BMWFan -
All told, good job on filling out the BIABacus. You must expect to get different numbers when using different programs because the assumptions made are inherently different. I am biased toward the BIABacus. Your equipment is much more complicated than mine so I cannot offer an estimate of KFL losses, just measure what you get.

Check out posts by Pistol Patch from 4 years ago
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2247&p=33405#p33405
https://www.biabrewer.info/viewtopic.ph ... 415#p33415

My look at your BIABacus gives, from the top:
Section B, kettle capacity is filled in properly, but the advice given most frequently on this forum is to boil for 90 minutes. Yes it uses more energy, but it is to evaporate the water used in the full-volume mash that extracted the good stuff from the grains during the 90 minute mash you entered in Section E.

Section C:
You have Chocolate Malt listed twice. Is there an explanation?
With flaked oats at 9.1% and flaked barley at 4.6% you will likely get a less-than-clear beer after all is done. That will be fine, as ling as you know it is coming.
You asked about EBC and SRM - someone else will have to help you there. I don’t worry much about color numbers. The BIABacus can be trusted to give approximate SRM numbers. In this case it indicate a fairly dark beer. Some light will get through, but you will not be able to read by it.

Section D: Willamette is one of my favorite flavor/aroma hops, but I do not use it for bittering. At its common 4.8% AA, as you entered on the left side, it is on the weak end of the AA% spectrum. You have entered 8.9 as the AA% on the right side - pretty potent Willamette hops you have there. If that is correct, it explains why you will be using a little more than half of the original recipe (left side). Why are there three entries of 8.9 on the right side with only one named hop on the left? If you intend to add Willamette hops more than once, enter the name on the line on the left (you don’t need to enter it on the same line on the right after that). Hops change from year to year in their AA% and more.

Section E: 68.9 ºC is on the high side for a Mash Temperature. It will provide for lots of body* in your beer, if that is what you want. You will not get as much fermentable sugars as you would with a lower Temperature like 66.5 ºC. Whirlfloc at 5 minutes is great. Mashout at 78 ºC for zero minutes - what do you hope to accomplish here? Mashout does a couple of things -the heat denatures the remaining active beta and alpha amylases and supposedly reduces viscosity to aid in draining of the bag when lifted. Pull the bag from the hot liquid before you go above 78 ºC no matter what. If you just ramp up to a boil without pause, the difference will be negligible - again, make certain that the bag of wet spent grains is out of the hot liquid by 78 ºC. Your bag is going to be heavy when first lifted and draining back into the kettle. Have you got that covered? No rinsing required, just drain it and the liquor drained goes back in to be boiled.

Your entries show 22.41 lbs (10.165 kg) in Section C going into TWN of 14.37 gal (54.41 L) in Section K, putting you in the right range with no water held back in Section W (no need to enter zeros, just leave it blank). Other brewing recipe builders will have different numbers, guaranteed. Let BIABacus handle the efficiency numbers based on your upcoming results. Don't base an early recipe on a guess about efficiency. It will take you more than a few brew days to get an idea of your own efficiency on your own equipment.

Good luck an let us know how things go.

*I may be guilty of perpetuating a myth regarding body and high mash temperatures. See http://brulosophy.com/2018/08/13/mash-t ... t-results/ for results from one case (a Helles, for what itis worth) where the correlation is disprovend

BMWFan - I guess you can tell that I missed the SRM difference in the two different Chocolate malts because I failed to pay attention to color.

The recipe has unusual elements; High mash temperature, >13% flaked grains, >11% black/chocolate grains and one dose of Willamette hops at 60 minutes, but they will work together. The link you included has discussions about astringency where it balances out. Take good notes along the way during brew day.

One great thing about the BIABacus is that you can enter the original recipe on the left side and it will convert to the scale you have set with your kettle dimensions and desired volume, OG and IBU targets. You do not need to "double" anything.

Looks good. Please let us know how it turns out!

I've been meaning to write a few things to this thread for ages and I have a question too! Firstly...

BMWFan wrote: ↑

1 month ago

This beer turned out FANTASTIC. Awesome!

Great to read that

BMWFan wrote: ↑

1 month ago

[BIABacus] boil-off rates. I'd like to change it because it's calculating way too high for me.
I use a Boil/Steam condenser, which gets me about 2 qt per hour of evaporation/boil-off.

Great to see you found that answer on your own in Section X of the BIABacus. Well done

Why BeerSmith, Brewer's Friend etc Don't Match BIABacus.

You were wondering, quite rightly, about the difference between software like BeerSmith, Brewer's Friend and the BIABacus. It's a tricky area to explain and one best done with analogies and I've just thought of another one...

Imagine an electric clothes dryer. We all know that we can throw one towel in the dryer and it will probably be dry in 45 mins but, if we throw 5 towels in the dryer, then it will probably take 120 mins for them to dry. BeerSmith, Brewer's Friend and all other mainstream software are based on a fiction that one towel will be just as dry as two towels in the same amount of limited time. Another analogy is assuming that a dirty towel can be cleaned just as well with a limited amount of water e.g. one bucket, as it can with two.

Instead of the above fictions, easy to see with the above analogies, the BIABacus works on a far more realistic scenario. The BIABacus knows that in the brewing world, it is impossible to extract every bit of sugar from the grain as we are limited by many factors, the main one being that we are severely restricted as to how much water we can use to wash and rinse the grain... pretend you only have one bucket.

The current version of the BIABacus (PR 1.3T) solves that problem to a massive extent. A future iteration aims to solve it even further. The following diagram may help to distinguish things although the advantages compared to mainstream, even of PR1.3T, are not adequately shown...



My question for you

I'd love to hear more about your "Boil/Steam Condenser." It sounds fascinating BMW. Can you post some more info on that? Would love to see some pics as well.

Thanks for the link and pics BMW - much appreciated . I hadn't seen the condenser before. We'd probably get in trouble using one here due to water restrictions . Enjoyed reading the link. Shame the waste water can't be used for cleaning. That would be perfect!

I should have mentioned with the pic above that yellow/orange scenarios can be fixed easily (e.g. dilution) whereas red scenarios can't be fixed easily. Also just noticed that one of the Low's under BIABacus PR 1.3T was coloured yellow instead of red - fixed now. The diagram probably doesn't do justice to the differences though... If we forget about volume, you'll see that mainstream only scores 1/9 brews as ok versus BIABaci's 9/9 if that makes sense.

Next version requires adding in a few fairly complex calculations which will require some pretty fierce concentration or a lot of beer, not sure which yet

PP, when will we be able to play with the new generation BIABacus file...? Ive been really happy with the one we have, but it looks like a solid improvent.

This is a very hard question to answer Scott and a very good one to ask. I started replying shortly after you wrote your question, had just finalised my reply, hit Enter and I was logged out and lost all I had written

Here is what I remember writing...

"I actually started writing an answer to your question before you even asked it. I also spent a lot of the last week on the BIABacus as tizoc has expressed an interest in coding it and has, actually, already started work on it. I know nothing about coding but I strongly suspect he is capable of coding the current version.

Even the current iteration has many hidden layers to it. I have one more version up my sleeve but it will take some days for me to test. The version after that is far more complicated to write/program/code. I'm not sure if it is even possible yet."

I finished my post with something like the following...

"In fact Scott, I'll probably email you and some other key members here before replying further in this thread as the BIABacus, even to date has come at an immense personal cost. Further versions will require the same intense blocks of concentration (hundreds of hours), so to continue that is pretty crazy. Especially as I haven't even had the resources to post the new site structure up!"


Pat