Adding an Ingredient with Only a Brix Value

Hello fellow brewers,

I have an interesting conundrum, I am going to be brewing a beer using pale and lager malt as a base to produce a golden ale. At the end of the boil I am going to add some Concentrated Cherry Juice, to produce a cherry beer. The issue I have is working out how to add the Cherry Concentrate to Beersmith as an ingredient

I know that the Brix Value of the Syrup is 67.5%, and it is 95% fermentable, but I can't add it as it requires a Gravity value (For Potential so I'm assuming its ppg . . . and again using US Gallons rather than Imperial Gallons why cant we use ºL/Kg?? i.e pale malt is 296ish.)

Using my standard rule of thumb in that gravity is 4 times the Brix value (very approximate) gives a Gravity of 1.270 . . . so a potential of 270 . . .but that's not right.

Any Clues here to help me??

One thought I've had is that 67.5% Brix is 67% sugar so 46 * .675 is 31.05 . . . which sort of sounds correct, if I took 1lb and dissolved it  up to 1 gallon.

I'm really fudging round in the dark here so any light anyone can shed would be useful.

Aleman
Mashing in Blackpool, Lancashire, UK

You've pretty much figured it out....

Aleman said:

I can't add it as it requires a Gravity value (For Potential so I'm assuming its ppg . . . and again using US Gallons....

One thought I've had is that 67.5% Brix is 67% sugar so 46 * .675 is 31.05 . . . which sort of sounds correct, if I took 1lb and dissolved it  up to make 1 gallon.

Click to expand...

Yup, BeerSmith is using the dissolved potential as the standard. I think you've figured out the rest.

For your purposes, you can multiply brix by four and get the gravity once you get tot he dissolved state. The error is pretty big when calculating at the concentrated brix level. The conversion totals to 1.336.

To be a proper entry, you do have to convert the juice into it's gravity at 1lb/gallon. That is the standard measure of sugar by BeerSmith. Since you already have the math figured out, I'll just jump ahead and tell you I got a gravity contribution of 33.75 ppg. Your total of 31.05 is less than a half percent of alcohol different. 

Nicely done, sir!

Thanks for confirming that Brewfun.

It's been so long since I've actually had to do this sort of thing by hand, that having someone to sanity check what I'm thinking is really helpful. Standard brews, with standard ingredients are really simple with Beersmith, it's when we decide to start playing outside the box that things get interesting.

For some further information I'm brewing it in a commercial brewery here in the UK at the end of September. The plan is to partigyle the mash and take 4BBL (1BBL = 36 UK Gallons) of the first runnings, and use that to produce a base beer to which we then add the Cherry  juice, to produce a 12% abv Cherry Beer for Next Winter. . . The remaining mash will be sparged to collect 10BBL of a 1.042 (4.2%abv) Golden Ale.

The worry for me is that the brewery has to actually sell these beers and throwing close to 1000UKP (~$1600) of ingredients in the mash tun and kettle to screw it up is not worth contemplating.

I brew commercially too, and that beer sounds delicious!