Thanks, PP. I just downloaded the PR 1.3K and am about to enter my stuff into it. When I first open the file, I get this message, screen shot attached. Is this worth worrying about, or fine as is?

Hi All,

Looking for recipe critique of this one please. Its for a local comp and have to use pre defined aussie hops.
More so wondering if any one has used marris otter in an ipa before with success. Not expecting anything more than feedback as its my first comp.

laserghost wrote:Thanks, PP. I just downloaded the PR 1.3K and am about to enter my stuff into it. When I first open the file, I get this message, screen shot attached. Is this worth worrying about, or fine as is?

My goodness! Lol!

Never seen anything like that before . It looks like you are using Apple. What sort of spreadsheet program? I think that was the cause of your other problems as well as that spreadsheet program is immediately corrupting the file. I think you'll need to use LibreOffice for Mac as I don't think there are any problems there.

Fun and games eh LG?

DaveDoran wrote:Hi All,

Looking for recipe critique of this one please. Its for a local comp and have to use pre defined aussie hops.
More so wondering if any one has used marris otter in an ipa before with success. Not expecting anything more than feedback as its my first comp.

Sounds like fun Dave. A few preliminary things. Try and use PR 1.3 K as some terminology etc in PR1.3 is obsolete. Also use the naming convention... "BIABacus PR1.3? - IPA - CATnDOG IPA.xls". Makes things easier on your own computer down the track and also when posted up here.

On the recipe, I think maybe a good way to go is to ask you questions so as you make sure you are clear why you are making the decisions you have made. Marris Otter would be fine. I'm wondering why so much wheat? Not really needed. Also wondering why such a dark crystal?

On the hop side, when designing a recipe, make a decision on what IBU's you want and type that on the second line of Section D. Lave the first line blank. Also put your hops in time order so as it keeps things clear for you.

My questions on the hops are... Why are you adding hops every ten or so minutes. What do you want from them at those times? I think the Summer hops are more suited to end of boil and after boil. Vic Secret is fine where it is. Mind you. I am not speaking from experience at all as there are so many hops out these days I can't keep up with them. I am basing my comments on what I read here.

On one of the Vic Secret hop additions you have WP (I assume that means Whirlpool and then 15 mins beside it. Get rid of the 15 minutes otherwise the BIABacus and other readers will think you are putting this hop addition in 15 minutes before flame out. If you want to define a time for the whirlpool hops, write it in Section I.

One last thing. See your red warning about your mash volume? You need to hold five or so litres back and add them before or during the boil after you pull your bag especially as you have a tall, narrow kettle. (Use Section W to do this.) Definitely get PR 1.3K as the warnings etc work in it better as well.

Good on you!

Pistol, you are busy on this forum! You are correct, I'm on a Mac, but I'm using Microsoft Excel ... I'll look into LibreOffice, but instinctively I thought Excel would be preferred. Will post back with my results.

Cheers!

Wow, that is weird lg. I've never heard of any problems before with Mac.

The only named areas in the spreadsheet relate to the Print Areas of the Recipe Report and the Checklist and they are not needed. I'll attach here a version with them deleted and see how you go. If it works alright, I'll remove them from the main release as well.

I've called it double K.



P.S. Let me know if it comes up as Protected. In other words, you should only be able to click on input fields. Also see if you can Unprotect it without a password.

Thanks for the response PP. Great advice and will be using this for sure.
Have filled it in on the PR 1.3K version.
With this recipe this was my thinking.
The Wheat was really just for head retention so can look at dropping this back a bit. The 5% crystal was to add a little bit of sweetness to grain bill hopefully to complement the malty flavour form the Marris Otter.
Looking though my notes here and this was my thinking for the hops. Originally designed as 60 IBU recipe being of 25 IBU Bittering (Pride of Ringwood), 20 IBU Flavour (Summer) and 15 IBU Aroma ( Summer + Vic Secret) along with a significant dry hop (Vic Secret). Hope this makes sense so far.
I then decided that maybe it would be of benefit to try smooth out the bitterness of the recipe using first wort hopping. So took 10IBU's of the 60 and took them from the aroma hops being summer. This resulted in 45g of Secret to FWH.
Now I am rethinking this because Summer like Vic Secret I read is best suited to a late addition or dry hop addition. Maybe they are better off being left as a 10min addition. If I had the time I would love to do 23 batches side by side to compare.
Thanks for the advice regarding the mash volume.
Have revised it to PR1.3k and attached.

That file had the same warning that I posted earlier. It's okay though, I went ahead and got LibreOffice and there were no warnings, though the numbers it's outputting are exactly the same as before – I'll just go ahead and use Libre along with PR 1.3K and not worry about it!

