Scaling extract recipes with Brewfather

[NeilE1970]

I mainly brew with liquid extracts…I have limited time for brewing.
But many recipes don’t use the full amount in a can so I had hoped Brewfather could scale according to the malt extract but it only did it with the water amount.
So, I figured that if I could scale the water then I could scale the full recipe. So here’s how I did it..
Assuming I have put in all the ingredients and the water amount for the full brew.
Let’s assume in this recipe the malt extract needs 3400g (more than 2 cans) and the water is a 23 litre batch. The scale factor to get from 23 to 3400 is 3400/23=147.82
Now if I divide my required extract 3000g (2 full cans) by 147.82 I get my required water=20.29 litres. I can now scale the whole recipe using the scale button using the water as 20.29 litres.
Hopefully it’s a help to other extract brewers.

[bitter_dave]

Hi Neil, welcome to the forum; good tip. Another alternative if you want to stick with the volume of beer in the recipe is to use dried malt extract (DME) for some (or all) of your extract. If you need the equivalent of 400g of liquid extract (over and above the 3kg liquid extract) multiply 400 by 0.82 and you get 328g of DME required. You need less DME because liquid has been evaporated off. With DME you can easily use what you need and the store the rest (I tried doing this with LME many years ago when I first started brewing and it did not turn out well!).

[NeilE1970]

Hi Neil, welcome to the forum; good tip. Another alternative if you want to stick with the volume of beer in the recipe is to use dried malt extract (DME) for some (or all) of your extract. If you need the equivalent of 400g of liquid extract (over and above the 3kg liquid extract) multiply 400 by 0.82 and you get 328g of DME required. You need less DME because liquid has been evaporated off. With DME you can easily use what you need and the store the rest (I tried doing this with LME many years ago when I first started brewing and it did not turn out well!).

Excellent point Dave, that’s a useful number so.
Lme x 0.82=Dme
Nice one!

Thanks for that