Working out quantities for a smaller brew

[Lightman]

Hi,

I wanted to have a go at brewing an all grain smash beer and I need a little advice on working out the quantities of ingredients.

I am looking to make a really small batch. I’ve been brewing wine for a number of years now and so my fermenting gear is focused around 1 gallon/5 liter demijohns. Looking online for beer recipes, I notice that most are for 19 or 25 liter fermenting vessels.

Can I take any of these recipes and scale them down by dividing the amount of ingredients based in the amount of water used. So, for 10 liter brew, I’d divide all the ingredients by 2 to get a 5 liter brew. Can it be done this way, or is it not that simple?

Thanks.
L.

 

[obscure]

It really is that simple, just divide the quantity of grain by the batch size and multiply by your new volume.

Generally I round grain up to the nearest ten grams and hops to the nearest gram.

One thing to bare in mind as a new all grain home brewer your efficiency may not be the best (amount of sugars you extract from the grain basically) so you may want to consider bumping up your base malt by maybe 10% to compensate).

Finally if you haven’t already seen it may I suggest having a look through this thread it’s a good introduction to small batch brewing.

https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/threads/have-a-go-at-simple-ag.51779/

 

[AnimatedGIF]

The thread that @obscure has linked to got me in to AG. Really simple and a nice way to be able to experiment with different hops etc.

 

[Lightman]

Thank you for the advice. I followed the advice in the link you posted this last weekend, and now have my first gallon of AG beer fermenting away nicely. Yay! I used Maris Otter grain and Cascade hops, I slightly over pitched with generic home brew yeast. It's looking good so far...

Regards,
L.