Extract Brew Calculations with Biabacus

Post #1 made 3 years ago
Full disclosure, in my haste of ordering ingredients for an upcoming brew I picked up a kit recipe, Palmer Premium Beer Kits - Harold is Weizen - Hefeweizen, not realizing it was an extract recipe. Not wanting to discard the kit and waste more money I dug around looking for posts that might shed some insight on what to do if you wanted to plan an extract brew using BIABacus. I did find one that mentioned changing the Kettle to Fermenter Losses (KFL) in Section X. to 0. Although I don't agree that there will be zero, it will likely be very minimal given that DME dissolves completely and this recipe only uses 1 oz/28.35g of hops (Hallertau). Having done this Biabacus tells me that I need 5.56 pounds/2.52 Kg of DME. The kit comes with 6 lbs/2.72 kg of Briess Wheat DME. Not a huge difference and I often find that when I brew recipes from Brewing Classic Styles, where this recipe comes from, I often achieve higher O.G. when using what they call for and have learned to adjust for this. I'm also assuming rather than using Total Water Needed (TWN) I'll add the Volume Into the Boil (VIB) minus probably a half gallon or so to account for what the DME will displace. So my question is, what am I missing for values that need to be changed in the defaults to get this recipe right having never brewed this one before? I have attached the Biabacus file below. As a sort of side note, you'll notice I split the DME in the substitution column to ensure that Biabacus adjusted things correctly and annotated that the DME would be a boil addition only.
BIABacus PR1.3U - Weissbier - Harold Is Weizen (DME) - Batch A0.xls
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Re: Extract Brew Calculations with Biabacus

Post #2 made 3 years ago
Thought I posted a response yesterday, but it didn’t post…

Some quick thoughts. I do not have experience with using DME with the BIABacus, so assuming all of the assumptions you list are correct.

One solution is to increase your target OG. Which will also result with a higher ABV and a bigger beer.

Another solution - if your brew kettle is large enough - increase your target volume. But IBU would be lower by a percentage if you don’t add more hops. I like this option if you have room in the kettle and maybe a tad extra hops.

Or third, lower the amount of DME added…
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Re: Extract Brew Calculations with Biabacus

Post #3 made 3 years ago
@Scott Thanks for the reply. I ended up going with my initial assumptions and brewing this based on the file I attached to my original post but couldn't take gravity measurements due to my hydrometer breaking on me. Depending on the sensory outcome of this beer, I may brew this one again to try to nail down some changes for anyone wanting to use BIABacus to calculate DME/LME recipes for a quick brew day. I will say that Lallemand Munich Classic is very active. I allowed for 2 gallons of head space and it was barely enough to contain the krausen, I do have a blow off tube in place just in case though. In the end it'll be beer and with any luck I'll have more banana character vs clove that I'm going for.

Cheers!
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