Formulating by Grain Percentage

Perhaps I just haven't figured this out yet, but it seems to me that the only thing you can do with this is adjust the ratios of your current ingredients. If your total grist is 7 pounds, you need to add exactly 7 pounds of grain to your recipe before using the percentage adjustment screen.

It would be nice if you could have fields for inputting your desired total grain weight OR your desired OG. You could edit one of them and the other would update, as well as the amounts of all your grains. For example, if you typed in 7 lbs. of grain, it would instantly calculate your OG for the given percentages. Or, if you wanted a target OG of 1.072, the software would instantly calculate the total grain weight to reach that OG, based on percentages.

This change would allow you to really use this new feature for recipe design. You could put in the target OG and your base and specialty malts and experiment with different percentages and OGs on the fly without changing your grain bill until you're ready. This can already be done manually outside of this screen, but requires much more work.

Hi,
  One trick you can use is to add the grains, adjust the percentages and then use the "Adjust OG" tool to set your OG (which will scale the grain sizes up for you).

Brad

I enjoy historic beers but often they are only in grain bills of %. For those that are not familiar with Beersmith 2 there is a very simply way to enter the percentages into a recipe and with a couple of mouse clicks have a ready to roll recipe.

Eg. If you look at this chart of grain bills for 1915 Porters etc you can enter the percentages and scale the values to reflect your equipment profile.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6Y5jvFLq41k/Tgnn-wz7-_I/AAAAAAAAIAg/tGqBqn0nS-Q/s1600/Noakes_beers_1915.JPG

[1] Add a new recipe
[2] Make certain you are set up with your standard equipment profile you always use.
[3] Enter the malt/sugar % values as Kgs -- 10% enter as 10 kgs -- .5% as .5 kgs
For the time being ignore the gravity and the colour.

Select the [Adjust Gravity Icon] on the top row or click the Estimated gravity slider.
Change the highlighted gravity which will be very high to the actual value of the beer.

Click ok and return to your recipe.

Due to rounding there may be slight % differences but that will not cause you a problem.

Now you have a malt bill for your equipment in actual kgs and based on the gravity you want.

With historic beers the hopping rates can present a challenge based on the relationship of measuring types used.

Possibly someone here has an easy to use conversion of pounds to quarters or whatever manner the hops were used.

Steve