Membership questions? Log in issues? Email info@brewersassociation.org

Author Topic: Scaling recipes  (Read 2745 times)

Offline duxx

  • Cellarman
  • **
  • Posts: 37
  • Good Karma Brewing, Warrensburg, MO
Re: Scaling recipes
« Reply #15 on: March 15, 2014, 12:51:29 am »
So most of you have found that recipes scale linearly except for the boil off rate?  During the below zero days of January and February, when I didn't have the willingness to freeze my butt off brewing AG in the garage, I tried James Spencer's 15 minute boil extract method in the kitchen (Basic Brewing Radio).  When I linearly scaled down some recipes that I wanted to try from Jamil's Brewing Classic Styles I found that the color was too light in the darker beers.  My brown ales were amber and my stouts were brown.  Yes, I'm sure I double checked my math for steeping grain additions.  I had to doctor the finished beers up with Sinamar to get the right color.  So, I'm just curious if anyone else has noticed that they need proportionally more dark grains in smaller batches?
"Tan and lean like a longneck bottle."  Zac Brown Band.

Offline dmtaylor

  • Official Poobah of No Life. (I Got Ban Hammered by Drew)
  • *********
  • Posts: 4724
  • Lord Idiot the Lazy
    • YEAST MASTER Perma-Living
Re: Scaling recipes
« Reply #16 on: March 15, 2014, 05:57:13 am »
I have been brewing small batches for many years.  Everything scales linearly but I do use homebrewing software just to make certain.  I have not noticed any general rules like you always need to add more dark grains -- have not noticed that at all.  The big adjustment to me when stealing others' recipes is always my 85-90% efficiency.  It is easier to get high efficiency with small batches because you need to sparge more to account for the high boiloff rate.
Dave

The world will become a much more pleasant place to live when each and every one of us realizes that we are all idiots.