermentor. [Go to 7]

7. THE END

[Just saw your post huhih. Good stuff! Will come back to it tomorrow as it's 2:30am now and I have to start work in about 5 hours!]

The following regards the BIABacus design things being discussed earlier.

Final BIABacus lay-out (unless you find a problem)...

I'm pretty sure that the following design covers all the things we were worried about in the previous design/lay-out but maybe we have missed something obvious or you might think something is unnecessary or could be improved? Please let us know. A lot of things that might be quick and easy to change or improve now could be too hard to do later*.

So, here's PR 1.1E. It has all sheets and everything should work except for 'Z. The Checklist,' which is protected in this file. See below before re-posting it though. Unless someone finds a major flaw, I doubt anything major will change prior to release so I can't see any problem with the file being posted in this thread but nowhere else.

Still to do.

There's still a lot to do before this can even be made a pre-release. Some of these things are listed in Z. 'The Checklist' of the above file.

*For example, even though only a few sections have changed since PR 1.0. Pat will have to do major re-writes of The Temporary Help thread including re-posting new pics. It's bad enough having to do this pre-release but imagine what a disaster it would be having to do it post-release! By that stage, many more posts, links and pics will have been written and created .

So, if you have any suggestions or improvements, now is definitely the time to speak up.


PP

Some cracking explanations there PP, I think they should be pinned up as essential reading for all newcomers to BIAB and Maxi-BIAB. They have certainly helped me to get a better grasp on the fundamentals.

Great work!

Brought to you by many coffees and later, light beers, BrewBagMan . If I can get the explanations down to less than a few million words, maybe the guys might use some bits in the new site structure - lol!

Will have to defer answering your last post huhih because...

Computer has blown up!!!

My hard disk on my main computer has just blown up. Not sure when I am going to be able to fix the thing and I can't type on these laptops and it doesn't have a spreadsheet program on it. Yeasty is also flat out at the moment but we're pretty sure that some of you guys are already driving the BIABacus really well so...

Does anyone want to try inputting the following recipe?

In this thread, Todd has come up with a recipe design for Strenghtnhealth. All the critical info is there though you'll need to google the average alpha acid % for the hops or ask S&H if he has them.

Because it's a design not a scale, you'll have to play with the hop bill a bit so it matches Todd's recommendations.

I'd use PR 1.1 E myself as it's much better suited to design than the prior versions but any version would be fine and I'll download Libre so I can check it if someone takes up the challenge.

Hope you guys can help out with this .

Can you check my workings PP?
The AA% are what i get so will have to be adapted.

Sweet! I now have a beer named after me!

Todd. Our resident recipe designer!

Mally - perfect . Good on you and thanks a heap. (Typing on this laptop is driving me mad - lol)

Stenghtnhealth - Just take your time looking through the file. Start at Section and have a read through to K. Most f the logic will become clear but you will have questions, so just ask them.

Dealing with non-fermentables.


Take a look at this Stout on BIABacus. I think that the flaked barley and roasted barley are non-fermentables. Should they be entered in the fermentables bill an scaled as a Malt would be?

Hi Strengthnhealth

Have a look at post#856 above.
I have added the BIABacus recipe for you.

Hello lads, this is probably a stoopid question that will probably have people laughing on 2 or 3 continents but, having spent a while trying to familiarise myself with Biabacus (I tried to convert the Landlord recipe in the recipe section) and seemingly getting to grips with it, I'm wondering about the hop bill. I tried juggling around with volumes and with added water just to see what would happen, but the only thing not changing was the amount of hops. What incredibly dumb thing am I doing/not doing, or can anyone even work out what the bleedin' 'ell I'm talking about...?

Hi Skink, have you entered a figure in the End of Boil Volume at Ambient (EOBV-A) forthe recipe you are converting from?

