Creating Recipes (Maybe dumb ass questions)

[Tiger Ed]

I'm wanting to create some of my own recipes but I have a few questions I need answering first.

1) Is there away of working out the liquid retention per Kg of dry grain in the Mash Tun. I would like to know the correct amount of sparge water to get the wort to the volume needed in the boiler. (Im using a HERM system I have just built)

2) How do I determine the correct boil time for the wort (Obviously this will affect the pre boil volume ) I have seen recipes that call for anything from 30 to 120 mins boil times and I don't know why.

That's it for now.but don't be surprised to find more Dumb Ass questions in the near future.
                                                                                                                                    Tiger Ed

[molc]

Check out Beersmith - it does all of that and more for you.

[KDeath]

Seconding beersmith for all these calculations, great timesaver. Just make sure your system is set up correctly in it (volume, efficiency, etc) so the calculations are accurate.

With regards to the boil 60 minutes is traditional, 90 minutes is recommended when using pilsner malt to avoid DMS and 120 minutes is supposed to provide some maillard reactions. This is the theory anyway but with modern malts a lot of people do 30 minute boils with no apparent issues. Boil times will also change your gravity, volume and hop utilisation so that's another factor to consider.

[Will_D]

1) Is there away of working out the liquid retention per Kg of dry grain in the Mash Tun. I would like to know the correct amount of sparge water to get the wort to the volume needed in the boiler. (Im using a HERM system I have just built)

As others have said BeerSmith will suggest a number of numbers. However its very up to you to calibrate your own system/practice.

So you do a brew and measure everything you can and compare it to BeerSmiths predictions, then you fine tune your system data in BS.

[Mudder]

A good rule of thumb is 1l per kg of grain

[Pheeel]

Honestly I'd take a known recipe, run that through your system and use that as a baseline

[biertourist]

I'm wanting to create some of my own recipes but I have a few questions I need answering first.

1) Is there away of working out the liquid retention per Kg of dry grain in the Mash Tun. I would like to know the correct amount of sparge water to get the wort to the volume needed in the boiler. (Im using a HERM system I have just built)

2) How do I determine the correct boil time for the wort (Obviously this will affect the pre boil volume ) I have seen recipes that call for anything from 30 to 120 mins boil times and I don't know why.

That's it for now.but don't be surprised to find more Dumb Ass questions in the near future.
                                                                                                                                    Tiger Ed

I know I'm super late on this one and I'm not going to be replying in units that you want, but the formula to determine water absorption is: TotalGristWeight (in lbs) * 0.125 = Water Absorption in Gallons.


-I use it in my home-made brew day calculator and it is very accurate, but it also assumes that you don't have any dead space in your mash tun. Also note that this is only the initial run-off, as once you get to sparging you get basically 100% of the sparge water as run-off.


Adam