re: Homebrewing Thread: Volume II

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If I give you one of my recipes brewed on my system, you're going to have to change everything for your system. Same thing goes for the equipment profile.

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Yeah but couldn’t you solve that by adjusting your equipment profile and adjusting your efficiencies there?

First, those bottles of sour look great;

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I also made a Cabernet kit today. I made a wine kit last year, and it came out great. This kit came with grape skins, so I am excited about the body that this wine will have compared to my last wine.

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What kit did you use? I've recently become interested in this.

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What kit did you use?

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I made the Cellar Craft Cabernet kit. This is a nice kit. It came with two different styles of oak chips and also has oak cubes that will be added later. It also had a bag of grape skins. I’m excited to see how this one turns out.

The last kit that I made was good, but it didn’t have the skins. The wine was good after 6 months and great after one year, but it never developed the full body of a good Cabernet.

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ETA: I was just looking at the overview video and the reason I don't like BeerSmith popped up almost immediately. He's talking about recipes and goes into how the program calculates infusion volumes for you. Well that shouldn't be part of the recipe. That's a system-dependent parameter. If I give you one of my recipes brewed on my system, you're going to have to change everything for your system. Same thing goes for the equipment profile.

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have you played with BS? If you just write down your recipe and give it to me i understand, but if you were to share it with me via the cloud, it will have your equipment profile in it and when i change it to mine it will fix everything you are talking about and tune it for my system.

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Only a little bit and never for an actual brew session. I admit it could be a non-issue. It just seems like something that doesn't need to be in a recipe in the first place.

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well it gets really technical. If you were to give me a recipe u would want to take the grits percentages and put them into BS to match your ABV. if i just put the poundage, i agree it wouldnt be like yours since we are using 2 different brewing systems. BUT a recipe is tied to a brew system. So if you share me your recipe via the BS cloud, it would be tied to your equipment. When i switch it to mine it would make it match my volumes and efficiencies, as i have my system brewing higher that 72%.

if you do try BS take the time and set up your own equipment profile.

I will.

I think a lot of my objection is prejudice because I've been using ProMash since Budweiser was a microbrew. PM has been showing its age for 15 years or more but it still works. That probably won't be true forever so I've been keeping an eye on BS as an eventual replacement.

The issue is that PM uses a different paradigm that makes better sense to me. There are recipes and then there are sessions. Recipes are just that - instructions for how to make a beer: ingredients, mash temps, boil time, etc. They don't include anything equipment-specific except for mash efficiency. When I'm getting ready to make a beer, I start a new brewing session, select the recipe I want to use, make whatever little changes I want to make (like hop substitutions, different yeast, etc.) and then save it. That becomes a permanent record of that brew session but the recipe itself doesn't change. That method of doing things just seems logical. I never understood why you'd include equipment stuff in a recipe.

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you need to write brad

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I talked to Brad about this very subject when BS1 came out. Let's just say he wasn't all that accepting of the ProMash paradigm and had all sorts of rationalizations about why he did it the way he did. Maybe he has valid reasons, I don't know. I've seen a few different workarounds along the lines of that thread you posted. That's good to know you can sort of get there with BS but it still seems like something that should be baked in and not a workaround.

The way I think about it is like this. You have a set of blueprints for building something but there are always little tweaks that happen along the way. So there is another set of blueprints called the "as builts" that tell you how it was really built. If you were going to build another one, you'd start with the design blueprints because the changes you made the second time around would probably be different from the first one.

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The way I think about it is like this. You have a set of blueprints for building something but there are always little tweaks that happen along the way. So there is another set of blueprints called the "as builts" that tell you how it was really built. If you were going to build another one, you'd start with the design blueprints because the changes you made the second time around would probably be different from the first one.

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I think i'm understanding. So you just want to be able to log a Master Recipe and your changes? As I stated with my NEIPA I have The Hopnotoad. Then I have the Hopnotoad V 1.0. I've built off of each subsequent version. But if I want to build off the master version, I could just copy the master and upload that and call it V6.0 and modify from there.

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I think i'm understanding. So you just want to be able to log a Master Recipe and your changes? As I stated with my NEIPA I have The Hopnotoad. Then I have the Hopnotoad V 1.0. I've built off of each subsequent version. But if I want to build off the master version, I could just copy the master and upload that and call it V6.0 and modify from there.

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Yeah that's part of it. Recipes contain things like the grain bill, hops additions, yeast, mash rests, target OG, etc. The brew session contains things like how much and what temperature strike water to use, how much sparge water is needed, how much wort to collect (and at what gravity), how much yeast was pitched, how long it was carbonated and at what pressure, the actual OG and FG, things like that.

I don't really want a bunch of recipes for the same beer cluttering things up. For most beers I only need the one recipe and then the brew sessions for each time I've brewed it.

Like I said, maybe BS does all that just in a different way and I need to use it in a real brew session before I fully understand the workflow.

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Im putting a beer in the keg this afternoon and i want it carb by Friday night. I know i can cool it then quick carb b shaking. But what pressure should i put it at to carb in 3 days. this is a regular drinkable pale ale. my idea was 30psi for 24 hours, 20 psi for 24 then serving for 24.

or should i just put it on like 20 and let it site till then?

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Is it cold already? I kegged a beer Sunday evening that had been cold crashing since Friday night. I did 40 psi and it was pretty much fully carbed last night. dropped it down to about 15 and will drop to serving pressure this evening when I get home.

If it's not cold yet, I'd definitely go 40 psi, then drop to 20 for 24 hours then to serving pressure.