Beer Forum

Hey Brewcasters,


I know you mentioned a couple times on different shows that you thought it would be a good idea to do a BeerSmith show. I have been using BeerSmith for about 2 years now and still have yet to discover all the tips and tricks. I still feel as though I might be missing something obvious or that there is probably an easier way of doing things such as profiling your system, evaporation rates, scaling up and down recipes, etc.

I really love this program and would love to learn even more. Maybe you can even get the creator of the program on as a guest for one of your shows, either the Session or Brew Strong. Besides, they are one of your sponsors and it would be great advertising for them!


Thanks,
Fremont Brewer

Is there a way to put percentages in the recipe and scale the whole thing up and down for 5 and 10 gallon batches?

iceclimber wrote:Is there a way to put percentages in the recipe and scale the whole thing up and down for 5 and 10 gallon batches?

Hi Iceclimber,

That is easy to do in beersmith. If you want your recipes in percentages, make sure to enter in your recipe in grams and kilograms instead of pounds. Keep it in the metric system at least during recipe formulation. Start with some arbitrary total weight for your grain bill, let's say 1 Kg. Then if you know you need 80 % base malt, just enter in 800g of pale ale malt. 800g is 80% of 1Kg. Lets say you need 5 % crystal malt, you enter 50g. 50g is 5% of 1000g. After you are done, your whole recipe is all ready in percentages automatically because it is in the metric scale. Then you can use the scale up or down feature to whatever batch size you want and all the ratios will stay the same. Pretty easy. When you are ready to buy your grains , just go into the options menu and change units back into pounds if you need to.

Or if you have a recipe in pounds already, but don't know percentages.... You can enter it in as usual in pounds. When you're done, go into the options menu and change the units of weight to be grams, it will change your recipe into the metric scale, all the percentages will be calculated for you. Scale up and down from there.

Hope this helps,

Thanks a lot, for clearing that up for me, I have only made about 8 recipes on beersmith and have yet to really dive deep into all of it's capacity. Thanks again.

I agree, I have finally broken down and decided to buy beersmith from my LHBS. A show on this would be a great help.

You can do it with pounds as well if you know what your starting gravity should be. Basically you are building a 100lb grain bill. So if the recipe calls for 90% 2-row and 10% speciality, you'd enter 90lbs. 2-row and 10 lbs of specialty grain. Then use the gravity button to enter your starting gravity and it will scale the amounts down but keep the percentages.

Not too hard with just 2 grains but I used this to make a recipe that had 12 grains that a local brewer only gave percentages on.