[BotanyGoneBedlam]

Hey all!

Man, oh man, I haven't posted on a forum since '04 it feels like! Anywho, I am a newb (for beer, at least). I racked my first beer today (pilsner with 2 row pale malt and light dried malt extract) and so far, hey, it smells like beer, the small sample I took tastes like beer so suffice to say, I may have done something right.

Well, I had an empty carboy, didn't have the honey to make yet another mead and didn't feel like making another cider (so far I have 1 mead, 1 cider, 1 wine, 1 beer going) so I decided to try my hand at making a lager for a friend's dad who just fell out of a tree (he is okay, but he loves lager so I figured I would give it a go). And here is my question...I am not sure if I scaled it down correctly.

I will preface by saying math was never my strong suit in school, unless it was Organic Chemistry, then I was a viking. So, I pretended I was in the lab in college scaling down stuff. I needed a 1 gallon recipe from a 5 gallon recipe so I took the amount of the ingredient, divided it by 5 and shopped according to that. Was this correct?

I ask as well because I notice a lot of the recipes on the website here are 5 gallons and I don't have that capacity, unfortunately.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Oiscout]

You also mist factor a few things. With your grainbill your not just trying "to make beer" your trying to hit s target gravity which in turn will hit whatever "ABV" your going for in that recipe. Also in my experience and opinion some grains tastes, characteristics and body can sometimes be muddled or non existent or too much in a small batch vs a 5 gallon batch.

These are one of those instances where reading the basics in a book or on a forum (like this one) or a website is super important. Learning about making beer is just as much about Why we do it as it is How to do it.

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[purduekenn]

You should be fine on your math. I started out doing 1 gallon batches too many years ago. Hope you beer turns out ok for your friends dad.

[Oiscout]

https://byo.com/mr-wizard/scaling-down-recipes/

I had this book marked, before I really got back into brewing full swing I was doing small batches . This was pretty informative

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[majorvices]

The link published above makes the point that it's going to depend on your system and that a recipe is a road map. So, in your case, scaling down is just simple math but depending on your system it will just be an estimation unless you are sure of your systems efficiency.

There's really good free online brewing recipe software out there that you can plug your numbers in and see what you get - this is a really nice one - check it out: https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator

[erockrph]

The link published above makes the point that it's going to depend on your system and that a recipe is a road map. So, in your case, scaling down is just simple math but depending on your system it will just be an estimation unless you are sure of your systems efficiency.

There's really good free online brewing recipe software out there that you can plug your numbers in and see what you get - this is a really nice one - check it out: https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator

The best thing about the Brewer's friend calculator is that you can use it to scale recipes and it works pretty well. I am a small batch brewer myself, and I use it all the time to adjust a larger recipe down to my batch size.

The one ingredient that does NOT scale on a direct ratio basis is the water. You will lose the same amount of water to evaporation (or maybe even a little more) over the course of a 1 hour boil regardless of whether you are boiling 2 gallons or 5. So if a recipe starts with 6 gallons at the start of the boil to get you 5.5 gallons in the fermenter; when you scale it down to 1 gallon, you still need to start with 1.5 gallons of water. How much you actually boil off in an hour will vary based on your system, but you basically work backwards by starting with the amount of wort you want in the fermenter and adding the amount of water that will boil off over the course of the boil on your system.