Fermentable Percentage by Contribution

[llvtt]

The Recipe Editor gives the percentage by weight of each fermentable in the recipe. For example, if I made a trippel with 13lbs pilsner and 2lbs sugar, the "fermentables" portion of the calculator would report that the fermentables comprise 86.67% pilsner malt and 13.33% cane sugar.

It does this regardless of what the "efficiency" is that I set for the recipe. I'd like to see the percentage of each fermentable as a function of its extract contribution. Ideally, I'd like to be able to switch between which percent measurement I see, or be able to see both at the same time. I know there's the "OG" statistic underneath each fermentable, but I'd rather not have to do the math myself summing up all these values then dividing the OG of the fermentable in question by that number.

This would be immensely useful when creating recipes that mash only some of the grist, using malt extract or sugar for the rest of the fermentables.

Excuse me in advance if this feature is already available somewhere and I can't find it, or if this feature request is a duplicate of another one.

Thanks for making such a great product! I spend a lot of time here.

 

[Yooper]

I'm not sure I understand what it is that you'd like to see. All of the software I've ever used has the % of the grainbill but I've never seen any sort of extract contribution as one of the features.

You want to know how many gravity points from each fermentable are in the recipe?

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

are you talking about adjusting the % manually and it changes the fermentables amount?

 

[llvtt]

Hey! Thanks for the replies.

Tweaking the actual % of the grains was not something I had thought about. I was just thinking about another piece of information to be displayed as I build a recipe.

Basically, I'm looking for exactly what Yooper said: to display % based off the actual gravity contribution of the ingredient. I've also not seen this feature built into other calculators, but it's something that I do myself, manually, from time to time. As I said, I find it helpful for building recipes that use a lot of sugar or that are partially malt extract.

Here's a contrived example where this feature could come in handy:

You're making a recipe for a 5-gallon RIS, but your equipment can only handle a 10# grain bill. You decide to use some malt extract to make up the difference in gravity points. Furthermore, you want to use some munich malt for some extra flavor. The question is: how much munich do you want to add? You decide the recipe should be "10%" munich malt.

If that means 10% just by weight, you might end up with something like 1.5# munich (overall fermentable weight ~ 15lbs)

If that means 10% of the gravity points, you will end up with something like 2.7# munich (OG ~ 1.100, munich PPG ~ 37, 100 points / 5 gallons = 20 pts/gallon; 20 pts/gallon / 37 ppg = 0.541 lbs/gallon; 0.541 lbs/gallon * 5 gallons = 2.71 lbs.)

Whether we add 1.5lbs or 2.7lbs will likely impact the flavor of the recipe. I'd say that the gravity contribution of an ingredient, for base malts at least, is probably a better indicator of how much character that ingredient imparts. Think about 1# munich in a recipe with 4# pale malt vs 1# munich in a recipe with 4# DME. The munich character will almost certainly be stronger in the former.