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Upscaling a recipe

hopkrid

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I moved from doing 5 gallon batches to doing 10 gallon batches.

I have always heard that recipes are not linear when upscaling but when i selected my new equipment in Beersmith it did upscale linear.

Is this just trial and error to rescale the recipes when moving to new equipment?

Thanks
Dirk
 
About the only thing I can think of that would not be proportional is the boil off volume - I'd expect the loss would be relatively independent of the batch size so you could potentially scale back for if it you knew your specific boiling loss.  The default values can all be adjusted based on your experience with your equipment in the equipment details page.
 
I *think* the scaling issue is related to scaling from home brew scale to professional scale, so going from five to ten gallons would be more linear than from five gallons to 15 barrels
 
I have had to make adjustments going from 20 BBL down to .6 BBL scaling.  I also tend to round numbers manually so I don't have 1.875 lbs of something.
 
hopkrid said:
I moved from doing 5 gallon batches to doing 10 gallon batches.

I have always heard that recipes are not linear when upscaling but when i selected my new equipment in Beersmith it did upscale linear.

Is this just trial and error to rescale the recipes when moving to new equipment?

Thanks
Dirk

Theoretically your right about it not being a precise linear upscale when scaling up recipes.  Some example that could impact your final beer include: reduced mash efficiency with larger grain beds, lower hops extraction efficiency for high gravity worts, and certainly yeast are impacted by the wort composition and fermenter shape (thus weight) impacted by more wort.  However in my experience (over 100 batches in last 3 years) these don't have a big impact for such small volumes as 5G to 10G.  Its a bigger deal when scaling a 10G recipe to professional scale (3-10bbls). 

I'd suggest to scale up your recipe focus largely on increasing the base malt to gain the bulk of the extra sugars and frequently I'll round down the specialty malts (which frequently end up with a partial pound weight).  So far this has been successful in making consistent and highly rated (in competitions) beers, so you might give it a try.

Cheers,
Paul
 
The scaling is to the 3/4 power; not linear.  See Brown and West's "Scaling in Biology"  (ISBN 0-19-513142-8)
 
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