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Dealing with percentages when extract is used

C. Painter

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So here is an issue that I need to work out.
In books like Designing Great Beers, styles are broken down and portions of the malt bill are generally expressed in % of total malt bill weight.

This seems to be how BeerSmith calculates it too.
However, when designing my own partial mash recipes, dry malt extract is treated as a straight weight, so a 8% speciatly grain as expressed in BeerSmith would really be... I don't know ... a 3% portion in an all grain recipe... (signicantly less anyway)

How should I maneuver around this.  Should I design the beer as all grain and then convert some of the base malt into extract, leaving the percentages out of balance?

Am I making any sense?

Thanks,

-Clay
 
This may not help, but when I was doing partials, I knew how much total "partial" grains I could use for the special flavors that beer needed, be it caramels, melanoidins, etc. which would depend on your method.

So I would use the grains for the flavor/aroma impact, and then add light DME to reach the OG target.

So let's assume you can fit 2# of grain in a mesh bag...design a 2# specialty grain mix to suit your recipe, and then add the DME needed to make the beer. 

It's a slippery slope, b/c I soon found I could ditch the bag, free-range more grains in a pot, put it in the oven to maintain mash temps, and I was full-mash, all-grain, full-boil in the kitchen. 
 
Someone on this board suggested to enter grain percentages as lbs of grain.  This would result in a recipe that has 100 lbs of grain.  Then you can use the gravity adjustment feature to set the gravity to where it should be.  This corrects the grain weights, but leaves the percentages the same.

Probably doesn't help much for extract though.
 
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