(CLOSED) Scaling Grain Amounts

[doublehaul]

I had a feature idea - If you had an up/down or +/- for your grains, that would increase/decrease your grain amounts by a factor, say by 1%. So, you could start with a recipe, and then increase or decrease your grain bill by clicking up or down, and your grain percentages and batch size would stay constant, but that way you could play with your Original Gravity without changing the percentages of your grains. Thanks.

 

[LarryBrewer]

Re: Scaling Grain Amounts

For now, what you could do is try the scale by efficiency feature (scale button at the top of the recipe editor). Then, set your efficiency back to what it was before. That will be the most accurate way of doing it, since it selects what it thinks is the base grain and scales that only. This minimizes changes in color.

Here is why:
If you are increasing the OG, but keeping the grain bill ratios and batch size the same, the SRM value is going to go up (the beer gets darker). Darker grains provide a huge color contribution relative to the light grains. For example, the lovibond of pale 2-row is about 1.8, but Chocolate malt has a lovibond of 350. So if you increase both of those by 50%, the SRM is going to increase with the OG (and you probably don't want that).


I'm going to leave this open and see if anyone else has comments on this, but we are leaning against it since the color contribution would be thrown off when using the feature (which would be confusing). Human judgement absolutely needs to be used when designing a beer recipe.

To increase the OG, I would recommend adding more base grain, then subtracting small amounts of that, and adding back in the specialty grains to keep the SRM the same. You could also just add sugar as a late addition or more light DME - that would lighten the body or dry it out some.