Recipe Formulation

This post is going to be all about formulating your own recipe.  Sure, there are plenty of recipes out there for you to brew, but there is a feeling of accomplishment when you brew a beer that is of your own making.  I think you gain a greater understanding of the process as well.

Before going through the steps, I need to point out that I use an iPad app for brewing called iBrewmaster.  This software allows you to create recipes and store them, track batches and share information.  The app also comes with a large database of existing recipes you can use and tweak.  The software is important to mention because I use it for refining the recipe initial estimates, which I will go over later.

Create a Recipe

Step 1: Determine the malts and hops that should be used

In this step, we want to determine which grains will be used and the percentage of each grain for the mash.  We also want to find which hop(s) to use and how long they should be boiled.

I like to leverage the work others have performed.  Some day I hope to be smart enough to immediately know which grains to use for a particular style, but right now I am not that smart. So I will go to our friend Google and perform a search for say "Northern England Brown Ale Recipe".  By the way, all the different style names can be found in the BJCP Style Guidelines.

Anyway, I will go through a dozen or so different existing recipes and keep track of the grains and hops used and their quantity (as a percentage of the total).  Reading the BJCP guidelines for the style will also help in determining the ingredients.  Once I have chosen the most popular grains and hops, I like to go read the grain descriptions and possibly modify the grain bill based on flavors I am looking for.

Once you know the style you are brewing, we can list our known parameters:

• Target Original Gravity: 46 gravity points
• Vfermenter: 6 gallons
• Brewhouse Efficiency: 70% (just use it, we will cover this in a later post)
• Recipe grains, percentages and maximum gravity points:

Grain	Percentage	Gravity Points
Maris Otter	66%	38
Crystal 60	13%	34
Brown	10%	32
Carapils	08%	33
Chocolate	03%	34

Step 2: Determine the amount of each grain needed

In order to find the amount of each grain, we must first calculate the total extract from the grains.  Total extract is calculated with the following equation:

Etotal = GU x V

GU: Gravity units
V:    Volume

The total extract remains constant in the wort.  So, for example Etotal prior to the wort being boiled is the same as Etotal after the boil.  We happen to know the gravity and the volume post-boil (our known parameters above).

Etotal = 46 x 6.0 = 276

Now that we know the total extract from the grains, we can calculate how much each grain contributes to this total extract amount by multiplying the total extract by the percentage of each grain:

• Maris Otter = 0.66 x 276 = 182.16
• Crystal 60 = 0.13 x 276 = 35.88
• Brown = 0.10 x 276 = 27.6
• Carapils = 0.08 x 276 = 22.08
• Chocolate = 0.03 x 276 = 8.28

With the extract provided by each grain, we can now calculate the amount of grain needed to achieve the extract amount.  This is calculated with the following equation:

Grain Amount = grain extract total / (brewhouse efficiency x grain gravity points)

• Maris Otter = 182.16/(0.7 x 38) = 6.8 lbs = 6 lbs 13 oz
• Crystal 60 = 35.88/(0.7 x 34) = 1.5 lbs = 1 lb 8 oz
• Brown = 27.6/(0.7 x 32) = 1.2 lbs = 1 lb 3 oz
• Carapils = 22.08/(0.7 x 33) = 1.0 lbs
• Chocolate = 8.28/(0.7 x 34) = 0.35 lbs = 0 lbs 5 oz

Step 3: Refine the results
It seems we should be done now that we have the grain amounts, but the values need further tweaking.  Also, we have done nothing with hops to this point.  For this, I use the iBrewmaster iPad app.  The grains, grain amounts, hops and hop amounts are input into the iBrewmaster app.  The target volume and boil time are also input.  One of the coolest features of this app is that I can now set the appropriate style for the beer (Northern England Brown Ale) and check all the parameters against this style:

• ABV
• IBU
• Original Gravity
• Final Gravity
• SRM

If the beer is outside the BJCP range for any of these values, the app will let you know.  Here is an example where all the ranges are good:

If I choose a different style - Dry Stout, for example - you can see that I am not within the proper ranges (yellow means you are close; red means you are way off):

Typically, I seem to run into issues with the SRM value and I end up lowering the amounts of the dark grains.  Here also is where I refine my hop amounts and/or hop varieties used.

So this final step is really just about tweaking values until I am within the proper ranges.  Of course, no one says that you must be in these ranges.  Go ahead and brew whatever you want and feel free to experiment.  But, if you plan on entering your beer into a competition, you probably want to stay within the proper style specifications.

The technique outlined in step 2 was taken from Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels.

Calculating Water Amounts

Introduction

This post is going to be about calculating the amount of water needed to brew a specific volume of beer  using a specific amount of grains on my specific system.  This is important because everyone's system is different.  This is the reason for the previous post where I calculated specific values for my system - values that will be used in my water amount calculations.  Before calculating my water amounts, let me quickly go over the details/reasons for my brewing posts....

