BMWFan -
All told, good job on filling out the BIABacus. You must expect to get different numbers when using different programs because the assumptions made are inherently different. I am biased toward the BIABacus. Your equipment is much more complicated than mine so I cannot offer an estimate of KFL losses, just measure what you get.

Check out posts by Pistol Patch from 4 years ago
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2247&p=33405#p33405
https://www.biabrewer.info/viewtopic.ph ... 415#p33415

My look at your BIABacus gives, from the top:
Section B, kettle capacity is filled in properly, but the advice given most frequently on this forum is to boil for 90 minutes. Yes it uses more energy, but it is to evaporate the water used in the full-volume mash that extracted the good stuff from the grains during the 90 minute mash you entered in Section E.

Section C:
You have Chocolate Malt listed twice. Is there an explanation?
With flaked oats at 9.1% and flaked barley at 4.6% you will likely get a less-than-clear beer after all is done. That will be fine, as ling as you know it is coming.
You asked about EBC and SRM - someone else will have to help you there. I don’t worry much about color numbers. The BIABacus can be trusted to give approximate SRM numbers. In this case it indicate a fairly dark beer. Some light will get through, but you will not be able to read by it.

Section D: Willamette is one of my favorite flavor/aroma hops, but I do not use it for bittering. At its common 4.8% AA, as you entered on the left side, it is on the weak end of the AA% spectrum. You have entered 8.9 as the AA% on the right side - pretty potent Willamette hops you have there. If that is correct, it explains why you will be using a little more than half of the original recipe (left side). Why are there three entries of 8.9 on the right side with only one named hop on the left? If you intend to add Willamette hops more than once, enter the name on the line on the left (you don’t need to enter it on the same line on the right after that). Hops change from year to year in their AA% and more.

Section E: 68.9 ºC is on the high side for a Mash Temperature. It will provide for lots of body* in your beer, if that is what you want. You will not get as much fermentable sugars as you would with a lower Temperature like 66.5 ºC. Whirlfloc at 5 minutes is great. Mashout at 78 ºC for zero minutes - what do you hope to accomplish here? Mashout does a couple of things -the heat denatures the remaining active beta and alpha amylases and supposedly reduces viscosity to aid in draining of the bag when lifted. Pull the bag from the hot liquid before you go above 78 ºC no matter what. If you just ramp up to a boil without pause, the difference will be negligible - again, make certain that the bag of wet spent grains is out of the hot liquid by 78 ºC. Your bag is going to be heavy when first lifted and draining back into the kettle. Have you got that covered? No rinsing required, just drain it and the liquor drained goes back in to be boiled.

Your entries show 22.41 lbs (10.165 kg) in Section C going into TWN of 14.37 gal (54.41 L) in Section K, putting you in the right range with no water held back in Section W (no need to enter zeros, just leave it blank). Other brewing recipe builders will have different numbers, guaranteed. Let BIABacus handle the efficiency numbers based on your upcoming results. Don't base an early recipe on a guess about efficiency. It will take you more than a few brew days to get an idea of your own efficiency on your own equipment.

Good luck an let us know how things go.

*I may be guilty of perpetuating a myth regarding body and high mash temperatures. See http://brulosophy.com/2018/08/13/mash-t ... t-results/ for results from one case (a Helles, for what itis worth) where the correlation is disprovend

BMWFan - I guess you can tell that I missed the SRM difference in the two different Chocolate malts because I failed to pay attention to color.

The recipe has unusual elements; High mash temperature, >13% flaked grains, >11% black/chocolate grains and one dose of Willamette hops at 60 minutes, but they will work together. The link you included has discussions about astringency where it balances out. Take good notes along the way during brew day.

One great thing about the BIABacus is that you can enter the original recipe on the left side and it will convert to the scale you have set with your kettle dimensions and desired volume, OG and IBU targets. You do not need to "double" anything.

Looks good. Please let us know how it turns out!

I've been meaning to write a few things to this thread for ages and I have a question too! Firstly...

BMWFan wrote: ↑

5 years ago

This beer turned out FANTASTIC. Awesome!

