Hi,
I have a large number of microbreweries using BeerSmith now, so I created this board to help facilitate sharing information and lessons learned. Feel free to add your own questions, tips or thoughts as a thread on this board.
The most common question by far I get from Pro or microbrewers is how to scale their small batches up to work with the large multi-barrel systems.
The process for doing this is:
- Create an equipment profile for your large equipment setup - including the various volumes, losses, etc...
- Adjust your brewhouse efficiency in the equipment profile - usually this is slightly higher (a few percent) than you will see on the small system
- Within the equipment profile, adjust the hop utilization factor. This factor should be 100% for batches of 20 gallons or less, but for large commercial systems it can be substantially higher (as high as 150-200% depending on the system). For a large system it takes less hops for the same level of bitterness
- Unfortunately I have no hard guideline for the hop utilization factor for a multi-barrel system. You need to talk with your equipment manufacturer or another pro-brewer with a similar system to get a rough idea of what this number should be.
Once you have the large system equipment profile set up, you can simply use the "Scale Recipe" command to scale a small recipe up - select the scale recipe command and select your large system equipment profile and BeerSmith will adjust the recipe to match.
Thanks,
Brad Smith
I have a large number of microbreweries using BeerSmith now, so I created this board to help facilitate sharing information and lessons learned. Feel free to add your own questions, tips or thoughts as a thread on this board.
The most common question by far I get from Pro or microbrewers is how to scale their small batches up to work with the large multi-barrel systems.
The process for doing this is:
- Create an equipment profile for your large equipment setup - including the various volumes, losses, etc...
- Adjust your brewhouse efficiency in the equipment profile - usually this is slightly higher (a few percent) than you will see on the small system
- Within the equipment profile, adjust the hop utilization factor. This factor should be 100% for batches of 20 gallons or less, but for large commercial systems it can be substantially higher (as high as 150-200% depending on the system). For a large system it takes less hops for the same level of bitterness
- Unfortunately I have no hard guideline for the hop utilization factor for a multi-barrel system. You need to talk with your equipment manufacturer or another pro-brewer with a similar system to get a rough idea of what this number should be.
Once you have the large system equipment profile set up, you can simply use the "Scale Recipe" command to scale a small recipe up - select the scale recipe command and select your large system equipment profile and BeerSmith will adjust the recipe to match.
Thanks,
Brad Smith