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

Have re-checked everything Phil and this conversion is good to go. At the end of the post you'll find a copy of The Calculator with the inputs described below.

The below will be be a long read but I'm not sure there is a short helpful way of doing and explaining recipe conversions. Anyway, here you go...

Firstly, I have just downloaded the latest version of The Calculator from the site so as we are on the same page.

First Page of The Calculator - Volume and Grain Bill Totals

On the first page change the figures in red to suit your equipment. So, change the "Diameter of Kettle" from 45 to 35.5 cm. Secondly change the "End of Boil Gravity (OG)" figure from 1.048 to 1.042.

But, what figure should you use for Brew Length?

You should ignore the 26.5L pre-boil volume figure provided by Jamil and John. Instead, look at the bottom of page 41 of their book and you will see that they have said, "All of these recipes are designed to leave 22.7L of wort in the kettle after the [60 minute] boil." These figures are far more accurate to work with as they are post-boil (post-evaporation.)

I personally think that, where possible, a 90 minute boil should be done as it avoids a lot of potential problems. The Calculator is already set at 90 minutes so no need to change that figure.

So, the last thing we need to do on the first page is keep changing the Brew Length figure (in red) until the "End of Boil Volume (Batch Size) equals 22.7 L.

An 18L Batch Size gets very close to this so let's use that. (In reality, you will end up with more than 18 L of beer as The Calculator is very generous in its trub allowances.)

Now that we have done the above, we can see that The Calculator says we need 3928 g of grain. The other crucial figure we get from the first page is "Water Required is..." 31.5 L.

Let's go to the second page now...

Second Page of The Calculator - The Grain Bill

The Calculator allows you to either put in the original weights of the recipe or their percentages. Either way will work. I'll use the percentages that Jamil and John have listed...

So, in Cell B6 I type, 62.5, B7 I type 25 and B8 I type 12.5. The Calculator tells me in G6, G7 and G8 that I need 2,455 g, 982 g and 491 g of grain respectively. (If you didn't have percentages readily available you should have typed in 2260 to Cell D6, 900 into D7 and 450 into D8. You can do this now and see that the result is the same.) So, you'll need the following grain bill...)

2455 g English Pale Ale
982 g Flake Barley
491 g Roasted Barley

Third Page of The Calculator - The Hop Bill

What we need to look at on this third sheet, once again, is the figures in red. The first one is the Original Gravity of Recipe. (This is a bit unclear but it means the Original Gravity of the original recipe.) In most cases, you will never need to change this - in fact, I can't see any cases where it would need changing for a straight recipe conversion so perhaps BIABrewer should un-"red" this figure .

The second red figure is the End of Boil Volume. This is important. Once again, it is a bit unclear that it requires the original "End of Boil Volume" of the original recipe - it might be better if future versions of The Calculator just had "zero" as the default???

Anyway, the End of Boil Volume of the original recipe is not a problem in our case as we have already adjusted our recipe to assume a brew length that will give us an end of boil volume of 22.68 L.

Although we are doing a 90 minute boil rather than Jamil and John's 60 minute boil, I would still throw the hops in at 60 minutes. (I usually do this.)

You will notice that the result on the right is exactly the same as Jamil and John's recipe. This is because our end of boil volume, our AA% and our hop addition times are identical.

What might worry you though is that Jamil and John's recipe (which I think uses ProMash) comes up with an IBU figure of 41 while The Calculator comes up with 31 IBUs! BeerSmith comes up with 35 IBUs and Beer Alchemy comes up with 43 IBUs!!!

Unfortunately there is always this discrepancy in IBUs from one program to another. For this reason it is best to use weights rather than IBUs when doing the conversions.

Hope that above makes a bit of sense - fingers crossed ,
PP

Glad it made sense . You are correct on the 2455 g - I'll edit in that correction now.

Will look forward to hearing how you go Phill.

Good luck!
PP

P.S. A 60 minute hop addition means that the hops need to be boiled for 60 minutes. So, if you are doing a 90 minute boil and have a 60 minute hop addition, you should add that addition in half an hour after your boil starts. A 3 minute addition would be thrown in right at the end - 3 minutes before the boil finishes.

Don't worry, you're not the first person to get confused on that .