Here is the new file. Everything is entered accordingly except for the 1 L wort out / 1 L water in. Not sure how to input that. When I'm writing the recipe for the beer, I don't think that's a step I would want to include, but I would like to know what mash efficiency into boil to specify.

I notice in the 1.3K version, there is "once chilled, VAW should be appox: 21.15 L" as well as "Volume of Ambient Wort (VAW): 21L" – what is the purpose for having both of those when the difference is only .15L?

Dave, I'll have to come back to you later sorry.

Laserghost, that is super weird about the Excel for Mac. Oh well!

Regarding the two VAW's...


THe BIABacus allows a series of double-checks because we know that single readings cannot be relied on. The first measurement we can take is into the boil. See how your EIB was 75.6%? The first time we can check that is at flame-out. Checking volume at flame-out is usually pretty hard if you use an immersion chiller but other brewers and no-chillers can fairly easily take a volume reading at flame-out. However, hot volumes are a bit dodgy as ther is so much swelling at boiling temperature. If you delete your KFL and VIF in Section L,you will notice that your EAW in Section P changes slightly to 69.9%, If you were a no-chiller, this is the only number you would have available until you pitched. So, that is one of the reasons why we have that approx VAW in Section L.

Let's put the 19L and 2 L back in. Now the BIABacus changes the EAW to 69.4%. The reason it does this is because if two sets of numbers are available, it will be the cold volume figures that will be more accurate. So, it's all about enabling opportunities to double-check numbers. Let's have a look at yours...

Have fun reading this next paragraph - lol!

Theoretically, if we could measure well enough, EIB should equal EAW as no sugar is lost during the boil and that is what efficiency is all about, working out how much sugar is in the wort. Your EIB was 75.6% and your EAW was 69.4% so we have a discrepancy of about 6% which is not uncommon (but you actually really do not have that discrepancy as you'll see later). What I can do now though is have a look at your EIF figure to see if that is confirming EAW. This is a bit advanced so don't worry about it too much. Remember we talked about efficiency being a measure of how much sugar is lost in the boil? Well the only difference between EAW and EIF is how much sugar we lose in our KFL. What I see here is that your estimated VIF is an exact match to your actual and this makes it very easy for me to see if the EIF figure confirms the EAW figure. Notice how your estimated EAW and estimated EIF are almost exact matches to your actuals? Basically that is telling me that those numbers are reliable and to ignore your into boil figures.

Now your problem is this removing the wort and replacing it with water. We already talked about why not to do that. If you ever did want to make a pre-boil adjustment (which you shouldn't!!!) you would just add more water and end up with more beer at the end of the day. Never would you remove wort from the boil. Anyway, my job is to adjust the numbers so we can see what would have happened if you hadn't fiddled .

All you basically did when you removed the wort is you took out 1 L @ 1.041. We can call this 1 x 41 metric gravity points. All we have to do is add them back in again at the end of the boil. Your end of boil gravity was 1.052. 41/52 = 0.79. All I have to do is add 0.79 L to your VIF so it now reads 19.79 L. (I'll adjust the volume at flame-out as well but will not bother with the 4% shrinkage as on 1 L it is nothing.)

Now we can see that your actual EAW was 72.0% which confirms the EIB of 75.6% quite nicely. Your EIF is 65.4%. Suffice to say your kettle efficiency was 72.0%.

What's Important

When publishing a recipe,your kettle efficiency figure is not of importance to another brewer as their kettle efficiency will be different from yours. What is important is the ratio of the grains used and the OG. Regardless, the BIABacus includes comprehensive information in its recipe report so use it as is. That is what you should use to publish all recipes. The whole question we have addressed here, in other words, is irrelevant.

It's also largely irrelevant to you. The BIABacus estimates were extremely close to what you got. If after five brews, you seem to be always getting higher efficiency than the Bi Abacus, then over-ride the default. But not until then. The worst that will happen to you is that you will get more beer than expected. Have some cooled boiled water ready at the end of each brew to dilute your wort if needs be.

Here's your file
PP

(P.S. The 13.25 in Section W stays as is. Don't add a litre in there)

cweir60 (second) and DaveDoran (first)

Dave, sorry I didn't get back you you uesterday. I got drunk on light beer writing BIABAcus help .

I think the recipe is more complicated thatn it needs to be. THe best IPA's recipes are often quite simple. No wheat is needed un lees with yiour water you have some problem. A simple bill if 95% MO and 5% Crystal 30 would be fine.

On the hops, do less additions. Do a bittering one at 75 mins using POR and nothing else. Do a flavour one of Vic Secret at 15 mins. Do a WP of Summer and Vic Secret and same with the DH.

