- What is this thing?
- Beer Calculus is a handy tool for homebrewers. It allows brewers to assemble beer recipes from scratch, or to plug in the ingredients of old recipes to play with the results. Beginning brewers can use it to build balanced recipes with little experience, and advanced brewers can use it to fine-tune their batches. My primary goal is to make it the most user-friendly brewer's calculator online, but I'd also like it to be useful at any level of experience. If you find anything lacking, .
- How are the calculations made?
- An enthusiastic brewer once inquired about doing a research paper on this site for his Calculus 2 class. But, despite the name, all the results are computed algebraically in the standard methods found in brewing books and online technical sites. I wrote the original calculator way back in the mid-90's when I was working at a homebrew shop, where I had free access to all the brewing books in print. I used the sources I preferred (e.g. Dave Miller) or, when multiple respectable sources differed, I found found a median between them. These days I'm sure every formula is online in multiple versions in multiple places. It is a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want to care about, looking something like this calculation (of degrees Plato, one of the variables required to estimate calorie count):
plato = (-463.37 + (668.72 * specific_gravity) - (205.35 * specific_gravity * specific_gravity))
- Can I add my own ingredients?
- If you don't find an ingredient listed, and request that it gets added.
- Why the hell would I 'correct hop extraction for boil gravity'?
- You are generally boiling your wort in concentrated form. For instance, for a 5 gallon batch, you might be boiling an average of 3 gallons of wort in your 5 gallon kettle. This concentrated, higher-gravity wort can be dense enough to limit the amount of alpha acids extracted during the boil. You can let the calculator reduce the expected IBUs to accommodate for this, or make the IBU calculations 'raw' to ignore wort density.
- What is 'mash efficiency'?
- The amount of sugar an all-grain brewer extracts during the mash depends on experience, the techniques employed, and the equipment. Advanced brewers may have calculated their own mashing and lautering efficiency in order to get more accurate results when designing a recipe. 80% can be considered an average efficiency, so that number is used as the default correction for mashed grains. Extract brewers don't have to worry about this, although it may have a small effect on O.G. when using steeped or partial-mashed grains.
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