Hi there willigan,

Here's another way to approach converting recipes with The Calculator.

Firstly, download The Calculator and type in the following information from the recipe you are converting from. In other words, type in...

18 L for brewlength as this will give us a post-boil-volume of about 22.7 L which is what J & J's recipes work on. See notes in my post above as to why you should disregard pre-boil volume.

75% for End of Boil Efficiency - once again what J & J's recipes are based on.

Play around with the OG figure until the Grain Bill Required reads as close as possible to 6683 g (J&J's recipe's total grain bill). You will find that 1.068 works nicely.

On the second sheet, clear cells B6 and down and then type in all the grain weights from J&J's recipe into D6 and down.

On the third sheet, type in 22.68 to E5 and then your hop weights, AA and times in.

Your spreadsheet should now look like the one at the end of this post called "The Calculator - J&J Standard Hoppiness is an IPA."

You have now done most of the work. The important things that the above gives us is an OG and IBU to work from. For example, J&J's recipe says an OG of 1.065 but The Calculator comes up with 1.068. These discrepancies occur between all programs. The same goes for hop bill - J & J get 64 IBU's while The Calculator comes up with only 45.3 IBUs. (A huge difference but this does not matter as it does not affect our scaling.)

Now that we have The Calculator's version of OG and IBU, let's go back to Sheet 1 and consider the following...

Kettle Diameter: Let's type in 38 cm to match your kettle.

End of Boil Efficiency: Let's change this to 79% as that is a good average figure to start with on BIAB.

Water Required is... and Approximate Mash Volume: Here it reads 33.95 L and 38.15 L respectively but your kettle is only 36 litres! This is not a big drama. What you should do though is keep back say 7L and add this 7L any time you are able during the mash and the boil.

Let's have a look at Sheet 2 now. In Cells G6 and down, you will see adjusted grain weights - ie what you should use.

Now to Sheet 3. As our end of boil volume is the same as J&J's, you will see that you use exactly the same amount of hops as in J&J's recipe.

So, you are good to go. I have attached what your final spreadsheet should look like below in the file called "The Calculator - J&J Adjusted Hoppiness is an IPA."

As mentioned in a prior post, I'll double-check the IBU formula in The Calculator. It uses a standard hop formula but for some reason seems to read a lot lower than other programs???

Good luck willigan ,
PP

P.S. J&J's recipe is based on a 60 minute boil. I didn't bother changing this from 90 mins for the same reasons given to pkearney above.

Hey Phil,
glad that was a success, have to say I'm not actually that surprised though!

The kettle trub is useful for yeast starters if you're into yeast ranching. Drain it through some cloth or muslin in a funnel and dilute it to <1.040, then boil it in sturdy bottle, ordinary glass might do but lab glassware is best, example. It will keep in the freezer too, but if so, don't store in glass but plastic, obviously before boiling it. Once it is boiled, the only organism which should come into contact with it is the yeast.

Congratulations Phil!

Until you get a few brews under your belt, you can just work your recipes out for a larger end of boil volume. This means you'll need to use a tad more grain but won't go short on your brew if you try some new methods of trub management and they don't work.

Another two things you could try are whirlpooling or, for single batches, if you have a rope and pulley and strong handles on your pot, you can even tilt the kettle so as the trub falls more to one side of the kettle.

Good on you,
PP

No worries willigan. Will appreciate your report .

pkearney wrote:the final gravity was ...39 instead of 42 ,I'm sure this will not matter . Should the boil be with the lid on or off? This may account for the extra volume?

Thanks for letting us know how you went Phill .

Forget all the readings etc. The Calculator at time of writing is very good on volumes but gravities and IBU's disagree with other programs. As a matter of fact, all programs disagree with each other .

So, the only comment I have to hopefully help is re your lid on or off....

You should leave the lid off. A lid partially on does nothing or very little to influence evaporation rates or boil vigour. (This is based on very limited but logical research.) If you cannot maintain a good rolling boil with your lid off or have high evaporation rates then this is another, separate problem (usually not even a problem) that can be solved in other ways.

So, lid off!
PP

PistolPatch wrote:The Calculator at time of writing is very good on volumes but gravities and IBU's disagree with other programs. As a matter of fact, all programs disagree with each other .

