Fermentables

The Fermentables panel is the grain bill. Search adds a row from the catalog, the amount is the only field most rows need, and everything else recalculates as you type: the percentage of the grist, the gravity, the color, and the mash pH two panels down.

Adding a malt

Press Add fermentable, or A anywhere in the editor that is not a text field, and search. The search reads names, makers and tags, so “pilsner”, “weyermann” and “crystal 60” all work, and what you have in stock is listed first. Pick a row and it lands with a sensible amount for the batch, which you then type over.

Each row shows the amount in your unit, its share of the grist, its color and its Use: mash, steep, boil, whirlpool or fermenter. A new malt lands on the use its class implies, and sugar lands in the boil.

Building by percentage

The panel’s summary shows the total grist mass. Press By % and the amounts become percentages you can type, against that total. Building a bill as “80 percent pilsner, 15 percent Munich, 5 percent crystal” is how most recipes are thought about, and the mode is there so you can type it that way and read it in kilograms afterwards. Change the total and every row scales.

Percentages only ever divide the total between your malts, so on their own they cannot move the gravity: raise one share and the others fall to make room. What moves it is the pair of figures in the summary — the total grist mass, and beside it the OG you are aiming at.

Aiming at a gravity

Type an OG into to in the summary and the bill resizes to reach it, holding every percentage exactly where you put it. That is the whole answer to “my bill overshoots”: it works downwards as readily as up, and one undo takes back both the target and the weights it asked for.

Until you set one, the box shows your style’s own figure — the midpoint of its published OG band — in gray, and aims there. It is a suggestion rather than something you typed, so restyle the recipe and the suggestion moves with it. Once you type a target it is yours and it stays put; clear the box to hand it back to the style, which leaves your grist exactly as it is.

A target you set is also what a new base malt is sized to when you add one from the picker, so the two places that ask “how much malt?” now agree about what you are aiming at.

Aiming at a color

Beside the gravity is the color you are aiming at, in whichever scale your workspace shows color in. Type one and we size the color malts to reach it: every crystal and roasted row scales together, so their ratio to each other survives, and the base and kilned malts give or take the difference. The percentages still add up to what they added up to before, and the rest of the bill holds still.

Crystal and roast carry less extract than base malt, so trading one for the other moves the gravity a little. If you have set a target OG we resize the total mass to hold it, and both numbers land where you asked. If you have not, the mass stays where it is and the gravity drifts the way it does whenever you drag a percentage.

There are two colors we will not aim at. A grist with no crystal or roasted malt in it has nothing to size, so we ask you to add one rather than pick a dark malt on your behalf. And we stop at half the grist: a color that would need more than that in color malt is a different beer, and a darker malt is the better answer than more of a pale one.

An unset color works like an unset gravity. Your style’s own figure sits in the box in gray and we aim there, so restyle the recipe and it moves with you. Clear the box to hand the question back to the style, which leaves your grist exactly as it is.

What the class does

Every row carries a class: base malt, crystal, roasted, sugar, extract and so on, from the catalog entry. The class decides which efficiency applies to it. Grain gets your equipment profile’s mash efficiency. Steeped grain gets a partial one. Sugar and extract get none, because they need no conversion and every gram is already sugar.

That is also why efficiency belongs to the equipment profile and not to the recipe. Changing rigs changes the numbers on every recipe you brew on that rig.

The row’s record

Open a row’s ⋯ menu and View specs shows the full catalog record: every published figure, whether the maltster published them or we entered class-typical values, and the maltster’s own page. The same record is on the ingredients page.

The row snapshots the catalog’s numbers when it is added. A later catalog update never moves an old recipe.

Overrides worth knowing

Two columns of the grist table are yours to set, and both start empty. An empty cell means we work the figure out for you, and the grayed number behind the cursor is the one we worked out. Clearing a cell hands the row back to us, which is not the same as typing that number in: a figure you type stays where you put it.

PPG is the yield we used for that row, from the malt’s extract and its moisture. Type over it if you have measured your own yield from a sack, and your figure wins for that row.

Fermentability is the share of the row’s extract the yeast takes. It reads yeast for malt, which follows whatever the pitch manages, and 100 for sugar, which ferments out. Set it to say that a particular sugar behaves differently: honey and candi sugar ferment out completely, malt does not. It changes the predicted final gravity without touching the original.

Both overrides belong to the row, and both go with the malt if you replace it, because a yield you measured from one sack says nothing about another.

On a narrow screen the two columns are in each row’s card rather than in the table.

Replacing a malt

Changed your mind about a malt rather than the amount of it? Open the row’s ⋯ menu and pick Replace with…. It is the same search you added from, but the pick lands on the row you opened it from. The amount, the note and the row’s place in the bill stay where they were, and only the malt changes. The color and the extract come from the new malt, and any yield override goes with the old one. If the new ingredient is a different kind of thing, a sugar where a malt was, the row’s use follows the new class.

Replacing is one change, so one undo puts the old malt back.

Mash pH

The grain bill is most of the mash pH. Every malt in the catalog carries either the maltster’s own titration figures or a class default, and the water panel reads them from the rows above it. Acidulated malt goes in this panel, not the water one, and its acid is read off the row.

Related

• Hops, Yeast and pitching, Misc.
• Water chemistry, for what the grist does to the mash pH.
• Profiles, where the efficiencies live.