Sunday, March 30, 2014

Extract Recipe Calculator


Why would anyone make yet another recipe calculator?  There are two major short comings of existing recipe formulation tools that stand out.
  1. Attenuation is normally fixed at 75% and is independent of the ingredients.
  2. Salts are generally not accounted for, especially the salt contribution of the extract.
Experiments have shown that the type of sugar in the wort directly effects the attenuation of the beer.  Simple sugars, such as corn or cane sugar, are 100% fermentable.  Maltodextrin does not ferment, and Briess DME is designed to be 75% fermentable.

Before Dry Malt Extract is dry it is wort, the same as it would be when making beer.  To make wort malted barley and water is mashed and then sparged.  The difference is that after the wort is made, instead of being fermented, the water is removed.  All of the salt that are present in the water are left behind in the dry malt extract.  The folks at Briess were kind enough to tell me exactly what to expect with their products.

This tool takes these factors into consideration. 

Extract Recipe Calculator.xlsx

Using the Calculator


Orange cells are meant to be changed.
Bold Orange text is calculated.

Volumes for your recipe are entered in column B.  Ingredients can be selected from the drop downs in column D.  Feel free to add more ingredients on the "LookUp" tab, but keep in mind that for things too work correctly they must remain in alphabetical order.



Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Kindle Edition of Brewing Engineering

Coinciding with the release of the 2nd Edition of of Brewing Engineering,  I have also released a Kindle Edition of Brewing Engineering.  The Kindle Edition will be available for only $3.99 on Amazon.com.  Get your copy today!


Sunday, March 23, 2014

Simple Lager

The weather is just right for brewing a lager.  The water bath is stable at 49°F, a good temperature for SafLager S-23.  The beer should finish with a nice malty flavor.  At temperatures above 55°F S-23 can get a little fruity.
Time has been a precious commodity these days so this batch is going to be an extract brew.  If you do it right, the quality of beer made with extract is on par with an all-grain beer.  The cost is about the same as well.  There are a number of hidden costs with all grain brewing such as trub loss and the cost of fuel that are often left out when comparing overall cost.  When making a batch of all grain beer it costs me about $5.00 in fuel alone.  If there is interest I'll write about that more in another post.

This beer will be a very simple base beer using my quick brew method. (See my book for details)

6lbs of Briess Pilsen DME.
1 oz of Challenger hops boiled in a quart of water for an hour.
S-23 SafLager

Using the simple pitching method outlined in my book I expect the cell count to be about 100 billion cells.  This can be verified with my Amscope microscope.

I expect this to a nice clean drinkable beer at about 5% ABV.  To add variety I have been developing "beer boosters" added when the beer is served that push the base beer into different styles. 





Monday, March 17, 2014

2nd Edition

The second edition of Brewing Engineering is now available!  Every page has been professionally edited for 2014.  If you missed this book the first time around this is the time to get it.