Cheers,

Lee

AHA! Yes, that worked, thanks Lee. However, that actually increased my hop bill - is that right? Is it because I activated trub management, and added 2L of water to the boil and 2 more to the fermenter? Doing this, I managed to increase my VIF to 14 L. I'm only tricking around - I think the best way to get the hang of Biabacus is to get hands on and juggle the figures. The only thing I dislike about it is the size of it on the screen - I'm having to do an awful amount of flicking around on the screen of my laptop.

No worries. I have my first Maxi scheduled for either tomorrow or on the weekend (it's been really warm here lately). I'm just gonna use the BIABacus as a rough guide as to volumes until get some hands on experience with the process. Getting too caught up in exact figures takes some of the enjoyment away from it for myself. Like the guys on here will tell you, you're gonna end up decent beer at the end of it so long as you have the basics nailed.

Let us know how you get on!

Skink wrote:AHA! Yes, that worked, thanks Lee. However, that actually increased my hop bill - is that right?

Good on Lee for getting you sorted . We're hoping the layout change in PR 1.1 E makes the EOBV-A thing a bit clearer. In a scaled recipe, it is very important for high integrity hop bill scaling. (While it is also needed to tell you the colour estimate of an original recipe, I think it is going to be less confusing in its new position.)

Your hop bill will increase when you do post-boil dilutions of any sort. The hop estimate formula make an assumption that the higher the original gravity the lower the hop utilisation. The latest research tends to be pointing towards this not being as true as they thought it was .

The best you can hope for from any hop formula is, assuming it has been written properly, is that it will scale your hop bill with high integrity. The actual IBU number it spits out though should only be taken as a very rough guide.


PP

Thanks, that makes sense when I think about it. I'm not ready for brewing yet - time and money constraints mean it could be a while yet, but I'll keep asking (mostly) dumb questions in the meantime, and some of it's bound to sink in. And the next one is...I have a book by Dave Miller which I delve into frequently, and I had a crack at inputting one of his recipes into the Biabacus today. It was a bitter, and some of the details are a bit bare - for example, he gives '5 lbs. British pale ale malt' and that's it, but he does give an OG of 1.038 and a TG of 1.006-1.009, and an IBU of 31. For hops, he states 7AAU pellets or 8.5 AAU of whole hops, either Fuggles, Goldings or Northern Brewer, and finishing hops 1oz. Golding, but doesn't give a hopping schedule. So, is this enough to work on, and let half the fun be a bit of juggling (he emphasises personal taste quite a lot)? I deliberately didn't give the full recipe, because I'm not sure what the copyright protocol would be.

Good thinking on the copyright .

Dumb questions are great but your question above is far from dumb. Very few brewers ever think of asking it and it's an extremely important one. Not knowing the answer means that many brewers are flying totally blind when they try to copy/scale a recipe such as the one you're looking at above.

Coincidentally, someone did ask this question the other day. The answer is in this post. I reckon read that and then come back here with any questions that post doesn't answer.

I also wouldn't mind writing about one more thing after you've read that post.


PP

PS: Re the British Pale Ale Malt. That's just a pale ale malt from a British maltster such as Baird's, Fawcett's or Crisp's.

Thanks, PP. Yes, I understand about the malt, what I meant was he doesn't give EBC numbers or anything. As regards the hops, I inputted the AAU into the abacus and got a figure which I assume is correct, but he doesn't give a schedule eg additions at 60 mins, 30 mins, etc - I think he expects the user to experiment (I can't show you my results because I only have excel starter, so can only access the spreadsheets by going to the library and saving the spreadsheets on a memory stick so I can look at them at home). Sorry for being a pain in the butt, but I believe in doing my groundwork - I learnt that 4 years ago when I returned to college and did a degree as a mature student! And I bet there's a few people reading this and saying 'Now, that's what I wanted to ask!'
Anyway, I think I'm getting the hang of this - I'm sure I'll keep bending your ear though, especially when I'm ready to go.

There's a few things in that recipe I want to make sure you have a handle on. Also to answer your questions about the hop schedule, I think I'd need to see the original recipe. Maybe shoot it to me in a PM?

For British Pale Malt, use 2.2 SRM (4.3 EBC) as per this chart that joshua put me onto.

