My First BIAB & First time using BIABacus

• • SVA Brewer With Over 50 Brews From Great Britain
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Hi there Yetti and congratulations on your first BIAB .

There's a lot I would like to say here. There is a lot to complement you on and one big problem that is not caused by you. I'll cover the compliments quickly and the problem stuff in more detail.

On the compliment side, you have shown great attention to detail. I know that one sentence makes me sound like a school teacher but I can't tell you how much I appreciate people who can read and write more than a tweet. (How anyone can honestly expect to get educated, a single sentence at a time, is beyond me.)

Your BIABacus file tells me you are willing to spend time on learning rather than demand and be happy with instant but incorrect answers. Very nice .

On the problem side, I am thinking that you have looked at other software before and this software will have lead you to believe that recipe scaling involves a lot of ducking and weaving or twisting and turning. In other software, this would be pretty much correct .

Recipe scaling and copying though, is actually dead easy. There are really only two issues...

1. The original recipe must contain the right information. Most recipes don't. If they don't provide the right information, no software in the world can scale or copy that recipe. Most published recipes on the internet are actually like that.

2. If the right information is published, you can use it and scale it in the BIABacus pretty much as fast as you can type the ingredients in. If you use other software, you will, at best, have to create an equipment profile for the original recipe and then 'scale' that to your own equipment profile. It's pretty ridiculous and prone to error.

What I think you might have done here is tried to put a recipe with no integrity into the BIABacus. (I'm assuming you are trying to copy the recipe in the second post of the Brains Dark thread you linked above???) If so, that recipe does not satisfy condition 1 above so we have a major problem before we even start. Can you have a read of...

This Post
This Post
A skim of This Thread

If you do that, you will be able to double-check me and confirm that the recipe you were trying to copy had very little, possibly no integrity. A recipe that has little or no integrity will be very hard to input into the BIABacus - you will actually have to fight the BIABacus. Why? Because an original recipe with no integrity can't be made into a recipe with integrity.

When you find yourself fighting the BIABacus, you must stop and ask questions. Did you find yourself fighting it?

If yep, then we can have a look at how fast and easy things should be if you had been given a good recipe to copy to begin with.


PP

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
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• • SVA Brewer With Over 50 Brews From Great Britain
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Good on you Yetti,

One thing we better sort out and could well be the reason you might be scratching your head, is that I'm not even sure I was looking at the same original recipe as you!

In the above post I wrote, "I'm assuming you are trying to copy the recipe in the second post of the Brains Dark thread you linked above?" but,on sober reflection, I remember now that there was no direct link to a recipe, only a link in the BIABacus to Jim's. So, what I did was just searched Jim's for Brains's Dark and found this thread.

So, I could have been looking at a totally different recipe from you. However all the ingredients are the same as yours, just not the weights.

Can you let me know if this was the right thread and that you were using the recipe in the second post? Once we have that, I might be able to do a bit better than I did in the post above.


PP

P.S. Just be aware that some of those links I gave may use some slightly newer terminology than you have in your current BIABacus file. Hope that doesn't cause too much confusion.

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
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• • SVA Brewer With Over 50 Brews From Great Britain
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Hi again Yetti,

Good on you for getting through all that reading. It's a shame that it is not in a nice, easy to find structure but I think that is going to take a massive amount of work and, as you have noticed, even some tricky terminology issues have only recently been solved.

Before we get back to the recipe...

Yettiman wrote:...I tried to edit the Hyperlink, but it seems locked.

That's an annoying thing in spreadsheets. In Excel, you right click on the cell and hit 'Clear Contents'. Not sure what you have to do in other spreadsheets.

Now to the recipe...

The Original Recipe has no Integrity

From your PM, I gather you have done some more reading on recipe integrity so what I write here might be superfluous. Probably the best thread for explaining this in detail is the thread called, Does this recipe have integrity? Can I copy it?. This cup of tea analogy might also help explain why this recipe has no integrity.

The basic problem with the recipe is that we have no idea what volume of ambient wort it makes. It says 23 litres but there is no way to know what this 23 litres refers to. If the person meant volume into fermentor, this does not help us because unless he also tells us his kettle to fermentor loss, we will won't know the key volume figure - Volume of Ambient Wort (VAW). Note that VAW is identical to the end of boil volume once cooled to ambient temps (EOBV-A).

The BIABacus has some pretty crafty ways of guessing the Volume of Ambient Wort but with this recipe, even this is impossible so the recipe remains impossible to scale accurately.

The BIABacus does the Scaling for You

Above you wrote, "The reason the quantities are lower is that I reduced them to 3/5th as I only wanted to create 3 gallons..." I was worried that this might have been what you had done. The BIABacus actually does all scaling for you provided the original recipe has integrity.

Let's pretend that in this case, the original author had said, "This recipe will give you 23 L of ambient wort." The recipe would now have integrity and can be used. Here's all you have to do...

Do everything you did (really nice work too) with the exception of the following...

See how Sections C and D have a left and right hand side? On the left you type in what weights etc were used in the original recipe. The right hand side then tells you what weights you will need to use to get the Desired Volume into Fermentor you typed into Section B and the same bitterness as the original recipe.

Here is how your file would look...

BIABacus PR1.3 - BrainsDark - Master.xls

You'll see you will need 983 grams of grain and 6.7 grams of hops.

On the left hand side of Section C, you could have also typed in the grain percentages if you knew them because that is the only info needed. It is best though if you input the original weights if you do know them.

Anyone can Now use the Recipe

If you sent me that file, all I need to do to scale it is type in my kettle dimensions and Desired Volume into Fermentor into Section B. That's it! (Well, you do have a dilution written in Section W so I would remove that for my set-up as well.)

Will the Recipe turn out Okay?

In the file, we have VAW set to 23 litres. In reality it could have been more or less. It is very likely though that we are within 10% so you will be fine brewing this recipe. This is true in most cases but it is important that you, as a brewer, are aware that you could be some way off from the original recipe.

As a general rule though, if you want a recipe with integrity, they are very hard to find. A book like 'Brewing Classic Styles' will serve you well and is one of the few books that actually does give you the VAW. Recipes on this site by the experienced brewers should serve you well although even some of the experienced brewers here are not fully aware of the integrity problem. Just ask then though if their VAW is not clear. If you have fellow brewers in your area and like the beers they brew, that is also a great recipe source as you actually know what the beer should taste like.


PP

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
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Hi PP,

Give me a little time to go through this, a lot of information here and I want to do it justice and not waste your time, if I go quiet for a couple of days, bear with me.

I think this has answered most / all of my questions, I just need to make sure I understand it.

Have gone through your undated version (huge thanks for doing that by the way) side by side with my original, and your notes, and now understand it so much more.

It was a great aid to my understanding.

I have also read and re-read all of the earlier BIABacus notes and threads.

Sorry if I sound like a schoolboy reporting back to his teacher

The good news is the beer from the session, is clearing nicely and should be a good 1st brew

I will be looking to test it next week, very early (only three weeks) but might be worth taking a peek a one bottle at least.

Thank you again PP

• • SVA Brewer With Over 50 Brews From Great Britain
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Excellent Yetti . I think I better take a few days break as well - I'm all typed out. When you're ready though, throw in any more questions you have. Main thing is to not try and digest the BIABacus as a whole. Sections B, C, D and K are the main ones to look at.

Don't read too much. Sometimes too much reading can actually be a negative. Currently we don't really have an order of what should be read and understood first but we'll get there one day.


PP

P.S. I owe you a PM but it might take me a few more days to get to sorry .

• • SVA Brewer With Over 100 Brews From Australia
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