Dry Malt vs Liquid Malt

[Damien E1]

Scott' date=' have a look at the BJCP style guidelines which will give you an idea of what the OG and FG should be for a particular style (note that they are guidelines).

Then you can use a brewing tool to work out what the ingredients will do to affect these numbers. The tools won't tell you what it will taste like though, and how the mouth-feel is etc, just purely numbers.

Free tools are : Brewmate or IanH's spreadsheet which you can either get from the AHB forums or someone nice on here.

The next level from that is BeerSmith which you can use in demo for 30 days.

 

Thanks Adam. the BJCP Guidelines look to be very useful, but because Brewmate itself runs only on PC's (i.e., not Macs), I can't use it. What does brewing software do for you? (I have downloaded the BeerSmith demo, which I will use for my next batch, then buy it if it works for me.)

 

And here is another general question about the Coopers Bitter mix: the instructions seem to indicate that you only boil 2 liters of water to dissolve the fermentables, then add cold water for all but the final few liters, which might be cold or hot, in order to get the best temperature for fermenting, rather than the lengthy boil that I see is more standard for most recipes. Do I have that right?

 

Yes. The reason for that is that it is a pre-hopped can, so the boil has already been done for you. You only need to do a lengthy boil if you're wanting to add significant amounts of bitterness, and you wouldn't reboil a kit.

 

What I would do if I wanted to add, say, 15 IBU's to the English Bitter kit is bring 8 litres of water with about 800 grams of light dry malt added to the boil, add in 30 grams of East Kent Golding hops (or any other hop of about 5% alpha acids, but EKG is most fitting for the style) and boil that for an hour.That would bring the total bitterness including both that and the kit to about 50 IBU's. Now that is right on the top end for an Extra Special Bitter, so I'd then add to the kit and 800 grams of malt I already have another 700 grams of LDM, to bring that to 1.5 Kg, and 300 grams of Dextrose. Made to 21 litres, this should give me a starting gravity of 1057, and 50 IBU's, which allows for the fermentation to carry some away to end up with a beer that's about 40 IBU's and 5.7% alcohol when bottled, and hopefully delicious.[biggrin]

[Otto Von Blotto]

Every time I try to install Brewmate it gets stuck at this stupid .NET Framework shite and doesn't go any further... [annoyed]

[AdamH1525226084]

Every time I try to install Brewmate it gets stuck at this stupid .NET Framework shite and doesn't go any further... [annoyed]

 

Maybe disable your anitvirus/firewall while it's installing?

[Otto Von Blotto]

Hm, that could work. I'm currently trying it the "long" way around first by installing .NET Framework from the Microsoft site before trying again with the Brewmate install. Hopefully it works [lol]

[Guest]

Yep IanH's spreadsheet is da bomb. I've

 

Oh my.... I can't believe I just said the same thing in another thread and I have never used this terminology before. WoW!!.. amazing coincidence! [alien]