I should have mentioned above that Lovibond is close enough to use as SRM on lower numbers. The official conversion formula though is...

SRM=L*1.3546-0.76

(We better chuck that in the Unit Conversion Tool of the BIABacus I spose.)

PistolPatch wrote:

So, if you have any suggestions or improvements, now is definitely the time to speak up.


PP

Probably should change section W; qt/# to qt/lb
and 2nd sheet (conversion tool) from qt/# to qt/lb

Thanks MS ,

Ended up not having to work today so was able to tidy up a lot of stuff in the spreadsheet. Still a few bits left but not much - mainly checking display and decimal places.

Main Changes

While there were a lot of little things fixed today, the three major changes were...

1. Extract Potential Adjustments - If you alter the extract potential for the 'left hand side' of the BIABacus grain bill, it will use those on the right unless you over-ride them. That's the way it should have been in the first place.

2. Extract potential ! 's have been re-formulated to give more information. (Beware of any recipe that has exclamation marks on the right but not on the left!)

3. Unit Conversion sheet re-designed - Insert a heap of swearing here. I've wrestled with this stuff before in individual formulas but until 'tidying up' the Unit Conversion sheet today I never realised just how ridiculous this whole aspect is. As I was doing it, I kept thinking of different users and so added a field in here and there. FFS! Look at the sheet now . And, there's still scenarios it won't cover. Anyway...

Can you please answer these questions if you get time?

I think this thread is the best place to ask these questions...

1. For those of you who have used PR 1.1E, are you finding the layout better/more logical?

2. What have we forgotten on the Unit Conversion sheet? (download it below)

3. The new Unit Conversion sheet means less double-inputting but it also means it is longer. This is partly due to imperial units being included but not entirely. Is it being longer a problem or not?

4. The Unit Conversion sheet can either be published with the input cells containing a value as you can see in the unprotected sheet or blank as in the protected sheet. What do you think is better?

5. Specific gravity display is always annoying in brewing software. It can take a lot to trigger an estimated specific gravity to trigger from 1.050 to 1.051*. What do you think about displaying estimated specific gravity fields as say 1.050/2 or 1.050/8?

Unit Conversion Sheet - Protected and Unprotected

Here's a file that has the latest layout of the Unit Conversion sheet. I've left the second sheet unprotected in case you want to look at the formulas or move things around/add things. You might come up with a better layout? Before you cut and paste though, please answer 4 above.If moving things around,always cut and paste - don't copy.


PP

...

* There are many ways around this and all have problems. The main one is that if you offer more precision, the new user will could start asking, "The BIABacus predicted 1.050/8 (50.8 gravity points) but I only got 1.050/2 (50.2 gravity points)". There is a whole other side of this coin as well though... e.g. "How come when I changed such and such, the SG still said 1.050?"

We could work on just gravity points (eg 50.2 or 50.8 instead of 1.050 or 1.051) but I think this approach would, at this stage in history anyway, be the wrong way to go. I'm thinking that a display of estimated fields only of the 1.050/2 format would at least trigger the right questions and we could elaborate on it in the help.

Where's all your replies?

I actually have another question .

BrewBagMan did his first brew today . You can see his thread here.

In that thread, you'll see, eventually, that the BIABasuc auto-efficency estimates matched the actual results which is nice on such a brew. The thread highlights the importance though of using clear terminology.

In the Maxi-BIAB Adjustments section we currently have a very poor term - 'Water Added After Final Lauter'. It's technically correct but totally non user-friendly and can easily be misinterpreted as Lee found today .

So, any ideas on what to replace it with?

(I currently have it changed to, "Water Added Before the Boil")

...

Oh, and re question 5 in the last post, the more precise specific gravity display only has a benefit in Sections M and O. Here's what it would look like with more precision. (This scenario mimics a situation where a brewer's efficiencies are correct but the evaporation rate has been underestimated).

Probably no right answers to this question but I am thinking that the benefits of displaying gravity as in the following pic in these sections only will outweigh the negatives .