Recipes Rules

[damo2576]

Hi,
I wondered if there were general rules when it came to designing recipes. Like for 5L you need Xg of grain, and for 25L you need Yg of grain? I see some people quote recipes in %ages so I guess its all pretty scalable.
I cant really find anything that explains it all?
Thanks in advance,
Damo

[J_P]

Here's one I picked up from Chris. For most English bitters OG / IBU should be less than 1. I like my beers bitter so I tend to have quite a high figure but this is a pretty good rule of thumb. Put simply for a 1040 beer (OG = 40) your IBUs should not exceed 40.

[haz66]

There is no rule for the amount of grain per 23 ltr or 25 ltr brew, it all comes down to how
strong you want your beer, the stronger you want it the more grain you use, but i guess if
you use too little you`ll have something close to pop, and too much and you`ll be falling over
after the first pint, i tend to brew lower ABV beers so only go for 3.5kg or 4kg of Pale Malt
then maybe 400g of Wheat and 200g of Crystal usually giving me a beer of about 4 to 4.5% ABV.
But like already mentioned i like to keep the OG/IBU ratio below 1 as i dont like my beers to bitter.

[NickK]

There are styles of ale/beer - those have specific parameters. So an Imperial IPA will be high ABV, very bitter (high IBU) initially an will take a conditioning time in the order of 6-8 months.

However if you're brewing outside of a style then the keys are:
IBU - the bitterness based off the hop mass, the alpha acid content and the time (giving the 'utilisation').
ABV - Initial Gravity (sugar/volume of water), Planned final gravity given a specific amount of yeast and it's attenuation.
Outside of that it comes down to selecting the ingredients based on flavours that they impart - just like cooking. Each hop has is it's own smell and taste it imparts, each grain has it's own taste too..

[boingy]

Check the BJCP guidelines.
They are not rules, and they are Americans ( ) but it is a good starting point.

http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/catdex.php