How much Special B?

[PhilB]

Hi Kingfisher

To be clear, I wasn't "recommending" Graham's Beer Engine particularly ... I mean, I use it and like its simplicity, but it is already quite dated and with Graham's passing is very unlikely to be further developed ... and, as a Grainfather user I would imagine the "inter-connectedness" of using their calculator, and being able to then transfer mash and boil details directly to your brewing system, would outweigh any advantages of using other calculators anyway

My main point was just that there are different ways of calculating predictions of beer colour, and sometimes the numbers they derive can be very different ... most of the time, as brewers who have chosen our preferred recipe calculators, it doesn't matter. By the time we've used our recipe calculator a few times, and made beer with the recipes we've formulated, we've got an idea for what the number colours mean, and we can formulate recipes to make beers lighter or darker than other beers we've made, accordingly ... most of the time, it doesn't matter if I (or Anspach and Hobday, for that matter ) call beer the colour of Cadbury's Dairy Milk (when in a glass on the bar, deep-amber coloured when the glass is held up to the light) 50 EBC, but other brewers (like MTW and maybe you if you choose to keep using the GF recipe calculator) call that colour some other number (probably around 27-28EBC, when calculated by the Morey method ) ... but every now and again, like it appears to have done in this thread, it can matter

Anyway, you have all the details I used to formulate that recipe ... so you could, put it as is (complete with the darker grains that you don't have and the 75% efficiency that may be much lower than you achieve with your GF) into your "chosen" calculator, say the GF one, and see what number that predicts for that recipe (call that number X) ... then you can adjust the recipe for the grains you have, and the efficiency you achieve, and tweak the proportions to get the colour you want again (around about X)

Cheers, PhilB

[Kingfisher4]

Thanks again PhilB,
I'm not the slightest bit fussed about the numerical scale of brown of the beer when brewed, but your helpful calculations sound a good place to start for a smoked brown ale, whether the recipe turns out like the original or not the quantities just look good to try.

It wouldn't matter at all if I hadn't tried to guesstimate the ingredient quantities from the limited info available for that beer, but I am forewarned of potential variations in incorrect colour (color!) scales for future reference. I have so far been very happy plugging recipes into the GF app, tweaking them a bit then using the connect Bluetooth on brewday and will stick with that generally.

[vacant]

I am dipping my toe in the realms of recipe construction .... [snipped] ...
I have never used Special B and suspect it can be overpowering

I went "off-piste" making up my own recipes very soon after starting AG. However, when it came to experimenting with one ingredient I made a mistake of just upping that ingredient in each brew-day until I reached a personal limit of "that's great, I wouldn't want more".

My first series of experiments was amber malt - lovely, Many months later I realised I hadn't bothered with amber since, it must have subconsciously put me off . Back in my repertoire now though.