Hello @porterman,

Welcome to the forum, by the way! Good job filling out the BIABacus tool. It's super helpful. First time I did it was pretty confusing, and the page that shows Clear Brewing Terminology was a great help.

I am an experienced BIABer, but am not experienced with adding coffee (never done that yet). Also I rarely do sparge, and only add water to fermentor if I boiled off too much and need to add water to lower my OG to closer hit my target brew. So that said, I reviewed your BIABacus and let me give you a few comments.

Fermentable Grains:
Recommended to add each grain on a different line, including its weight and its color (EBC). You should be able to get this from the grain malt producer's website. This would also give you the estimated color of the final beer. And listing everything like that means it will be easier for you (later) to go down to the local homebrew shop and get ingredients to copy the beer you made. Makes it easy to tweak beer recipe in the future, should you want to.

"What You Will Use" in Fermentables & Hops:
Quick note that to hit the target with what you have for ingredients and your planned water additions, the BIABacus is saying you are just a smidge short on grain (no big deal), and that to hit their IBU level that you need to add more hops. If you don't have additional hops, don't want to get any from local homebrew shop, and don't care that you hit their IBU level exactly, you could use the hops they included in the kit and call it good... Heck, you could change the Desired IBU field to 19 IBUs or just over and be almost dead on with what they have here. Then it would closer match what you will receive for bitterness.

Also, the AA content in the Magnum they ship you may not match exactly with that in the recipe, could be a tad higher or a tad lower, and naturally everything else not changing this would affect the bitterness of the beer to some degree. Should be within a range, and for this style of beer its probably not too critical.

When brewing I always fill out that other area, Sections L, M, N, O, P, Q, & R - and use this data as "check points" that can tell me if I am going off course so I can correct course mid-route, or for later if something is off I can easier see what it was.

Anyhow, it looks pretty good to me. Let us know how it works out!

Good improvement.

One final suggestion to make it look even better. I would recommend abbreviating the ingredients a bit so that you can read them easier - on screen and print out. That's what I do anyhow. Sometimes I print pages 1-3 to bring with to local home brew shop and if text size is too small I would not be able to read. Also with reviewing Excel fields with larger names requires me to click into cell to read. So - abbreviate the names so you can read the malt types and you're there. Well, besides brewing the beer.

Hello @porterman,

This is one that kind of pushes me out of my comfort zone (witholding water and adding it later, etc.). I know that making changes to the inputs on the BIABacus, the file is supposed to adjust. Playing with these just now, things were not coming out as I thought they would and it would take some playing with the file and reviewing old posts to figure out details. The guy that knew the file best was Pistol Patch / Pat Hollingdale - who is the main author, but Pat unfortunately passed away last year. There are others like @ShorePoints and @jhough that may have more knowledge on doing this than I do... Seems like jhough used to have a smaller size brew kettle and had to adjust so likely had to work through these same things himself, and ShorePoints is a retired scientist / lab guy that seems to have an excellent grasp of anything technical. No doubt there are others not coming to mind just now. Let me know if you would like me to reach out to some others and see if they have more / better advice to you on this.

Not saying this works for you - but I oversize things a bit. Initially brewed for 5 or 5 1/2 gallons VIP, but now since I have a larger 16 gallon brew kettle - mazimize my batches. Normally get in the range of 8 to gallons VIP (depending on the OG of the beer being made). And that which will not fit into my 5 gallon Corny keg is either bottled or is put into cleaned & sanitized 1 gallon containers and put into the extra beer fridge so that when my keg beer gets low I can be added into the keg. But you may not be quite to that point of wanting to add capacity. It can always be upsized if your consumption patterns are more than you expect.

For sure if you are coming up low on gravity, you want to do whatever you can to not add quite as much water (etc.) so gravity ends up where you want it. Only a couple of points is pretty minor.

A brew where you don't have to make the additions that you are doing would be better in my opinion. Simpler. Even if you are limited to a 60-minute boil.

Glad to hear things are off to a good start with your fermentation! Let us know how it works out and if there are additional questions.

Yes if you read PP’s posts you can tell how sharp his mind was! He certainly is missed…!

The BIABacus is designed to minimize times you wind up low on gravity. Not sure by how many points off, but that is part of its design. Follow it and don’t think you will have to worry about coming up short. Rare that I come up short, and if so - barely. Normally the other way where my gravity is high, and that’s an easy fix.

Sounds good @porterman ,

My only question is when to add the lactose sugar. I've had beer with that before (Hazy IPAs and I think some Milk Stouts, etc.), but have never brewed with it... My only question if adding this at same time as priming sugar at bottling - will that increase the CO2 and cause bottle bombs...?

Anyhow, sounds like most things are looking good. For sure let us know the final result.

*****

Addition: I did some research, quick look and found the following link that does have some info on when to add this.
https://byo.com/article/milk-stout-it-does-a-body-good/

Okay good. Glad you already thought through all that.

Nice to hear your progress. Let us know how it all turns out.

porterman, sorry just seeing this. been busy with work and moving daughter up to college. You can pm me, I'll try to answer right away. Just trying to get ready for the storm that is hitting Florida tonight.
J

Hey @j@jhough, great to see you are still around and thanks for answering porterman. These might be questions others could have as well... I'm curious. Might be good to post on this thread so others can see and learn from it as well.

Porterman, it can be done. just a little tricky.Are you designing your own recipe or copying? What I did was to design a 20L recipe, then work backwards with using water additions. I had 2 20L pots and would kind of do a sparge , add back to boil . Using enough grains for a 20L batch. Takes some traial and error , but it did work for me until I was able to buy a 57L brew pot. I was making pretty good beer that way for 3 years. Glad the porter turned out!
J

@aliced - why not? What did you brew, process, etc.? You list no details…

Follow the proper process and good brewing success becomes easy.

@aliced - why not? What did you brew, process, etc.? You list no details…

Follow the proper process and good brewing success becomes easy.

*****
EDIT: Alice - If having problems or have questions I might suggest start a new post and as clear as possible list what’s going on. If completed a BIABacus file please attach it. You can tag me in on it and I’ll take a look and try to hep.