

Take all of the ingredients in the recipe, this will include each type of grain, hop, yeast, spice, fruit or other flavourings listed. Scaling a recipe up means they got more beer for the same amount of time spent brewing. The opposite is also true for brewers who don’t have much time to devote to a whole brewday and therefore brew larger batches but less often.

Small batch brewing is becoming more and more popular with people just getting into brewing who don’t want to commit to making 40 pints of beer but rather just have a handful of bottles. You may want to brew a small batch of beer to test or experiment with ingredients or techniques you haven’t used before. Some brewers, me included will look at recipes and adjust them to my equipment, ensuring there is enough headroom and capacity in the equipment I use.Įquipment is only one reason why you would adjust a recipe of course. In the UK most home brew equipment such as fermenting vessels and boilers are designed to hold 23 litres so a common homebrew recipe in the UK can be 23 litres or 5 imperial gallons. Probably the most common measure for a home brew recipe is 19 litres or 5 US gallons this is due to many home brewers preference towards kegging beer in Cornelius kegs which hold exactly 19 litres. The most likely reason to brew a certain amount is down to the equipment you are using.

There are many reasons of course on why you may want to scale a recipe up or down. Scaling a home brew recipe is relatively simple. If however you want to adjust the recipe for any particular reason to make a different amount of finished beer how do you go about it. If you are brewing the exact recipe that is fine continue on without a worry. In the UK this is just shy of 23 litres in the US just under 19 litres. The vast majority of homebrew recipes you’ll find in books and online are formulated to make around 5 gallons of beer. Remember that knowing how something works means you can do things on the fly without relying on a computer and software. If you want to know how it works however then read on.
ANVIL FOUNDRY BEERSMITH SOFTWARE
If you use brewing software and it has this facility look no further. It is then a case of finding the option to scale the recipe to the amount you want to brew or the efficiency. Once you have found a recipe you like, input the ingredients and their amounts into the software according to that recipe’s specifications. If you use brewing software then many of the popular choices have options to scale a recipe. Scaling A Home Brew Recipe by Efficiency.
