[Attik]

Hello people!

Lately we (me and two colleagues) have been thinking in giving a try in gypsy brewing. We got a couple of recipes we've made in 30L batch and we think it's our moment to try and brew around 270L in a microbrewery and hit the market to see what happens.

For this, we have to scale up our recipe and we have several doubts, main one is that...would it be as easy as to scale up the recipe by multiplying the quantities by the correct factor? Another thing would be to find out the water parameters of the place, see the efficiency of the brewery etc, but thats another story.

Any suggestions or things to take into consideration?! We want to give it a try but every possible thing under control.

Thank you!

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[majorvices]

Your efficiency will probably be higher on a commercial system, much higher on some systems such as those that use mash filter. Your hop utilization will also be higher so you probably need to account for your bittering hops and will most likely need less.

Just talk to the brewer familiar with the system. They will know their equipment and will be able to tell you almost exactly what changes you need to make.

[egg]

I've assisted on a couple of commercial brews (one on 2BBL kit and one 10BBL working a 1000L batch). The larger one was my own scaled up recipe.  One tip I learned from mine, which I would have hoped to have forseen... but didn't: I use an immersion chiller at home, and hadn't allowed for the 15-20 minute stand at the end of the boil to let things settle before running off through the plate chiller; my late hops were still isomerising in that time, so IBUs were boosted unintentially.  (Luckily, the brew came out great and there had been increased body in the extraction to balance).

[Added] Depending how you mash and lauter/sparge at home, and the commercial kit's design, you may find it harder  (or easier) to achieve a certain temperature in the grain bed after the mash.

Transfers can take a long time, of course.  As stated above, consult someone who knows the kit.

[Attik]

The thing is that, I have a feeling the people who owe the brewery dont even know their own system very well and they seem to be a bit careless and prefered for us to give them our recipe and they would scale it up for us, but honestly.......pfff

We're more lost than an octopus in the jungle. We are asking more breweries around the area but we are having serious difficulties.

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[Attik]

Or how about designing a 250L batch from scratch using more or less the similar percentages? My main concern is the hop quantity..

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[majorvices]

Yes, good point, WP and rest can take at least 15 minutes combined, maybe longer. Also, for a 15 bbl batch it takes me about 40 minutes to run from kettle through chiller and into FV. You will have some hop utilization during that period.

[majorvices]

Or how about designing a 250L batch from scratch using more or less the similar percentages? My main concern is the hop quantity..

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You're gonna need to at least know their brewhouse efficiency. They should at least know that. I'm mean, I can't imagine they wouldn't know that.

[morticaixavier]

If you haven't already, convert your recipe from kilos, liters, grams, etc. to percentages, ratios, and IBUs (or grams per liter for finishing hops):

Pale Malt 80%
Munich 15%
Roasted 5%

Challenger 80IBU at 60 minutes remaining
Challenger 5 grams/liter dryhop

[majorvices]

If you haven't already, convert your recipe from kilos, liters, grams, etc. to percentages, ratios, and IBUs (or grams per liter for finishing hops):

Pale Malt 80%
Munich 15%
Roasted 5%

Challenger 80IBU at 60 minutes remaining
Challenger 5 grams/liter dryhop

This is a good tip for any brewer at any level that is often not mentioned. Writing a recipe in pounds or kilograms is not very helpful if you are not thinking about the percentages.

[HoosierBrew]

+1.  Recipes in % at least speak a common language.

[Pricelessbrewing]

Since it's relevant to the discussion at hand (regarding percentage based recipe)

While I know a lot about my system, and a lot of the math regarding efficiency (see my mash calculator), isomerization, and processes'.. I don't really know jack about recipe formulation.

I vaguely know what grains have what flavor profiles, but how they work together, and how much to use per recipes is breaking new ground for me. So in that regard I was trying to figure out how specialty grains scale with mash efficiency (if they do at all), as is commonly stated, and ran into a bit of a schism. Someone's telling me that specialty grains should be treated seperately, and to only adjust base malts to hit the intended OG and keep specialty malts the same. Is this correct?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/476t3d/tuesday_recipe_critique_formulation/d0auk4o

[RPIScotty]

Since it's relevant to the discussion at hand (regarding percentage based recipe)

While I know a lot about my system, and a lot of the math regarding efficiency (see my mash calculator), isomerization, and processes'.. I don't really know jack about recipe formulation.

I vaguely know what grains have what flavor profiles, but how they work together, and how much to use per recipes is breaking new ground for me. So in that regard I was trying to figure out how specialty grains scale with mash efficiency (if they do at all), as is commonly stated, and ran into a bit of a schism. Someone's telling me that specialty grains should be treated seperately, and to only adjust base malts to hit the intended OG and keep specialty malts the same. Is this correct?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/476t3d/tuesday_recipe_critique_formulation/d0auk4o

I'd say no. I adjust all grains. It may not be linear adjustment but all fermentables get adjusted if I increase or decrease a recipe size.


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[Pricelessbrewing]

Right, batch size is easy. What about mash efficiency? Most recipes are scaled to be listed at 70% mash, while I have an average of 84% for a typical 1.060 brew.

[RPIScotty]

Right, batch size is easy. What about mash efficiency? Most recipes are scaled to be listed at 70% mash, while I have an average of 84% for a typical 1.060 brew.

Same thing.

If you were scaling a batch from 1 gal to 5 gal you would adjust the fermentables to that batch size to match gravity.

Similarly, if you were doing as you have described, taking a 1.060 gravity recipe designed with 70% η in mind, you would reduce the fermentables based on your systems 84% η value until you hit that same gravity.

One of the great feature of ProMash is the ability to lock a recipe to a batch size or η value and scale the fermentables accordingly.

In my spreadsheet I'll typically take a recipe and input it in as listed until all the numbers jive and then modify the parameters until my numbers yield the same stats.
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[morticaixavier]

Right, batch size is easy. What about mash efficiency? Most recipes are scaled to be listed at 70% mash, while I have an average of 84% for a typical 1.060 brew.

best way to find that out is to try it. I would always try a straight up percentage based approach first. If the color is off or the flavor profile is not what you are expecting then you start tweaking character malt percentages to match your expectation. This is the first step of recipe formulation. You begin to learn what ingredient affects what aspect of the finished product and how.

alternately you could try it first by just scaling the base malt and leaving the character malt as it was in the original recipe and if it doesn't meet expectation tweak from there.

I don't think there is a right way, just a right method, hypothesize, experiment, evaluate, repeat.