Great to read that

BMWFan wrote: ↑

5 years ago

[BIABacus] boil-off rates. I'd like to change it because it's calculating way too high for me.
I use a Boil/Steam condenser, which gets me about 2 qt per hour of evaporation/boil-off.

Great to see you found that answer on your own in Section X of the BIABacus. Well done

Why BeerSmith, Brewer's Friend etc Don't Match BIABacus.

You were wondering, quite rightly, about the difference between software like BeerSmith, Brewer's Friend and the BIABacus. It's a tricky area to explain and one best done with analogies and I've just thought of another one...

Imagine an electric clothes dryer. We all know that we can throw one towel in the dryer and it will probably be dry in 45 mins but, if we throw 5 towels in the dryer, then it will probably take 120 mins for them to dry. BeerSmith, Brewer's Friend and all other mainstream software are based on a fiction that one towel will be just as dry as two towels in the same amount of limited time. Another analogy is assuming that a dirty towel can be cleaned just as well with a limited amount of water e.g. one bucket, as it can with two.

Instead of the above fictions, easy to see with the above analogies, the BIABacus works on a far more realistic scenario. The BIABacus knows that in the brewing world, it is impossible to extract every bit of sugar from the grain as we are limited by many factors, the main one being that we are severely restricted as to how much water we can use to wash and rinse the grain... pretend you only have one bucket.

The current version of the BIABacus (PR 1.3T) solves that problem to a massive extent. A future iteration aims to solve it even further. The following diagram may help to distinguish things although the advantages compared to mainstream, even of PR1.3T, are not adequately shown...



My question for you

I'd love to hear more about your "Boil/Steam Condenser." It sounds fascinating BMW. Can you post some more info on that? Would love to see some pics as well.

Thanks for the link and pics BMW - much appreciated . I hadn't seen the condenser before. We'd probably get in trouble using one here due to water restrictions . Enjoyed reading the link. Shame the waste water can't be used for cleaning. That would be perfect!

I should have mentioned with the pic above that yellow/orange scenarios can be fixed easily (e.g. dilution) whereas red scenarios can't be fixed easily. Also just noticed that one of the Low's under BIABacus PR 1.3T was coloured yellow instead of red - fixed now. The diagram probably doesn't do justice to the differences though... If we forget about volume, you'll see that mainstream only scores 1/9 brews as ok versus BIABaci's 9/9 if that makes sense.

Next version requires adding in a few fairly complex calculations which will require some pretty fierce concentration or a lot of beer, not sure which yet

PP, when will we be able to play with the new generation BIABacus file...? Ive been really happy with the one we have, but it looks like a solid improvent.

This is a very hard question to answer Scott and a very good one to ask. I started replying shortly after you wrote your question, had just finalised my reply, hit Enter and I was logged out and lost all I had written

Here is what I remember writing...

"I actually started writing an answer to your question before you even asked it. I also spent a lot of the last week on the BIABacus as tizoc has expressed an interest in coding it and has, actually, already started work on it. I know nothing about coding but I strongly suspect he is capable of coding the current version.

Even the current iteration has many hidden layers to it. I have one more version up my sleeve but it will take some days for me to test. The version after that is far more complicated to write/program/code. I'm not sure if it is even possible yet."

I finished my post with something like the following...

"In fact Scott, I'll probably email you and some other key members here before replying further in this thread as the BIABacus, even to date has come at an immense personal cost. Further versions will require the same intense blocks of concentration (hundreds of hours), so to continue that is pretty crazy. Especially as I haven't even had the resources to post the new site structure up!"


Pat

Sorry your post has gone under the radar @BMWFan . It's going to be easier to answer if you can post your BIABacus file up and then I can make the right changes for you. Hopefully we're not too late???

Answer - Part 1*

Thanks for you outstanding patience @BMWFan . Nothing worse than having to wait days and days for an answer (sorry about that). I've just finished a big job so I should be more reliable from now on. Mind you, I might need some practice as I was half-way through writing my answer to you and lost the lot! (Not the forum's fault.) Let's see if I can remember what I wrote...

