PistolPatch wrote:The BIABacus help is being written up now and you won't really find anything much on Recipe Design on the forum on it atm. Recipe Design has very little to do with numbers/software but with the BIABacus, that side of things is very easy...

1. Type in the OG you want in Section C and the percentages of each grain you want. In Section D, on the second line, type in the IBU's you want and then type in the amount of hops, their AA%, times and addition method. That's it.

You can also check to make sure your colour is right but...

The major part of recipe design should not be done in software. When people do, they say, "Oh no my colour (and colour formulas we have in software are not that great) is wrong! I'll throw in some crytal or dark malt to fix it. Great! Now it matches the style!!!" Or they look at the IBU estimate (especially in other software where you add the hops first and then see what IBU you get and which formula you are using and whether it was even written correctly) and focus on that instead of thinking about what each hop contribution will bring o the table.

The BIABacus, with it's set-up of typing in gravity and IBU goals before ingredients is ideal for the numbers part of recipe design. Its formulas are also correct whereas a lot of other software has its formulas wrong. The only thing the BIABacus won't do that a lot of other software will, is tell you if you are within style guidelines which is really just a gimmmick and it's a misleading gimmmick as it is just based on gravity, IBU and colour which you should know before you start designing a recipe not after.

Professional Recipe Design

In the BIABAcus help that is currently being written, three of the forums are, "Recipe Scaling," "Recipe Design" and "Beer Cloning". Professional Recipe Design does not involve much time sitting in front of software (maybe 5 minutes at most.) The more knowledge and experience you have of ingredients (and the beer style), the better recipe designer you will be.

Software will not tell you the difference between Briess US 2 row malt and Rahr US 2 row malt and that both can benefit from a protein rest. (Well it might but it certainly won't tell you which is best for the recipe you are working on.) Software won't pop up and say, you're making a lager. Did you know you can use pilsner malt for this style? It won't tell you that one variety of hops can bring out different flavours/aromas/bitterness depending on the way it is applied to the brew.

Study, tasting, experimentation and experience are the main tools of recipe design, not software. All the software will (should) do, is adjust your grain weights up and down to match your gravity and adjust your hop bill (which you have carefully worked out the ratios of) to match your IBUs.

So recipe design (and then actually brewing the recipe) for amateurs can be a lot of fun and an excellent learning experience especially if they use the approach above. In other words, go for it but be aware that your experience and knowledge are the major factors.

PistolPatch wrote:The first thing to realise is that recipes need to be designed in your head/heart/senses first, not in a computer program.

A computer program's numbers, if written very carefully, (the BIABacus is the best you will get at time of writing) will still only give you four things even slightly relating to recipe design... original gravity 'points' (volume x gravity 'points'), final gravity 'points', colour (very low importance and very poor estimates) and bitterness (let's not even go there ). The BIABacus does the first better than any other software. It does all the others at least as well, usually better, than any other software but all these estimates are just estimates. The colour and bitterness formulas that all software uses, including the BIABacus, are extremely vague, often appalling.

When designing a recipe, the first thing you want to think of is, perhaps, the percentages of grains you want in your grain bill. That is what the left hand side of Section C is for. If you can't imagine, in your head, your grain bill as percentages, then you should not even be thinking of designing recipes in my view. Designing recipes is an advanced skill and depends on a lot of factors. (Btw, even if you do design a brilliant recipe, your next and far more complicated problem, if you were a commercial brewer, is working out how to replicate that recipe from week to week given the varying inputs/qualities of ingredients available.)

As for the hops, there is no great way, in brewing software of dealing with this highly complex subject. For a start, all the hop IBU estimate formulas we rely on, are primitive. Secondly, IBU's are only one part of recipe formulation. Flavour and aroma are far more important than IBU's but there are no formulas for these things. So, once again, unless you realise how vague IBU formulas are and their relative second place to flavour and aroma, in many, if not most, styles, you probably shouldn't be designing yet if that makes sense.