We are your humble and attentive servants.

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Hahahahaha!!! I thought we'd lost you Bek

Seriously though, as I was doing that conversion for you, it dawned on me just how crap the existing calculator is. I have no idea how anyone makes sense of it . I wrote it maybe four years ago and since then, we have always been on the verge of improving it. But, we keep thinking of better things and designs. It's a very long story .

Suffice to say that converting your recipe the other day using The Calculator was embarrassing for me. The Calculator is so primitive... I'm amazed in hindsight that anyone understands it!!!

So, I'm going to take a bit of time off working on the new 'BIABacus' (because that is still at least 6 months away) and see if I can get a bit more of a respectable calculator up.

I'll use the BIABacus Beta to create a report for you Bek but I better do it tomorrow as I've been working on the 'temporary calculator' and I don't like doing conversions on a tired brain - too easy to make mistakes .

Very impressed you struggled through my last post and could make at least some sense of the existing calculator. I was actually going to PM you and say, 'Sorry!'.

(Should be able to do your recipe tomorrow morning.)


PP

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Calculator and grain bill

Pat suggested I ask for help here with this recipe.
My question is"why does my grain bill in the grain bill calculator not match the grain bill required in the volumes section" This has happened before where the two don't match and I usually go with the "grain bill required" in the volumes section.For some reason I keep ending up with beer but you guys are getting me addicted to numbers and I'm still on the fence whether this is a good thing or not.
Attached is a typical recipe with the problem.

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Mate, give up on stressing over numbers and I will guarantee you will live 5 years longer.

The difference in grain bill on the spread sheet provided makes no sense to me, it's just taken a few days off my life

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Hahaha hashie (Don't distract Lylo, he's trying to concentrate )

Okay, I asked Lylo to PM me the original recipe. Here it is.

Lylo is wondering why the original grain bill is about 20% higher than the scaled one. We basically need to look at two things...

Uh oh! Hold on, I'm just looking at your spreadhseet Lylo and a few of the input figures are wrong. Eg, the original gravity should be 1.053. For some reason, you have 4 grains whereas the original recipe only has 2. On the hop sheet, the hop weights and AA% didn't match the original recipe. I've changed all these to what the original recipe says and have attached the file below.

You'll see now that the difference in the original grain bill versus the scaled grain bill is now 4422 grams versus 4671 grams. Let's have a look at the differences...

1. The End of Boil Volume at Ambient Temperature

This is the first thing we need to look at in a recipe. This figure, EOBV-A, is equal to Volume into Fermentor plus Kettle Trub and, for all practical purposes, is where bitterness and gravity are finalised. Therefore it acts as a common ground between recipes.

It's easy to find EOBV-A in The Calculator. On the first sheet, line 11, you'll see it says 23.5 L.

But what about the original recipe? What is the EOBV-A? All we get given is a number called 'Batch Size' and depending on the brewer or program it could mean EOBV-A or it could mean Volume into Fermentor. After a bit of investigating, I believe by batch size he does mean EOBV-A which is great for us. So, his EOBV-A is 5 gallons which is about 19L.

So, there's your first difference. You are brewing more beer than he is. So you need more grain.

2. Efficiency into Kettle

If the original brewer has an EOBV-A of 19 litres and your EOBV-A is 23.5, how come we only need 200 grams more of grain?

The answer is that your efficiency into kettle (EIK) is 6% higher than his so you are getting more 'sugars' out of the grain than he is. (By brewhouse efficiency, this particular brewer does mean EIK. Some brewers or software can mean efficiency into the fermentor though when they talk of 'brewhouse efficiency ).

Summary

I've got a lot of work done on the temporary calculator mentioned above. I think this will be much easier to understand and use than the current calculator so Lylo, if all the above is a bit mind-boggling, don't worry about it for now .

And, don't listen to hashie
PP

PS You're next Bek

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
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Here you go Bek,

I changed this to a 60 minute boil. This means you need more hops. Let me know if you want a 90 minute bio instead.


PP

BIABacus RECIPE REPORT
***********************
The Recipe Designer, Calculator and Scaler for BIAB Brewers
(The BIABacus is currently being developed at http://www.biabrewer.info" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)

Naked Island Imperial Stout (Batch 0) - Stout Russian Imperial (13F)
Brewer: stoutgirl5
Original Recipe by:
Information link:

Equipment, Efficiencies and Losses
-------------------------------------
Equipment: 21.21 Litres Kettle with a diameter of 30 cm (Evaporation Rate:2.98 l/Hr)
Efficiencies: 65.6% Efficiency into Kettle (EIK) and 56.3% Efficiency into Fermentor (EIF)
Kettle to Fermentor Losses = 1.8 Litres - Fermentor to Packaging Losses = 0.8 Litres

Gravities and Volumes
------------------------------
Total liquor (water) = 19.23 Litres
Volume of Mash (assuming a full-volume BIAB) = 23.6 Litres
Pre-Boil Volume and Pre-Boil Gravity = 16.1 Litres at 1.078
End of Boil Volume (before chilling) and End of Boil Gravity (or OG) = 13.12 Litres at 1.096
Volume into Fermentor and Original Gravity (OG) = 10.8 Litres at 1.096
Volume into Packaging (Bottles/Keg) and Final Gravity (FG) = 10 Litres at 1.024

