Help with All Grain Recipe

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ClownPrince

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Hi, Making the jump to All Grain brewing soon.
I'm looking to make an IPA to begin with and I'm not familiar/comfortable with which grains to use yet.
I've made some nice SMASHs with Marris Otter so I'll probably go with that as my base.
I made some Extract brews with 2kg Pale DME and 1KG Amber DME, so a conversion of that would be appreciated.

Basically, I'll take any advice I can get.
 
My "house" IPA is just Marris Otter/pale ale malt and crystal 40 for some colour and caramel flavour.

Can you help me out with amounts for a 20L batch. Please, assume i'm an idiot.
Looking for an ABV of between 5 and 7.
I'm fine with Hops, been doing that with extract brewing for a while now.
 
5kg of Marris Otter and .5kg of crystal 40. I've gone higher on the MO in the past but this is my current incarnation of the recipe. Hop it however you like but I use 100% centennial.
 
Just to add, we all started in the same spot. As mentioned above, get a good brewing book. I have probably 20 different books on specific styles and how to brew them along with some generic ones like Designing Great Beers. It's a bit dated now but when I started brewing in 2007, it served me very well. I learned about the different malts and what they add to a beer and what role they play in specific styles.

I'm not saying this is what you need to do to learn about malts. Everyone has their own way of learning. This just worked well for me.

20210608_092544.jpg
 
Thanks all. The plan is a Summit, Simcoe & Galaxy IPA.
Not too much of a variation on an Extract IPA I did last year. Think I'll keep it simple as advised.
 
Well worth dipping your toe into brewing software. I use Beersmith, you can enter the recipes you have already tried as a starter and after a few brews it learns your set up.

You dial in your equipment and losses of water and wort at the different stages via whatever vessels you are using.

I tend to put in tried and tested recipes and adjust it to the ABV you prefer and then you can switch around hops and grains you would like to try or have experienced from beers you have had elsewhere. The software will tell you if you are wildly out from the style you are trying to achieve, if you care.

You won't regret it if you are looking to experiment with your beers. Definitely keep it simple to start with though. Good luck.
 
0.5kg crystal is a bit high for me. I'd cut it down to 150-200g. You don't want an IPA caramelly and sweet, imo.
 
When I make an English IPA, it's 100% MO for grain. American IPAs are a little more "loosely" structured in that area. :-)
 
When I make an English IPA, it's 100% MO for grain. American IPAs are a little more "loosely" structured in that area. :-)
I put a bit of light crystal in an English IPA. Like 2-3%.

500g is a lot of crystal.
 
I made some Extract brews with 2kg Pale DME and 1KG Amber DME, so a conversion of that would be appreciated.

In 20 litres that would take you to an original gravity of 1.052 and a colour of about 6ERM/12EBC which equates to pale malt with 2% crystal 60L - say 5kg Otter and 100g crystal 60L.

Can you help me out with amounts for a 20L batch. Please, assume i'm an idiot.

You're not an idiot, you just lack knowledge. And that is fixable, unlike being an idiot.

As others have said, software is a big help when building your own AG recipes - whether it's the paid ones, a free one like Brewtarget, or a website like Brewersfriend. But if you're not ready for that, the numbers happen to fall out for a good rule of thumb :

1kg base malt in 20 litres at 70% efficiency -> ~10 gravity points which with a medium-attenuation yeast -> 1% ABV.

So :

5kg base malt in 20 litres at 70% efficiency -> 1.050 original gravity which with eg S-04 yeast -> 5% ABV

In fact with modern malts you tend to get a bit more than that, but it's close enough (or just assume slightly efficiency of say 68% to make the numbers work). Base malts are any malts with a "full" amount of enzymes for breaking starch down into sugar - pale malt, pilsner, even slightly darker ones like Vienna. But the enzymes get killed by the longer cooking needed to make darker malts, and the starch itself becomes less accessible, so assume speciality malts release half as much sugar per kg compared to base malts. So :

Instead of 5kg base -> 1.050, you want 4.9kg base + 0.2kg (4%) crystal -> 1.050 and so on. But 2-4% crystal is a pretty flexible base for most styles.

Brewhouse efficiency is a measure of how much sugar you get out of the grain versus the theoretical maximum. Somewhere around 70-75% is considered typical for BIAB, all-in-one systems like Grainfather get over 80%. I wouldn't sweat efficiency too much - what matters is being able to predict efficiency rather than its absolute number (unless you're brewing for profit), so consistency is more important. If your efficiency is low, all it means is you have to add an extra 50p of malt, which is nothing in the global scheme of things. So 70% efficiency is a reasonable assumption, but your first one or two AG brews will probably end up closer to 60% so it's worth adding an extra 15% or so grain in those early brews - better to go a bit higher than end up with gnat's urine! For the same reason it's no bad idea to have some DME to hand if it needs a bit of a boost.

Attenuation is a measure of how well a yeast converts a sugar solution into alcohol. Typically you end up with final gravity (FG) at about a quarter of the original gravity (OG), implying an attenuation of 75% - formally, apparent attenuation = 1 - (FG/OG) or = (OG – FG)/OG.

So a 75% yeast will take 1.050 wort to 1.0125 (just divide 50 by 4) and ends up at about 5%. So at 75% attenutation it's roughly 10 points of gravity ->1% ABV, and it changes by about 0.2% ABV for every 3% attenuation up or down. So you might get 68% attenuation from a yeast like Windsor, which would end up below 4.6% but with more body, or 85% with a saison yeast for 5.6% and a drier, thinner beer.

All the above are not completely accurate, but they are close enough to have in your head to be useful reality checks - or when you just need to do a quick brew without getting the computer/phone out.
 
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