Kyle - Enthusiasm is wonderful,but read some more around this site before buying more stuff and starting your brew day. Your 19 L kettle will work for small batches for now. If your LHBS sells BIAB bags with a thread count of ~35 per cm, good on them, but many will sell paint strainer bags with larger gaps among threads and they will disappoint. After you read more, I'm sure you will mash for 90 minutes and know why - and try out the BIABacus for the SMASH Amarillo recipe found in the recipe section on this site. Then post your customized file for feedback. Good beer will result eventually.

Hey Kyle,

ShorePoints has it right... Nobody would recommend a tiny 19 liter / 5 gallon pot for BIAB unless you are doing mini BIAB with tiny batches. Mine is 3 times that size and am very happy for it. Normally do 5 gallon finished batch sizes. Could do with as small as a 10 gallon pot for 5 gallon batches - just barely but I would go larger and am happy for my 15 gallon pot. There are valid reasons to choose small pots for small batch sizes but I wonder if you may have made a mistake. If so, now is the best time to fix it, before you really get going...

Assuming you wanted to do larger batch sizes, can you return or exchange your pot for something way larger...? Got to put first things first... Don't want to "shoot" until you are certain what your target is. We can help you with all of the later more trivial details later (ingredients, etc.) as they are easy to calculate later. Can't figure out any of the remainder until you have pot size and dimensions... But can't choose pot size unless you know desired batch size.

Terminology Link: http://www.biabrewer.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2685

If things are a little confusing, it's okay...we've all been there before too. Take a deep breath, relax, and take it one step at a time.

kyle wrote:Hi guys,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'll stick with my 19ltr pot the now as I want to stick to smaller batches. I'm struggling with the interpretation of the recipes and how to use the calculator and BIABacus. I'll stick with trying to learn this first and see if I can figure it out. Really appreciate your help.

Kyle

We all struggle with interpreting recipes, in fact ... the BIABacus was designed to remove all of the ambiguity that you are obviously finding in recipes.

Have a look into this thread to help sort you through the mess ... http://biabrewer.info/viewtopic.php?f=5" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ... 31cca39aab


The BIABacus can look pretty tough in the beginning, but it's really not that bad. It can be kept very simple in the beginning.

Kyle, From what you Wrote your out of America, so this may not Help.

In America the Standard Bottle size is 12oz, and there are 24 bottles per case.

That totals 2.34 gallon /8.9 liter.

Attached is the American Pale Ale - NRB-All Amarillo APA a simple SMaSH recipe that will fill 26 Bottles, and has a boil length of 75 minutes.

Good Luck.

Kyle, This is a guide I wrote a few years back.
It may just help get your head around the process and terminology?

kyle, when your pot arrives let us know the dimensions.

Also, what sort of beers do you like?

That info will give us enough info to give you a recipe to start with.

Your post above tells me that the BIABacus is a bit more familiar to you now - that's excellent and will serve you well. Hopefully, your friend (other user) has shown you how it can answer most of your original questions.

Your biggest issue (decisions) will be due to the fact that your kettle is much smaller than your fermenter will handle (as mentioned above). This, unfortunately, means you'll have to study some concepts that many brewers are not aware of so as you can make the right decisions. In other words, if your kettle is big enough to handle your fermenter, everything is pretty simple but, in your case, you'll need to study this for, possibly, several hours.

We can come up with a sensible approach for your first brews though so concentrate on answering the first two questions of this post.


PP

One step at a time... The BIABacus looked a little daunting for me at the start. But jump in, one step at a time... Review the BIAB Terminology (links to this have been given). Trhen try to understand one section at a time starting with the most important sections (the earliest ones). All are important... Won't take long to understand it and you will be very happy for spending the little bit of time to get it.

Kyle,
Attached is an Updated BIABACUS for the SMaSH simple recipe, That has your Kettle Dimensions.

Good Luck with your Brew day

Kyle, FYI with trying to open your file and take a look it gives an error message saying your "file is corrupt and cannot be opened."

Kyle, you did not set the IBU number, but it looks like you wanted 37IBU.

If you need to change it, let us Know.

Also, if you move the 2.88 liter "water used in a Sparge" to "water added During the boil" the Error messages will disappear.

You cab also lower the 2.88L to 2.0L in that field, and get a better beer

JMHO.

Scott, the .ods file opens fine in LibreOffice.

Hoover then Kyle...

Hoover: Yep, the bigger the screen, the easier it is to understand/appreciate the BIABacus. Most programs, even though not as flexible or powerful, split things over several screens. Whilst this makes it easier on a first glance, it also prevents you from seeing the dynamics and inter-relationships of how changing one aspect of the brew affects another. I can't offer you much advice on how to deal with the BIABacus on a small screen apart from what Scott said. While you miss out on seeing the inter-relationships easily, the A to Z approach has a very real logical order to it. The blank BIABacus actually throws up a line at the start telling you which sections to concentrate on first.

Kyle: Firstly, thanks for reading and studying the links above . It's always the best of signs when someone follows through on advice, and, some of those links were quite hard. Top job .

Okay, your file....

First rule of the BIABacus is, no matter what program you are using, you must always save it as an .xls file . As soon as you save it as anything else, such as an .ods, things start to go wrong. For example, I can't even open your file in Excel. You'll only make that error once though - because, it basically means you have to input everything again .

I normally have LibreOffice on my PC but did a reload recently and haven't got it on atm. Regardless, always, always, always save your BIABacus file as .xls and never, never, never, as anything else!

...

One question I can answer before I see your .xls file is, "Section W is giving me a warning telling me to decrease my sparge volume and I can't seem to figure out why. Any suggestions?"

Actually, I will need to see your file to double-check, but, even in BIABacus PR1.3T, I'm pretty sure it throws that warning if the BIABacus can see that you could have "full-volume brewed".

Apologies on behalf of the BIABacus team re the .ods. A warning is in there somewhere but it's impossible to make the appropriate warning stand out for each individual user.

...

Also just want to clear up another possible area of confusion. joshua above uploaded a SMASH recipe, twice, with the same name as an example recipe used in the main pre-release BIABacus thread. Unfortunately, he has used pretty much exactly the same file name whereas the original recipe has three malts - not one.

Maybe a Mod should clean that up?

Not a noob question at all Evan. You've asked joshua so I'll leave it to him. His answer should include two specific links which will set you right .

Evanspa,
What I meant was moving the "Sparge" water to "water added during the Boil", would prevent the Kettle from having too much Sweet liquor at the Start of boil.

Also, I meant lowering the 2.88L to 2.0L, would allow the Boiled Off wort, to have a higher S.G., after 90 minutes boil.

Many 1st time Brewers have a problem with Too Much Wort at the end of the 90 minutes, and having lower S.G than BIABACUS projected.

You CAN add some Good Water to a Higher Gravity S.G. in the Fermenter, to get the proper VIF.

Evanspa,

Yep, BIABACUS does that.

The difference between SWN and VIB is about 6.0%.

I also Squeeze the %$#& out of the Bag, and many times end up with more Sweet Liquor than the SWN, Because of the Conversion Of Solid starch to Dissolved Sugar.

Where I live, I need to cut the SWN/TWN, so I do not need to Boil for 100-120 minute to get My VAW, and GAW.

What we all need to do, after 5 or 6 batches, is adjust all those Numbers in Section 'X' of BIABACUS, to Dial in our brew methods.