Beer Forum

I have 2 5 gallon Better Bottles that I want to use for smaller batches ( since we don't do secondary fermentation anymore, I don't want them to go to waste ). I was wondering if I could scale the 5 gallon recipes down to 3 - 3.5 gallons using Promash by locking the ingredients or is something lost in the translation.

Thanks.

Yes you can. I don't have Promash on my work computer, but I remember a lock ingretients feature. Then you can just scale the batch size down to 3 or 3.5 gallons. Or, you can just multiply your ingredient list by 0.7 to transfer from a 5 gallon to a 3.5 gallon batch.

I did the same thing using Beer Tools. I created a 5 gallon recipe and then had the program recalculate for smaller batches.... 2.5 gallon

Turned out fine, except I screwed up the bottle conditioning. They were all flat.

JC

July/August issue of BYO 2007, listed how you change your recipe size. You simply take the amount listed like 9 oz x 3 gallon batch size and then divide by 5 gallons of original recipe. Basically you reads 9x3/5= 5.4 oz. You do that to all your ingredients and that will shrink your recipe accordingly. It's pretty easy. I did a oatmeal stout and it came out just like when I made 5 gallons. Hope this helps!
Cheers!

A friend of mine only uses 5 gallon carboys and he just uses a blow off tube. Seems to work for him, so that could be an option that would keep those puppies in use. Or you could make a five gallon batch and just split them into those two bottles. And you could experiment with yeast!