I'm basing this on Mitch Steele's IPA book. Most of the American IPA's basically had one bittering addition adn then nothing else until the whirlpool. A couple had a 30 or 45 minute addition but not many. For thos recipes that had aonly bittering and WP additions, basically half th weight of hops were used at bittering and the remainder at the end of that is of any help.

The above is just an idea. I'm certainly no expert at the artistic side of recipe design. Your idea is probably as good as mine.

Just looking at cwier60 recipe now and heahas added additins all the way through as well so definitley don't take what I say as gospel.



cwier60, glad to hear it is tastting great . Yep, pump the IBU's up tp 60 or 65 I reckon. Your over-riding of the BIABacus auto-estimate was a bit ambitious. If you hadn't over-ridden it, you would have been pretty spot on.

One thing, don't reduce boil vigour to try and slow down evaporation rate. It won't make much of a difference anyway. If you are worried about the large evaporation from a wide pot such as yours, float a SS bowl in it. I've got your pot and really don't worry about it. Hey, why no KFL?

Good stuff!
PP

Thanks PP. Will take it all on board and see how it goes in the end.

That's great the beer turned out nicley cwier60 ,

Thanks for re-expliaing your trub lss thing. Sometimes it gets hard in this thread keeping track of who is doing what .

Okay, firstly, evaporation does not affect efficiency. It affects volume only. Efficeicny is all about the amount of sugar in the wort. If you could measure things accurately, and your actuals in this brew managed to match your estimates, here is what you would have measured...

Into Boil: 33.03 L @ 1.047 = 33.03 * 47 = 1552 metric gravity points.
End of Boil: 24.24 L * 1.064 = 24.27 * 64 = 1551 metric gravity points.

The amount of sugar, and therefore efficiency, does not change due to evaporation.

Now on the 9% thing. Firstly ignore your actual into boil measurements as these are the least reliable of measurements. (Did your actual VIB really exactly match the estimated or is that 33 just typed in but not actually measured? As the previous para show, all efficiency readings rely on measuring both volume and gravity not just gravity.)

Look at your efficiecny of ambient wort reading in Section P. It is about 7% below. That is the tell-tale sign.

Now, if you simply go ahead and delete the 9% from Section X, you may get confused as your efficiecny will still read 7% below. However, if you had done this before ordering your grain bill, you would have found yourself ordering more grain and therefore you would have endded up putting more sugar into the boil and your actual would therefore have neen higher. You would have found your EAW coming to within 2% of the estimate. (You might need a beer to understand that ).

Main lesson. Don't over-ride anything in Section X without a very good reason or several brews under your belt.


PP

Hi rephormat.

Welcome to the forum. On the forum here we all make a post in this thread http://www.biabrewer.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=119.

After that I recommend filling out the Biabacus and going from there.
Shout out if you need help filling it out. Plenty here to help out.

I'm having a look at this right now, but there are a few things suspicious looking. First, I doubt that crystal 15 malt has an extract potential of 10PPG as listed in the recipe. We can ignore the first point and move forward I think. Second, It says to rack to a keg at 29 PSI but doesn't give the temperature. So we will have to assume they are carbonating at or close to room temp, or carbing to over 3 vols. A little bit of a shot in the dark in terms of recreating carbonation level. I think 2.7 vols is fairly standard for the style, so we can go with that for now. It also appears that they just dump everything in the fermenter, trub and all. Considering that they are dumping everything into the fermenter, I think this recipe is probably meant to leave 1 gallon behind in the fermenter and yield 5 gallons VIP (volume into packaging).

I'd suggest putting 20.5 or 21 in the VIF field of BIABacus. Or I can upload a partially completed file that you can change the kettle dimensions to match your equipment, and populate the fields in section G.

LampyB wrote:Hey guys, I'm going to be brewing my first BIAB next weekend and I'm looking for some help converting a recipe over to a 3 gallon batch.

Do you have a source for the recipe that we can have a look at?
You say 3 gallon batch, is that 3 gallons ending up in bottles/kegged or 3 gallons in the fermenter?

Source: http://www.biabrewer.info/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1236

This recipe is full of mistakes I think.

1. Says 30 minute boil, but 90 min boil seems to better match his equipment's boil-off and total water need. 90 min boil also seems fairly close to his start of boil volume (if the end of boil listed is actually start of boil volume).

2. The IBU is way off from what the recipe lists. If I double both of the 10 min additions then we get close. I don't really understand this, as this appears to be a generated recipe report. Maybe the program that generated the report increases IBU for no-chill users?

Unfortunately the user hasn't visited the forum in over a year, so asking for clarification may not help. Maybe one of the more experienced brewer's here can make sense of this, but I can't.

We can scale the recipe to 3 gallons, but you would have to decide whether you are OK with the IBU being much lower than what is listed, or increase the hops to match the IBU listed. I'm also unsure how to handle the "French press" hops.