Advice on my first planned biab
I agree with most of this, but to be fair about the bold ...Lumpy5oh wrote:I'll give this a go... First off the author has to be a 40lb child if one pint of 6.8abv puts him to sleep.
He says it makes about 25l; but in the instructions he says to collect 25l from the mash. You are going to loose several liters before you get to packaging.
He calls for 9.5kg of pale English malt. That's not too hard to figure out. The crystal on the other hand is impossible. He doesn't mention what degree of crystal and doesn't hint even at a finished colour to even take a wild stab at figuring it out.
The gypsum addition is for water treatment. Unless you are using the exact water he has you may not want any treatment or more. It has to do with the minerals present in your water.
He lists EKG hops but doesn't tell anything about the %AA of the hops used or what the desired bitterness of the finished beer should be.
This really is a recipe we can't do anything with.
My suggestion would be to try and get the biabacus on your iPad and then download the sample APA. If you want an IPA we can help you modify that recipe without much of a problem.
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PistolPatch wrote:Let's see if we can unspin your head Oldgit
In the link MS has given, there are lots of results there you don't need to read, just read the ones that have a title relevant to you.
Before I write any more, the best book to buy when starting out is Brewing Classic Styles (you'll see it at the bottom of all BIABrewer.info pages at time of writing). With that book, it makes things very easy.
[center]A Hoppy English IPA[/center]
I think though we already have the info needed from you to make a hoppy English IPA. (I'm assuming you want an English IPA and not an American one). I can't actually read the writing in the pic in the first post so I'm going to go down a different track of writing a recipe from scratch and without a book. I don't brew English IPA's and, so, in a way, I am in the same boat as you and others here will maybe improve on what I come up with below. My main point in doing the below is to show you it is not too hard to get brewing quickly.
Step 1: Go to the BJCP Style Guidelines and look up the style you are after. In your case, it's Section 14A. Read the section to give you an overall feel for what the style is about and make sure that is what you want to brew. Note the ingredients used and the 'Vital Statisitcs'.
Step 2: Do a bit of googling on the style. In your case, Google "English IPA Recipes". Try to avoid recipes on most forums and software sites as they are often published by people just starting out; it's often hard to tell the author's level of experience. What you are looking for in the Googling is a sense of the ingredients used - malt/s, hops and yeast. Look through the first five or six pages of Google and try and find magazine articles written by professional brewers such as this article. DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME READING EVERYTHING, YOU WILL ONLY GET CONFLICTING ADVICE. JUST READ THREE OR FOUR QUALITY ARTICLES. Yeast companies will often have excellent advice on what yeast to use for your style such as here.
Step 3: Write some notes on the above and consider your experience level. Let's look at what you may have come up with...
The Malt
In Googling, you will have read, in several 'quality' places, that you don't need to use a crystal malt in brewing an English IPA and, in fact, doing so can be a mistake. Don't complicate things. The BJCP guidelines, written by professionals, make no mention of using more than one malt so don't, unless someone here strongly advises it. Later you might choose to add an extra malt to satisfy something in your own personal taste or, you might find the one malt is just perfect.
So, we need one English Pale Ale malt. Which one? A good idea is to look at the malting companys' websites. Google "British Maltsters" and you might find a page such as this. Find your way to the maltsters sites and look for the site that gives you the most info. I've just had a very quick look and can't find any site with comprehensive detail. However, the malt I am going to recommend to you is Maris Otter as it is a very high-quality English pale ale malt. There are several types of Maris Otter but don't get hung up on that, just use whatever Maris Otter your supplier uses.
What Hops to Use
In this style, we want the hops to show moderate to high in bitterness, flavour and aroma and we'll be using English hops. It is extremely easy for you to overload yourself with information in this area and no two sources will agree. Let's research the three hop varieties mentioned by the first brewer in this article - Fuggles, Goldings and Target.
If you go to the Hops forum in BIABrewer.info, you'll find this thread stickied. This will, in turn, lead you to hopslist. Notice how Fuggles and Goldings are under Aroma/Noble Hops and Target is under Dual-Purpose Hops? One thing I want to do is try to get the number of hops you use down to two as it's very easy to end up with a freezer full of pellet hops that do very similiar things. So, let's use Target for both bittering and aroma.
Now let's try and get rid of either Fuggles or Goldings.
Another site recommended on BIABrewer.info for hop information is beerlegends. Read up on Target there and you'll see that a substitute for it can be Fuggles. Note that. Now read up on Fuggles and Goldings. Just noticing that on both sites, there isn't much on their characteristics. Do some more Googling to get more info. e.g. here and here and here.
I'm going to get rid of the Fuggles and keep the Goldings.