Okay, always save your files as .xls even when using LibreOffice or OpenOffice. The reason for this is that lots of people only have Excel and if you save your BIABacus as an .ods, they will, unfortunately, get a message saying that your file is corrupt. It won't open. If they do have LibreOffice installed they'll be able to open the file but heaps of people don't so best to play it safe and stick with .xls. (In hindsight, I wish we'd written the BIABacus in LibreOffice. Maybe later.)

Anyway, before we even go looking at BIABacus files, the thing to look at closely is the recipe you are trying to copy. If the original recipe says, "Chuck a pinch of salt in here and a couple of buckets of flour in here and then two handfuls of hops," you're not going to have much chance of copying that recipe. Unfortunately, there are many recipes floating about that can't be copied. In this thread, you'll find a recipe for a gold medal beer published in a respected magazine. But, it's impossible to copy as the recipe lacks critical definitions resulting in a recipe of no integrity. Yikes! But, it happens all too often. Let's have a look...

The Original Recipe - Dragonmead Final Absolution Triple Clone
I've deleted non-critical info below. Full original recipe can be found here though.

Batch Size (Gal): 5.00 Wort Size (Gal): 5.00 This line tells us we are going to have to do some work.
Total Grain (Lbs): 16.00 Should be 14.4 as Candy Sugar is not a grain.
Anticipated OG: 1.094
Anticipated SRM: 5.4
Anticipated IBU: 35.3 Garetz, Tinseth or Rager is not specified so, it rally has no relevance.
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75% This line also tells us we are going to have to do some work.

One good thing is that the original recipe contains a lot of info about each grain, sugar and hop addition....

Grain/Extract/Sugar
% Amount Name Origin Extract SRM
80.0 12.80 lbs. Pilsener Belgium 1.071 2
10.0 1.60 lbs. Munich Malt(2-row) America 1.008 6
10.0 1.60 lbs. Candy Sugar 1.015 0

Hops
Amount Name Form Alpha IBU Boil Time
1.80 oz. Hallertauer Mittelfruh Whole 4.50 29.7 60 min
0.40 oz. Styrian Goldings Whole 5.25 3.9 30 min
0.80 oz. Czech Saaz Whole 3.50 1.7 3 min

So, I think we can sort this.

Let's get The BIABacus to Help Us Fill in the Grey Areas

First we need to correct some typos. (I'm not happy with that 60 mins in Section B and in Section E by the way but we can talk about that later ). The 1.084 at the start of Section C should be 1.094 if we want to copy the original recipe.

In Section C, I have also typed a B beside Candy Sugar as it goes only in the boil. What you have done in Section Y for Candy Sugar I thought was correct but I have changed it to Beersmith defaults. Research that though as I think you are right .

That gets the fermentables sorted, sort of....

Section X is out of control. You've over-ridden the BIABacus default adjustments and you've typed in totally unrealistic scenarios. For example, you won't get only 1.9 litres of Kettle to Fermenter trub when you are brewing 44 litres into the fermenter of a hugely high gravity brew (any gravity brew as a matter of fact) so...

Don't over-ride the BIABacus defaults. The defaults prevent you from trying to do impossible brews which is exactly what I'm seeing here.

So, I'm going to remove the 1.9 KFL and the 0.7 from Section X. I'll leave the 1.9 evap rate as I know you have the exhaust set-up.

A Quick Look at Efficiencies

We have the fermentables sorted now and this is nearly always straight-forward. One thing you might note now though is that in Section P, we have three efficiency figures with the highest being 67.2%. If you look at your original recipe, they have something called 'Brewhouse Efficiency," at 75%. What you'll find if you look for any other recipes published by this person, they will have the same Brewhouse Efficiency whether they are brewing a beer with an OG of 1.094 or 1.034. And, that, is the major problem with all brewing software (BIABacus excepted), they assume that "efficiency" which is set by the program user, is a constant on every brew and that, is totally incorrect.

* That's taken a few hours to write and I've been working all day (and it's a Sunday) and I think I am getting old. In reality, I suspect I am getting wiser because I know how long the next part of the answer will take to write. I'll come back in a day or two with Part Two. Make sure you research on why I am unhappy with the 60 min boil and 60 min mash and I'll research on why I keep losing what I type. So annoying!

Hi Pat,

This is great stuff... It is awesome to read a post with so much thought put into it!!!

