Home Brew Talk - Brewing software.

In the next few weeks i'll be talking about the bottling of my first batch which i've just completed and also how it's turned out and the brewing of my first part mash brew. Today though i'm going to quickly share with you some software i have discovered which i find helpful in making recipes for brews.

As you know from my last home brew blog post, i based my recipe for my first part mash brew on that of one i found in a book i'd been given for my wife as a present. That recipe was for a weizen and called for 1.35kg of wheat malt (grain), 1 tbsp gypsum, 1.5kg liquid amber malt extract, 1.35kg light dry malt extract, 42g Hallertuer hops, 9g, Willamette Hops, 11g Ale yeast, 140g cane sugar (for conditioning). I decided to ue that as a bade and just change some ingredients based on the taste notes provided elsewhere in the book and based on what was available in the brew store.

The changes to that where to use a wheat malt extract instead of grain - with the theory being that as it's a wheat beer i'd rather have a reliable source of wheat malt in case my use of grains went wrong. I used vienna malt then as my grain because of its subtle taste and caramel aroma. I also changed the Willamette hops to Chinook based on it s flavour profile and used a different yeast as the brew store had a specific hefeweizen liquid yeast that would produce a hefeweizen style beer.

I shall give details of how i brewed this in future blogs but after i had brewed it and before placing in the cupboard to ferment, i took a reading with my hydrometer of the gravity of my brew (its original gravity) and got a result of 1.040. I decided to look online and see if this was a figure consistent with the typ of beer i was brewing. There were various responses on various home brew forums from people that had asked similar questions before but also a referral to use a brewing software which apparently would give you details of how your brew should work out and what readings to expect. So i downloaded one called brewtarget which was free.

When you open up the software there is a simple layout, with a menu of existing beer recipes down the left side of the page (your own recipes will add to that list when you make them) and an area to input your own details on the right hand side. So i decided to use this to see what should happen with my recipe.

Inputting ingredients is easy enough and is split into fermentables, hops, miscellaneous, yeast and mash. I ignored the mash section as this gives you an opportunity to adjust the method for mashing that you've used - ive still to properly learn all about this area and improvised a mash with my brew so just left it at default settings. So i entered my other ingredients as below (entering is easy and user intuitive, using drop down menus for ingredients and methods and allowing free typing for volumes)

The result of all this is give the overview in the top right hand side of the screen.

Here you name your beer, choose the style of beer, brewing method (all extract, all mash, part mash etc) and size of batch. I didnt quite know what to do with boil size and efficiency as im quite new to this too. What i can glean information form is what's on the right hand side and the figures there and the very handy graphic which gives the overall characteristic of your beer.

The blue figures at the expected figures and the middle figure and to the right is what you can expect from the ingredients and methods chosen -the middle is the expected result and im not quite sure what the right is at the moment. So you can see from the overall picture that my beer is extra malty - this i feel is because i used another liquid malt rather than dried malt as asked for in the base recipe (this is my fault for skimming the recipe and not reading thoroughly) and is going to be extra bitter (this is because i noticed that the hops i changed for had a higher bitterness rating so i know in future to keep an eye on these figures for more balance. The colour is darker than expected and thats because of the malt changes i made swapping out the light malt extract which would;ve lightened the colour somewhat. Where i have lucked out though, and im its from a low efficiency with my improvised mashing technique producing a weaker wort from my grain - is that the OG of my beer is actually under the 1.044 required and not the 1.050 expected. This means that i probably have a lower malt content as well which should help bring it closer to a balance.

So, whilst i may need to learn more before i can finally use this to its full potential -i have already learned something regarding balancing beers and making a recipe that should work well. Other features i can use later on will also tell me how much sugar to use in priming and as i understand the jargon regarding mashing, i should be able to get more realistic figures.

Answering my original question though about my OG, it seems im not too far away form where i should've been and if my final gravity (FG) is also around 1.010 or under i should have a decent beer and ABV also.