So we have Target available for bittering, flavour and aroma and Goldings available for flavour and aroma.
When and How Much of the Hops To Add
For a beginner, and for anyone without experience in the style, this is a very hard question to answer and another reason to buy something like Brewing Classic Styles or Modern Home Brew Recipes (also at the bottom of each BIABrewer.info page. Click on those links and buy a Kindle Version you can read on your computer. That will also give BIABrewer.info about $3!!!).
I prefer Gordon Strong for recipes and so am going to have a look at what he says and make some decisions from that.
Okay, I've made some decisions and you'll find them in the BIABacus file at the end. The more experienced brewers of this style might have some corrections or suggestions.
Yeast
I always recommend using dry yeasts when possible, especially when starting out. I also advise sprinkling the dry yeast on top of the bubbles of your well-aerated wort as this reduces the likelihood of wrecking the yeast by using crappy water or wrong temps to rehydrate.
There are many options for dry yeast in this style. Look at this page for some ideas; make sure you select India Pale Ale from the drop-down list and look for yeasts of Type D (dry). Look for high attenuating yeasts. Safale S-04 is widely available. Nottingham is as well but it is a wild bugger and, in my opinion, can often not turn out well for many palates.
Let's go with Fermentis S-04 but listen to what other dry yeasts the experienced brewers of this style here might recommend. Buy two packets of dried yeast as this is a high gravity beer. S-04 can also be a wild fermenter so keep your fermentation temperature under control until after high krausen and consider using a blow-off tube especially if you have less than 30% headspace in your fermenter.
Water
Unless your water has some strange characteristics in its taste, or, you know it has a certain consistent profile, I would not consider water adjustments at this stage of your brewing. Any addition you make, could be a wrong one.
[center]Putting It All Together[/center]
The below is a BIABacus for your brew. Others might have some suggestions to improve it. If not, just go ahead and brew it. Buy the ingredients on the right-hand side of Sections C and D plus your yeast and kettle finings (forgot to add that to the BIABacus sorry)..
When buying your hops, they will almost definitely be of a different AA% than those listed on the left-hand side of Section D. Ring your supplier to find out what the AA% is of the hops you will be buying and type that number in on the right-hand side. That will re-adjust the weights of the hops you will need to buy.
Note the 120 minute boil. This is necessary to increase the evaporation rate to result in the high gravity you want. It will also darken the wort a tad so you'll get a darker colour than what the BIABacus indicates.
Your FW (first wort) hops of Goldings go into your kettle just after you pull the bag. Use your BIAB bag as a hop sock; just rinse it under a tap after you tip the spent grain out.
Your dry hops should go in three days before you are going to bottle or keg. Use hop bags to contain them in the fermenter otherwise seriously consider using a secondary. A secondary will be necessary on this recipe if you are bottling I think.
Keep your fermenter at 18C for the first three days and then you can let it go up to 20C. If you are using a secondary, use it at 7 days and add the dry hops then preferably with them contained in hop socks.
Other Things
Above you mention "ifv". Have a read of Clear Brewing Terminology as terms like ifv can mean anything to other brewers. I'm assuming you mean into fermenting vessel. 30 L is a bit of a strange number for that and you will want a large fermenter (at least 45L) to handle that volume.
Note Section K of the BIABacus. The first line tells you how much cold water you need for your brew (54.5 L). That and the ingrdients is all you need to get under way
Wow! That only took four hours to write that! Can I start drinking now?
PP
that's a truly educational way of giving me my first recipe Yep, basically saying that for a first brew the recipe doesn't really matter. In fact there are so many unknown variables for your first brew that absolutely everything is a guess so the recipe doesn't really matter at all.Lumpy5oh wrote:I really have to disagree with you contrarian.
There can be a huge difference in crystal malts. Crystal 10 will give a candy like sweetness where 120 will give you a raisiny pruny flavor. Let alone the difference in colour. Especially at 12% (really should aim for under 10%)of the grain bill.
The EKG hops can also vary from 4 to 9% AA according to an English hop site.
So you tell him to go ahead and make the recipe but also change the VIF to 25l instead of the 25l VIB from the original. And also suggest changing the OG. So really you are saying toss the original out as well?
. Good on you 
. I'd disagree with a lot of the above but really liked this bit... That is a very true statement.Contrarian wrote:The worst thing that can happen to a new brewer is to be paralyzed by worrying about their first recipe.
. Sure, there are exceptions like when a certain hop is crap one year whereas it may have been consistently great in prior years but no one can allow for those sort of oddities. .
. It isn't hard!,Return to “BIABrewer.info and BIAB for New Members”
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