I had questions as well on when using sugar (I’ve done this one time in my 55 BIAB batches), what changes if any does one make with the BIABacus file? I see you left his file adjustment with a change in the original file for that section. (Or does putting it in B for “boil only” do that automatically)?

Anyhow, some clear info on if/when sugar is used, what to change with the BIABacus file and how that changes things would be appreciated.

My one time I put it in like a regular fermentable and made no other changes. Think I added at the start with the mash. But at the end my OG was way high and I had to add water to dilute.

Thanks,
Scott

Hey there Scott ,

In my last post I said I'd reply more frequently. Unfortunately, just after that, my van blew up so now I have to find and pay for a new engine. I think I need a "Go Fund Me," page

Thanks Scott for your comment on the thought bit. I truly appreciate that as the thought does take quite some hours.

And a great question of yours (as usual) on the sugar. Let's see if I can explain this right....

Okay, just got hit with a problem so I have to head out. I'll answer you Scott asap. Should be within 24 hrs. Cheers. Pat

So much for the 24 hours . So sorry (and embarrassed) to make you wait so long Scott.

[Also Scott, I've written the below for other readers. Most of the below you already know very well. At the end though, I come back to you. For other readers, take your time with this. This is not an easy read. In fact, it is pretty advanced stuff.]

Okay, what does putting a "B" beside a fermentable in Section C do?


The "B" ensures that kettle efficiency is not applied to that fermentable. (I'll come back to this.)

Without the "B", the BIABacus thinks as follows...
(This is tricky stuff but I've summed it up in point 5 below.)

1. This is a crushed grain and unless the author has typed something different in to Section Y, I am going to treat it as an "average" malt.

2. An average malt contains the equivalent of 76.8% pure sugar and 23.2% of non-useful stuff like husks.

3. On top of 23.2% of the malt being "junk", we have another problem. When mashing, the 76.8% of "sugars" from the grain don't miraculously dissolve into the water we soak or wash it with. There are lots of complexities involved but a nice simple way to think about it is if you have a pair of dirty jeans and dunk them in one bucket of water, they will not be as clean as if you dunked them in two buckets of water. Or, another way of looking at it, is that after the mash, sugars still remain in the spent grain.

The percentage of sugar we can extract from the malts in the mash into our boil (or kettle) is called, "kettle efficiency." The BIABacus estimates your kettle efficiency for you and you can see this in Section P*.

In Section P, you'll notice that on a very high gravity brew, the EIB and EAW percentages might drop as low as 60% and on a very low gravity brew, they might be as high as 90%.

What makes thing a little more confusing is that other brewing software cannot make the above calculations so they suggest setting 75% as what they often call "brewhouse efficiency."

It's important to know though that the 76.8% I mentioned above is a totally different thing from kettle efficiency.

[*NOTE: In Section P, "Efficiency into Boil" and "Efficiency of Ambient Wort" are both kettle efficiencies. Their estimates will always be identical as the amount of sugar in your kettle does not change during the boil. Only water evaporates, not sugar. The two names simply tell you that "kettle efficiency" can be checked at the beginning and end of the boil (in fact, it cam be done at any point during the boil). Like any brewing measurements, double-checking is good practice.]

4. After reading the above, let's see how the BIABacus deals with the 12,800 grams of Belgian Pilsner malt in Section C. The BIABacus will...

a) Assume that 76.8% of that 12,800 grams is equivalent to pure sugar.
b) Because the brew is of such high gravity, it is much harder to extract the sugar from the grain. In fact, in Section P we can see that BIABacus reckons that only 66.3% of the sugars can be extracted.
c) So we get 12,800 x 0.768 x 0.663 = 6,518 grams of "sugar" being contributed to the recipe.

5. In other words, if there is no "B", the BIABacus multiplies the weight of the fermentables by two percentages.

With the "B", the BIABacus thinks as follows...
(This is easy stuff.)

1. This fermentable with a "B" beside it, is not a crushed grain. It won't be soaked or rinsed. It will simply be added to the boil where it will fully dissolve. This is easy!

2. The "sugar" can be added at any time during the boil. Some recipes will say add at the start of the boil and others may say to add towards the end.