Reason for Brewing Posts

I believe I mentioned this previously, but let me again state that these posts are not a basic step-by-step how to brew.  There are plenty of great resources for this, and I think the best place to start is with Palmer's book How To Brew.  This book is great for both the beginning brewer and the advanced brewer.  In fact, I am writing these posts because there is so much information out there.  I read enough to successfully brew a couple of batches of beer, and now I need to advance towards brewing better.  I am not an expert, but I am simply detailing my journey of trying to become one.  My hope is that someone smarter will correct my mistakes and answer my questions.

Some of the topics I intend to cover are water amounts needed to brew, how to formulate a recipe, calculating efficiencies, yeast starters, equipment and software tools, water reports, water modifications and possibly even writing my own software tools.  Hopefully we will all learn something as we go along (otherwise this is a complete waste of time when I could be brewing instead).

On to Calculating Water Amounts...

So I have brewed two batches of beer so far.  They were both supposed to be five gallons and they were both short on that amount.  I don't even want to count my first batch since it really was a learning batch; trying to put into practice the loads of information I had crammed into my poor brain.  I learned a lot - mainly information in the "what not to do" category.

So let me go through my water calculation that I have created.  I will know how accurate this is when I brew my next batch, and I will post those results at that time.  For now, here are the parameters we have:

• Target Batch Size: 5 gallons
• Total Grain Weight: 9.5 pounds
• Boil Time: 80 minutes

From the previous post, we saw that during a 60 minute boil, I will lose 1 gallon and 3 quarts or 7 quarts per hour.  If I divide the 7 quarts by 60, I will get the number of quarts per minute:

7 qt. / 60 min. = 0.117 qt/min

So if I have an 80 minute boil, I should lose:

80 min * 0.117 qt/min = 9.36 quarts or about 2.34 gallons

OK, so let's start with our final target volume and start moving backwards through the process.  We are interested in tracking the following volumes: Final volume (Vfinal), Volume in fermenter (Vferment), Volume post-boil (Vpostboil), Volume pre-boil (Vpreboil), Total volume needed (Vtotal).

Vfinal = 5 gal.

• Add any beer lost while bottling.  This is any beer caught in the settled yeast and equipment dead space.  I am guessing at this number, and will need to adjust this number based on observations when I brew.  For now, I am assuming 0.25 gallons.

Vferment = 5.25 gal.

• Add water lost to trub and hops in the boil kettle as well as transfer losses between boil kettle and fermenter.  I am guessing with the trub and hop losses with a value of 0.5 gallons.  My system tests showed that I lose about 0.25 gallons pumping from my kettles.  So total loss here is 0.75 gallons.

Vpostboil = 6.0 gal.

• Add adjustment for temperature shrinkage.  It seems water occupies a different volume at higher temperatures so we need to adjust for this.  I cannot claim that I totally understand this, but I am using (trusting) the value described in Ray Daniels book Designing Great Beers page 65: divide by 0.96.  Therefore, 6.0 / 0.96 brings us to a total of 6.25 gallons.
• Add the water lost in the boil (2.34 gallons) to the 6.25 gallons.

Vpreboil = 8.6 gal. = 8 gal. 2 1/2 qt.

• Add water lost in transfer from mash kettle to the boil kettle (0.25 gal from system measurements)
• Add water lost to grain absorption.  Here again, I put my trust in Ray Daniels and assume about 0.2 gallons per pound of grain gets absorbed: 0.2 gal/lb * 9.5 lb. = 1.9 gal.

Vtotal = 10.75 gal. = 10 gal. 3 qt.

I am using a total of 10.75 gallons of water, but I will mash with some smaller amount and sparge with the rest.  I use the fly-sparge technique.  If you batch sparge, then you will want to look into he optimal size for the number of runnings you perform.

When I mash, I will be using the ratio of 1.5 quarts per pound of grain:

1.5 qt/lb * 9.5 lb = 14.25 qt.

BUT, remember from my system measurements that I have a full gallon of water that sits below my false bottom in my mash kettle.  Therefore I need to add this amount (4 quarts) to my mash water: 14.25 qt + 4.0 qt = 18.25 qt.

Mash Water: 18.25 qt. = 4 gal. 2 qt.

Once I know my mash water amount, I simply subtract that from the total water to get my sparge water amount: 10.75 gal - 4.5 gal = 6.25 gal.

Sparge Water: 6.25 gal. = 6 gal. 1 qt.

So it is doubtful we have the exact amount of water, so to be safe I will actually make sure I have 7 gallons of water for my sparge - or perhaps place 12 gallons of total water in my HLT before removing the mash water amount (I initially place all water in my HLT so that I can use a campden tablet to remove the chloramine - but that is for a future post).

This should be a good first estimate.  Values will get tweaked as I gain a better insight during the brew process.  So this works great when you know the total amount of grains you are using.  What about when you are designing a recipe?  When calculating water, you need to know the amount of grain.  When creating a recipe, you need to know the amount of water.  How do you calculate the two together?  This will be addressed later.  First we will go through recipe formulation and then tie that together with calculating the water amounts.