Beer Forum

I'm probably the last one to figure this out, but...

During the CYBI Bam Bière show Jamil made a great point about using percentages when scaling / talking about recipes. This is hands down the best way to share and evaluate recipes, in my opinion. It's kind of frustrating, however, that the recipe calculators I've used don't let the user edit the percentages directly. But there's an easy work around to this in ProMash. (And other software, I'd hope.)

-Turn off "Lock Ingredients to Batch size".
-Enter the recipe 'by percent' in lbs or kg, aiming for a total grain bill weight of 10 lbs or kg. I.e. 80% pale ale malt would be 8 lbs/kg, 5% caramel 40 would be 0.5 lbs/kg, and so on.
-Change the "Batch Size" until the desired SG is achieved.
-Turn on "Lock Ingredients to Batch size".
-Change the "Batch Size" until the desired post-boil volume is reached.
-Malt weights are now scaled correctly to your system based on the original percentages.

Easy.

Hopefully that helps someone.

That is so simple, its just stupid. Why have I been staring at my BeerSmith screen for months trying to figure that out? Thanks, wunderbier!

Actually, on second thought, the process you describe allows for percentages of wieght. I thought when pro brewers give out recipes in percentages, they were talking about percentage of gravity. If this is the case, this method wouldn't work considering every grain provides different gravity points per pound.

Am I wrong on this?

TheMadHopper wrote:Actually, on second thought, the process you describe allows for percentages of wieght. I thought when pro brewers give out recipes in percentages, they were talking about percentage of gravity. If this is the case, this method wouldn't work considering every grain provides different gravity points per pound.

Am I wrong on this?

I hope you're wrong! That would be terribly complicated!

In Designing Great Beers anyway, the percentages are given by weight (pg 125). I guess I too would like a sanity check that probrewers are speaking in percentages by weight.

At any rate, I'm glad to hear something similar can be done in BeerSmith.

percentages of gravity

Hm, ProMash ordinarily displays percentage of grist, with percentage of extract hidden away. I'm still thinking it's the former.

It is percentages of gravity. Like Madhopper said each grain has a different gravity points. You can make a simple spreadsheet to do the math.

You should refer to pages 29-31 in Designing Great Beers.

ukbrewer wrote:It is percentages of gravity. Like Madhopper said each grain has a different gravity points. You can make a simple spreadsheet to do the math.

You should refer to pages 29-31 in Designing Great Beers.

You may be right (and that seems to be what Daniels is saying in Designing Great Beers) but I'm not sure Jamil meant the same on CYBI. On the Bam Biere show (at about 61mins in) when discussing recipe conversion from percentages he seems to be talking about grain weight and not gravity point contribution.

Maybe we should take it to the Pope?