3. Perfectly dry table sugar is 100% pure sugar. In other words, if I added 1000 grams of perfectly dry table sugar to Roger's recipe, then it would contribute 1000 grams of sugar to the recipe but...

4. In Roger's recipe, he has Candi Sugar being added to the boil. I searched and was able to find that 1000 grams of Candi Sugar was equivalent to 783 grams of table sugar. (I was surprised by that! It makes it almost identical to your average malt in "pure" sugar content. It's beyond my field of expertise but I think that every 1000 grams of Candi Sugar has 217 grams of it's weight "frozen" as inert sugar. Hope that makes sense?)

5. In other words, in Roger's recipe, the Candi Sugar contributes the equivalent of 1,253 grams of pure sugar. (That's 1600 in Section C x 0.783 in Section Y.)

Scott's Problem

Scott, you mentioned, that in the one time on your heaps of brews you did use a sugar. The OG ended up way high. Now, let's firstly assume that the sugar you used was a lot more potent than Candi Sugar. In other words, it was more like table sugar.

There's two things...

Firstly you said you might have added it at the beginning of the mash. To my mind, and I'm not positive on this, I think that this would have reduced your OG as some of your sugars would have got stuck (clung to) the spent grain. So, that theory works against your end result except...

Secondly, you would not have added a "B" beside your sugar so, the BIABacus would have assumed not only that your sugar was impure (by 23.2%) but also that a reasonable percentage of that sugar would be lost. Let's use the "generic" 75%. Basically, for every 1000 grams of sugar your recipe had, the BIABacus would have thought you were really only using about 500 grams. (See point 4c above).

So, the BIABacus would have raised the amount of all fermentables needed with the end result being a brew with too high an OG.

I hope that makes some sense???

Crikey! I'm sorry that is so long. I thought I'd get the sugar problem and the hop problem done and dusted in this post. Instead, I fear I have written way too much just on the sugar problem.

Please, anyone reading this, just ask if anything above is totally confusing.

I'll leave the hop part for yet another day
PP

Thanks Pat.

I did not put the B for Boil Only. That explains the problem. Didn’t know that we need to.

What does S for Steeping do to the calculation? I used to steep but normally now just make the grain part of the mash. Easier and seems to work fine. But some of these grains have no diastatic power.

Guess I’m pretty good at all the basics. Just brewed BIAB batch 56. Many / most of them 8 gallons plus (VIF). Haven’t brewed a 5-gallon Bach for years. Labor is the same and I was going through beer way too fast. Bigger batches help. Anyway, if something I haven’t done or wasn’t involved in designing the spreadsheet - all bets are off.

Thanks again for your help!!! Writing an intelligent and articulate response just saps a huge amount of time and energy. And I hope your recovery is coming along...

@BMWFan : Read the bit below about "The Average Yield the BIABacus Uses," as this will be a part of my answer to one of your questions. I was expecting to answer your questions tonight and get your BIABacus finalised but some bits below took ages to write and I've now run out of steam sorry. (I still have beer though!) I want to get your BIABacus right before you brew so hang in there a bit longer.

Scott wrote: ↑

5 years ago

What does S for Steeping do to the calculation? I used to steep but normally now just make the grain part of the mash...
Guess I'm pretty good at all the basics...
And I hope your recovery is coming along...

In reverse order...
Recovery is going along well I think . Only one night in hospital this week and that's only because I know they have good food otherwise I would be legging it out of there as soon as I woke up from whatever they knocked me out with
You are way above the basics @Scott and write really intelligent and careful answers here. I've loved seeing you explore some really advanced areas, learning (or "unlearning") from them and then teaching us about them e.g. hops is just one thing.
Now the S for steeping will do nothing calculation-wise. It is simply there as a way of transferring more info to others. It allows an easy way of showing that you are going for the @hashie method as described in this thread way back before the idea became popular . Gordon Strong recommends steeping grains that can be steeped. I need more time to brew as I would love to do many side by sides on this and see the difference.