I have checked the extract efficiency and hop bitterness formulas in The Calculator and they seem to be fine. The hop formula actually comes from John Palmer so go figure?

When converting from one program to another, the best way is to firstly type in everything you know about the original recipe into the program you wish to use.

After doing this, write down...

1. Original Gravity.
2. Bitterness Level.

Once you know these, you can play around in the new program with your own volumes until the OG and bitterness match the above.

It'd be nice though if all formulas came up with at least similiar results .

Hi there lespaul and welcome to the forum,

It gets very confusing working between different software programs and the way they can or need to be set up. Some brewers will use the term batch size as what goes into their fermenter while other brewer's, "recipe reports," mean the post-boil volume. It is often difficult to know which one they mean unless you know the software they are using and even knowing this sometimes means you still have to do some figuring or guessing to work out how they have set their software up!

And, it gets worse...

When converting recipes, every program will give you different gravity and bitterness results which is a PITA. The Calculator (or BIAB spreadsheet) uses a standard gravity formula but usually reads about 3 points different from Beersmith etc. The formula used for bitterness comes from John Palmer but reads far lower than other brewing software. As mentioned here recently, a recipe I plugged in the other day came up with...

ProMash = 41 IBU's
BeerSmith = 35 IBUs
Beer Alchemy = 43 IBUs
The Calculator = 31 IBUs

My goodness!!!

When communicating recipes, end of boil figures are the easiest to work. They are the common denominator of gravity and bitterness as these two things do not change from this point on. The best way of communicating recipes though is to take the time to explain the set-up your figures are based on such as Jamil and John do on Page 41 of, "Brewing Classic Styles," or in the manner of The Calculator where all volumes, gravities etc are described explicitly. This makes it easy for others.

What You Should Worry About/Do when Converting

The way I convert a recipe is...

1. Try to determine the original brewer's end of boil volume. (This can be difficult if the original brewer has used volume into fermenter as their batch size as you will have to guess at their losses after the boil or play around in the program they used until you establish their post-boil volume.)

2. Now set your software or spreadsheet so as the end of boil volume matches the above.

3. Now set your efficiency figure to the original brewers efficiency figure (based on post-boil efficiency.)

3. Type into your software the original weights and times of ingredients.

4. Now take a note (write down) what OG and bitterness your software / spreadsheet reads.

5. Now type in your desired end of boil volume (this will be what you want to get in your fermenter plus what you lose when transferring from the kettle/cube etc.) and your efficiency figure.

6. Now adjust the grain weights until you "score" the OG you wrote down above. (Make sure you keep the ratios between grains the same.) Often their is a scaling function on the software, including The Calculator that will do this for you.

7. Finally adjust your hops until you score the bitterness level you wrote down above. (Make sure you keep the ratios between hops the same.) Once again most software or The Calculator will do this for you.

Good recipes will take a lot of punishment so don't be panicked about making a stuff-up as you'll end up with a great beer anyway.

Jamil and John's recipes work on 75% efficiency and a post-boil volume of 22.7 L. The average end of boil efficiency on BIAB figures I have collected is a bit over 79%. I think a new brewer could happily copy any recipe in J & J's book exactly without worrying about the efficiency difference and end up with 19 L of splendid beer in their bottles or keg. It's a great book to have on your shelf.

So, if you were wondering why converting recipes can be a little bit demanding on your brain, hopefully the above shows why .

Cheers,
PP

[Admin Note: You are now free to distribute your recipes in The Calculator format providing you follow the copyright instruction explained here. The name will also soon be changed to BIAB-Calculator to make it easier to find.]

There's no denying PP's enthusiasm and his level of understanding of the BIAB technique, or his desire to help new brewers with detailed information.

He is the man!

Thanks very much LP and hashie.

Perhaps it's time I got a new girlfriend .

Phil, I am just on the phone to LloydieP. I have looked back over your recipe and thought there was something odd with it that I never noticed at the time - too busy converting. I am no good at recipes but Lloydie reckons there is something strange with this recipe as well. I'm going to hand you over to Lloydie. What you brewed though was as is written in Jamil and John's book???

Hopefully Lloydie and others who have the recipe knack can help you out.

Cheers,
PP