Mashing and Boiling
---------------------------------
Single Infusion Mash at 68.3˚C for 90 minutes.
Boil for 60 minutes.
Mashing Instructions:

The Grain Bill (Original Gravity 1.096)
---------------------------------------
3818.38 g or 63.64% Maris Otter
1090.97 g or 18.18% Munich
272.74 g or 4.55% Crystal (Caramel) 60
272.74 g or 4.55% Chocolate Malt
272.74 g or 4.55% Malted Oats
272.74 g or 4.55% Roasted Barley

The Hop Bill (BBTinseth IBU's - 75.9)
-----------------------------------
33.58 g or 69.8 IBU's Columbus (Tomahawk®) Pellets (14.4%) at 60mins.
17 g or 3.91 IBU's Willamette Pellets (4.7%) at 10mins.
17.02 g or 2.14 IBU's Willamette Pellets (4.7%) at 5mins.
17.05 g or 0 IBU's Willamette Pellets (4.7%) at 0mins.

Miscellaneous
---------------

Miscellaneous Notes:

Yeast, Fermentation, Carbonation and Conditioning Details (ABV = 9.42%)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yeast Choices: Dry English Ale (White Labs WLP 007)
Ferment for 10 days at 18 ˚Celsius

Bulk prime with 44.93Grams of Table Sugar
Carbonate at 18˚Celsius for 14 days or Crash Chill at 1˚Celsius for 4 days and then transfer to keg.
Carbonate to 2.2 Volumes CO2.
Serving Temperature: 6˚C
Fermentation notes:

Special Recipe Notes or Instructions
--------------------------------------
A great balance of roastiness, chocolate, malty sweetness, alcohol and hops.

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I got it. I don't even want to tell you what I was doing.

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Lol! Sorry mate, I only just saw your 'Oops' PM now. Hope the above made some sense. If not, wait and see if the updated temporary calculator helps.

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kartoffel wrote:Ok so I think I'm going to jump in this coming Sunday. I unfortunatley can't really get the calculator to work well for me as I'm on linux. I only can use LibreOffice Calc which gives me all sorts of horrible run time errors and the macros don't really work. No easy access to a windows machine makes it even worse.

I have a 30quart (about 28L pot)
http://www.overstock.com/Home-Garden/Ki" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ... cid=123620
with that burner too.

I also have a fermentor bucket which I want to use for the sparge/mashout part of a maxi biab setup (unless I should be doing something different)

My recipe is a ~50/50 blend of wheat malt and pilsner malt. I don't care about hop utilization I'm using 1 ounce and if it's a bit more bitter then oh well with the 90 minute boil, or I could always add them at 60 minutes to end of boil.

I have 10 pounds of grain total or ~4.5KG

I am planning on putting all the grain into the 28L pot at ?? temperature to mash at 152-154F or about 67C (probably a bit on the warmer side for body) This pot should be full to the brim with water right.

I wont squeeze the bag but I want to sparge/mash out at 170F/77C for 10-15 minutes (I can do this in my fermentor bucket since it's big enough and can handle the temperature. Then I want to take the sparge/mashout liquor and add it back to the 28L pot to have enough water to do a full volume boil and end up with enough for a 5gallon/19L (into bottles) batch. I will assume the average ammount of trub loss (I will whirlpool)

The recipe has an anticipated OG of 1.049 If im off by a few points I dont care.

I just dont know how much water I need to add to my original mash pot to fill the whole 28L to the top, and what temperature it should be at assuming my grains are room temperature. Then I don't know how much water to sparge/mashout with, and what temperature that water should be assuming the grains are at mash temperature.

The diameter of that pot is im guessing around 40CM but I'll measure it sometime tomorrow and update this. I don't know if I need to adjust the boil length to hit my gravity, but from what I have seen here with the all grain kits from northern brewer they usually work out well(I have the bavarian hefeweizen one but I did 50/50 on the grains and have 10lbs so I could use less if needed)

I'm not too concerned with numbers but as long as I can use this setup with that amount of grain and get near 1.049 and ~5gallons of beer to bottle ill be happy.

If I can get any more information let me know. I'm finding the overload of information here a bit overwhelming, and the worst part is I can't even really mess around with the calculator because it gives me runtime errors :(

Hi kartoffel
I'm also a Linux user. Attached is the Maxi calculator in ods format. I sometimes find that the Hops calculations display #ERROR. I've found that if I open the spreadsheet in gnumeric and just do a save the the calculations are all ok again when I open it in Libre office?!

Please post your kettle diameter and your hops AA% and I'll have a bash at entering the figures. Alternatively upload your file here and I'm sure some guys will have a look at it. Just don't expect anything from Pistolpatch - he's got a wheat intolerance!

Cheers,
Bertie

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Ok kartoffel,

Here goes my attempt at running through your recipe. I'll try my very best not to write an essay. Some things may not be explained to your satisfaction - I'm hoping the other members with knowledge in the "lacking" areas will add some detail!