You also mention diastatic power above Scott. I must admit that I really have never bothered to read up on that term well enough to understand it. I also don't really understand what "inert" sugar means. Maybe this is an Australian thing? I've seen a lot of scary stuff here in Australia but nothing has scared me more than high school Chemistry.
I suspect that you have no fear of this Scott and could bravely educate the more timid among us with the most timid being me . (Email me if you do write something as I might miss it if I'm busy checking out yet another hospital )

Scott, I think you already know the following but, in case anyone else is following the numbers, here goes...

The Average Yield the BIABacus Uses - Don't Fall Asleep - I did!

In all brewing software, besides the BIABacus, every fermentable is given its own individual yield. A fermentable generally falls into two categories, a malt (crushed malted barley for example) or processed sugars (e.g. dried malt extract, table sugar or maple syrup).

For Processed Sugars: The BIABacus expects you to research the yield for these and type that info into Section Y as well as adding a "B" beside that sugar in Section C. (Any pure all-grain recipe will not contain processed sugars, however, that is a harsh definition as something like a Belgian Tripel will contain processed sugars but is still best described as an all-grain recipe.)

For other malts: The BIABacus allows you to be very lazy. Here's why...

The homebrewing world likes the myth that, "All beers can be brewed consistently." The largest commercial breweries in the world understand that this is a myth. In other words, they know that the malt, hops and water they use this week will be different from that they use next week even though they are from the same source, They know and say to themselves...

The pale ale I buy from Joe the Maltster this week will be a bit different from last week because he will be malting grain from a different paddock or region than he did last week. And, this week's pale ale may have 6% moisture content versus the 4% of the week before. I'm going to keep track of each batch's specifications and lower or raise the amount of this malt I use in each batch.
The hops I use this week, even though from the same batch as last week, will have aged a week. In 3 or 4 months, they might taste totally different or I might need a lot more of them to get the same result. Or, I may run out of this hop and be forced to find an alternative. And, on next year's harvest, this hop may taste totally different. If I'm a large commercial brewery, I'll perhaps buy the essential hop oils where there is less variance. If I am a craft brewer, I'l have to be really on the ball to get consistency but, even if on the ball, it is almost impossible on the fancier styles.
The water I used last week in some cities will be wildly different as from what flows through the taps a week later. A commercial brewer will use large scale equipment (even reverse osmosis) to equalise the water from batch to batch.

And, as a commercial brewery, I will also employ blending tanks where one batch is mixed with the next so as any changes from batch to batch are less noticeable.

Anyway, you get the idea. To cut a very long story short, one day (or week) I sat down and ran through lots of numbers and recipes and came up with an average yield that worked very nicely across pure all-gain recipes. Should you be a commercial brewer using the BIABacus, then you would use Section Y to type in the actual specs. If not a commercial brewer, don't do a thing unless you have specs you can trust.

Tweaking the BIABacus

I think the above section shows the perils of thinking that one batch of beer can be perfectly replicated.

BMW, gathering numbers on each batch is great. And, the BIABacus has been carefully designed so as there are ways of double-checking your numbers. I love it when brewers do record numbers carefully because recording honest numbers is the best way of beating yourself around the head with the honesty stick. What do I mean by that?

If your actual numbers are always matching your predicted numbers then you are being dishonest with your measurements. I know this because, before the BIABacus, I spent years taking, re-taking, re-remembering and/or re-interpreting brewday measurements so as they would match exactly that of the brewing software I was using at the time. It's a little harder to be dishonest with the BIABacus as the terminology is well-defined but, you can still do it .

The sooner you are beaten with the honesty stick, the sooner you grow up into a more realistic world. You'll see (especially if brewing outdoors) that each brewday brings you hugely different results in evaporation.

So, BMW, don't worry about the efficiency thing. The BIABacus will take care of that for you. But, imagine that you are trying to brew a batch of beer that has a VAW of 5 gallons with an OG of 1.050. On a windy day, you might end up with 4.5 gallons at 1.056. On a calm day, you might end up with 5.5 gallons at 1.045. Which do you want? How should you manage this most basic of unpredictables?

The good news is that the BIABacus defaults will tend to ensure that you, at pitching, will be in a good position.

On my next visit, I'll see if I can get that BIABacus finalised for your brew.

Cheers,
PP