This week I take a look at how you can use percentages to formulate your grain bill for more efficient beer recipe design. I also explain how to do this using BeerSmith brewing software.
Formulating Your Grain Bill with Percentages
Professional brewers often use percentages to specify the malt bill for a recipe. This is done in part because professional recipes are often brewed on different size systems so it is quite common to scale a recipe using software when brewing on a particular equipment setup. However, percentages are also widely used because it gives you a more precise idea of the composition of the grain bill that is easier to work with than pounds, ounces and kilograms. I actually published a video some time back on how you too can build recipes like the pros with BeerSmith.
For example if I say I’ve use 9 lbs 3 oz of pale malt in my grain bill the information is rather meaningless unless I know the size of the batch I’m brewing, style, and overall intent. However if I say 90% of my grain bill is pale malt, I have a pretty good idea that the bulk of the base malt is pale malt, and likely the remaining 10% is specialty malts of various forms.
For example lets take a look at this malt bill:
- 90% English Pale Malt
- 5% Carafoam
- 5% Crystal 30
From the above I can see we are using English Pale Malt as the base, and the use of a small amount of carafoam is likely to enhance the head retention on the beer. The addition of 5% crystal malt will likely add a bit of color and sweetness to the beer. While its hard to place the exact style of the beer without knowing the original gravity, yeast and bitterness, I would quickly guess this is some kind of English Ale style – perhaps a Mild Ale or Pale Ale depending on the strength.
Using percentages also lets me more quickly balance the flavor of the beer, assuming I understand the underlying flavors of the malts used. I can limit harsh zone malt percentages, easily make sure the bulk of my malt is base malt, better control my use of adjuncts and non barley malts and ultimately make a better beer.
Some Rules of Thumb for Working with Percentages
I covered the basic principles of recipe design in this summary post here, and I recommend you read it if you want a quick overview. But here are some basic recommendations for working with percentages:
- Base Malts Should Make Up the Vast Majority of the Malt Bill – Malts like Pale Malt, Pilsner Malt, Vienna Malt and occasionally Pilsner should make up around 80-100% of your malt bill. Many classic styles including English IPA were made with 100% pale malt. I personally try to limit my specialty malts to no more than 20% of the malt bill and in many cases it is 10% or less. Adding too many specialty malts in large quantities muddies the flavors you are trying to produce and also can inhibit fermentation and attenuation as darker specialty malts don’t add a lot of fermentables to the beer.
- Specialty Malts Should Be Added with Purpose – While its fun to create a “kitchen sink porter” with whatever happens to be laying around the brewhouse, it won’t come out nearly as well as a properly designed Porter using targeted specialty malts to achieve your goals. Add specialty malts that create a specific flavor, aroma or effect you are looking for and use them in small quantities that achieve those goals. Most of these malts are in the 2%-15% range.
- Limit Harsh Zone Malt Percentages – While harsh zone malts like Special B can be used to enhance many darker beers, they need to be used very sparingly, making up perhaps one to four percent of the grain bill. If you use them in larger quantities they can easily ruin the balance and flavor you are trying to achieve.
- Use Non-Barley Malts in Proper Quantities – Non barley malts like wheat, rice, oats, rye, sorgum, etc… can be used to great effect in a beer, but may require special mashing schedules, enzymes, as well as careful sparging if used in large quantities. Some, like rye, tend to unbalance an otherwise balanced beer. In general the malted, flaked or torrified versions are much easier to use in a standard mash and can be converted far more easily than the raw grains which require special mash schedules such as a cereal mash. For grains like rye and oats I usually limit them to 1-15% of the grain bill much like a specialty malt. For malted wheat you can use it as part of the base grain bill. For example some German beers use as much as 50% wheat though I usually try to keep it well below 40%. Torrified or flaked rice can also be used as part of the base, but be aware that rice and wheat don’t contribute much in the way of enzymes to complete the mash so both require a generous base of pale or pilsner malts to provide the enzymes needed for conversion.
- Keep it Simple – Most commercial beers are made with one to three malts including specialty malts. In fact the vast majority of beer styles can be created using just a base malt and one specialty malt. Only for darker beers do we need to use three or in some cases four malts. At a commercial level this is done not only because its hard to keep a ton of specialty malts in stock all the time, but also because simpler is usually better.
Using Recipe Percentages in BeerSmith
Some brewers don’t know that BeerSmith has had the capability to build a grain bill using percentages for many years now. For the desktop version, just open a recipe and click on the Grain Pct button which is in the stack of buttons to the right of the various Add ingredient buttons in BeerSmith 3. From the web version there is a Fermentable Pct button just below the various add ingredient buttons in any open recipe.
This displays the grain percentage dialog which shows your entire grain bill and a percentage for each ingredient. You can edit the percentages directly to set the exact percentage you want for each grain or fermentable and the total will be displayed at the bottom. Pressing OK will adjust the actual quantities in the recipe to match the percentages you set. You can use this in clever ways along with the adjust gravity and bitterness tools to very quickly build a recipe exactly the way you want it as outlined in this video.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s article on grain percentages. Please subscribe for regular weekly delivery, check out the podcast, and don’t hesitate to retweet, link, like or mention any of my articles on social media and give my BeerSmith software a try if you enjoy brewing your own beer.