1. I've done very little to the changes you've made, so well done on that one!

2. Since you seem reasonably set on a OG of 1.049 I haven't changed the value in B10 (worksheet/tab: Volumes etc.)

3. I did, however, change the B5 (Brew length/How much beer you want to end up with) value to 17.5L (I'm going to refer to metric through- sorry!). The effect of this change is that your total grain requirement B21 will be 4.455 grams. The breakdown of the grain bill is given in the Grain Bill worksheet/tab in cells G7 & G8. Oh - I'm assuming that your 10lbs total malt available is 5lbs Pilsner malt and 5lbs wheat malt? Note: If you want more beer with the same grain bill then you can increase the value in (B5) to 19L (basically 5 US Gal) but then you will have reduce your OG (B10) to 1.046. So you will have a "weaker" beer but more of it! Make these changes on the spreadsheet and see how the values in cells G7 & G8 in the Grain Bill tab changes.

4. Hops. Your 28 grams of hops should be perfect for the beer. On the Hop Bill tab I've enter the IBU value of 12 in cell E12. This is, I think, "middle of the IBU range" for the Weizen/weissbier style. I have entered your hops AA's in J12 on the same sheet and the "standard" (I use the term loosely) boil time for a single/bittering hop addition is 60 minutes. This value was already in in cell G12. Important: If you have got hops pellets then please change the value of cell L8 to 110%. For hops flowers the value should be 100%.
Now, the end effect of all these changes of are that, APPARENTLY, you will need to add 25.8 grams (0.91 ounces) of your hops after you wort has been boiling for 30 minutes (the calculator is set for a 90 minute boil). I highlight APPARENTLY as a more exact figure is provided in the Maxi-BIAB and Actuals tabs.

5. The values entered in the Equipment tab looks perfect.

6. The Maxi-BIAB tab reveal some interesting/important information:

1. If the Value in cell B27 is too low then you will be mash will be very thick. I've had it down to 2.7 once and it was very difficult to work with. Just keep that in mind for future brews. The 4.6 as given for this recipe will present no problems.

• I use the sum of cells B69 and B70 as a guide of the amount of dunk sparge water I need. In this case it's 8.1L (2.1 US Gal). If you can dunk sparge in between 2.1 US Gal And 2.3 US Gal of water then you should be just fine

7. The "flesh" of the Mega-Maxi calculator is the Actuals tab. And it's unfortunately one that you will need to update as you progress with your brew. I have inserted a column M that will accept/display inches, US Gal and ounces where applicable. You basically start at the top of the sheet and work your way down - the values in red you need to complete. If it's red in column M then you can change it in that column are it will convert to liters and cm in column B. Gravity readings still need to be completed in column B. It's not pretty, it's not 100% accurate but I hope it makes things easier!
- Please note that the important part of this tab is that the values of the water additions, efficiencies and more importantly, hops quantities, change as you enter your readings.
- I've highlighted the water additions with a pink background. It will change as you enter the correct measurements.
- Use the hops quantities as in B78/M78 when you do the hops addition. It will change as you enter the correct measurements.

A couple of "general" notes that will hopefully help:
- The sugar extraction of wheat is apparently different than normal grains and your efficiency might seem very low. Other people on the forum would be able to give more details here (or they might tell me that I'm talking crap ). Don't stress about it.
- I would suggest that you mash at around 67C/152F for 90 minutes and then dunk the bag in your sparge water. You will be surprised how close the sparge water comes to mash-out temps (77C/172F). My sparge water would be boiled and in the sparge pot about 5 minutes prior to me lifting the bag. Somehow it just works!
- I've had a separate 3 gal pot with my dunk sparge liquor on the stovetop, as close to boil as possible. It meant that when I did the additions to the main kettle, the boil would not be interrupted.
- I've had a hard time getting my wort to cool down to hydrometer temps until somebody here suggested the following: Collect your wort sample in a stainless steel jug. Lower it into a bucket/dish with cold/ice water, taking care not let any water mix with the wort, and swirl it around. I hold my jug sideways under a running tap whilst swirling it around all the time and I cool boiling (100C/212F) wort down to hydrometer temps (16C/60F) within 4 minutes. Our tap water temps average around 12C/53F!
- If the calculator, especially the hops tab, gives you a #NAME error, close the file, open it with Gnumeric (easy to install via Synaptic), save it and open it again in Libre Office. Ugly but effective! And soon (I hope) not necessary any more!

I am sorry for the "additional" info overload! Shout if something is not clear. I hope that it help and I trust that the knowledgeable guys will correct me where I'm wrong (hopefully nowhere!).

Cheers
lambert

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Haven't checked it, all sounds good

With the maxi calc where it says to add boiling water additions you can use sparge additions. Just make sure you finish adding sparge with at least 15 mins to go in the boil

I make a hefeweizen with 50/50 pils/wheat and a 60 min hallertau addition

It can be tricky draining a wheat biab as a gel coating forms on the bag. A protein rest of some sort can help with this

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