BIAB legacy podcast

[PistolPatch]

Deary me! Lol!

If it's okay with you guys, I'd prefer this thread be focussed on the podcast which was about explaining things full-volume brewing has enabled us to learn. The single vessel, full-volume brewing method enables a real clarity of things that I think we are losing here in this thread.

[As for who invented BIAB, there is already this thread of 104 posts. This post and the two afterwards are the critical reads, I think. In that thread we already determined that the significance of BIAB was it's full-volume/hidden sparge mashing method and S.E. you agreed there so I'm a little surprised at some of the posts above. That thread though is the best one for whoever wants to spend time on that subject.]

I think the main goal of a thread like this should be to transmit the information in the podcast. Here's an excerpt of an email that James Spencer received after the podcast, "Just listened to the Podcast with the Canook and the Aussie. Best episode ever. I laughed, I learned, I smiled, and I learned again."

The podcast is really all about discovering new paradigms and identifying some large elephants in the room. There are many of them but I'll name just three here.

1. Most published recipes on the internet are meaningless. See here .

2. Commonly used terminology amongst homebrewers has also become meaningless. 'Batch Size', 'Efficiency' etc now mean nothing. See here.

3. 'Kettle Efficiency' and it's extremely poor cousin, "Fermentor Efficiency" (which most software is based on) is a variable. So, when anyone says, "I always get x% efficiency", it's a good sign that more education is needed and it is an education that is sorely lacking. The main reason is because brewing software to date has been built from the wrong premise - it leads you to believe that efficiency (kettle or fermentor) and trub losses are a constant.

...

I asked stux a few years ago to investigate how kettle efficiency (forget ambiguous terms like 'brewhouse', 'mash' or 'whatever' efficiency as they mean nothing now) varied depending on certain factors. He would have spent a hundred hours (probably many-fold more) exploring that and I would have spent the same again, thinking on and simplifying the formula.

Finding the elephants and creating solutions are most important Aussie inventions/discoveries that did take thousands of hours. (There's many Aussies that helped - chiller is yet another example.) Having software intelligently work out your kettle efficiency, evaporation, fermentor efficiency, kettle to fermentor loss and fermentor to packaging loss is revolutionary - no other software can do anything the BIABacus can do and it can work for extract and three vessel brewers as well.

I'll need another week or two to get the BIABacus out as an official release. It can be easily laughed at as it is only a spreadsheet (free of charge, mind you). But it is a game-changer.

I'm just hoping that AHB's most respected posters will take some time to pass on the 3 rogue elephants we have outlined above and the ones here as well as the 90 minute mash thing.

In other words, I hope this thread becomes more about passing on high quality information and education. I'll certainly spend time answering those questions if people have listened to the podcast.

I better go!
PP

P.S. Crusty - good on you. A very old PM is probably is still in your other box. Bribie, your post on the 90 minute thing was excellent! I'll email you re that because open-mindedness like that is just brilliant :super: .

 

[geneabovill]

All the 'loss' factors interest me. IDGAF about my my efficiency in the sense of needing to know the exact numbers.

Mostly what I want to know is: am I going to hit my predicted/intended SG, with enough wort to produce my predicted/intended amount of beer. This roughly translates to 'I hope I'm not wasting my time on a batch that's too small'.

Other than that I love my beer, and I brew on a 40L Birko.

Thanks a ton to ALL the BIAB pioneers, and brewers in general who've made the mistakes for me and had enough nous to write about it on the Internet.

 

[S.E]

Deary me! Lol!

If it's okay with you guys, I'd prefer this thread be focussed on the podcast which was about explaining things full-volume brewing has enabled us to learn. The single vessel, full-volume brewing method enables a real clarity of things that I think we are losing here in this thread.

[As for who invented BIAB, there is already this thread of 104 posts. This post and the two afterwards are the critical reads, I think. In that thread we already determined that the significance of BIAB was it's full-volume/hidden sparge mashing method and S.E. you agreed there so I'm a little surprised at some of the posts above. That thread though is the best one for whoever wants to spend time on that subject.]

I think the main goal of a thread like this should be to transmit the information in the podcast. Here's an excerpt of an email that James Spencer received after the podcast, "Just listened to the Podcast with the Canook and the Aussie. Best episode ever. I laughed, I learned, I smiled, and I learned again."

The podcast is really all about discovering new paradigms and identifying some large elephants in the room. There are many of them but I'll name just three here.

1. Most published recipes on the internet are meaningless. See here .

2. Commonly used terminology amongst homebrewers has also become meaningless. 'Batch Size', 'Efficiency' etc now mean nothing. See here.

3. 'Kettle Efficiency' and it's extremely poor cousin, "Fermentor Efficiency" (which most software is based on) is a variable. So, when anyone says, "I always get x% efficiency", it's a good sign that more education is needed and it is an education that is sorely lacking. The main reason is because brewing software to date has been built from the wrong premise - it leads you to believe that efficiency (kettle or fermentor) and trub losses are a constant.

...

I asked stux a few years ago to investigate how kettle efficiency (forget ambiguous terms like 'brewhouse', 'mash' or 'whatever' efficiency as they mean nothing now) varied depending on certain factors. He would have spent a hundred hours (probably many-fold more) exploring that and I would have spent the same again, thinking on and simplifying the formula.

Finding the elephants and creating solutions are most important Aussie inventions/discoveries that did take thousands of hours. (There's many Aussies that helped - chiller is yet another example.) Having software intelligently work out your kettle efficiency, evaporation, fermentor efficiency, kettle to fermentor loss and fermentor to packaging loss is revolutionary - no other software can do anything the BIABacus can do and it can work for extract and three vessel brewers as well.

I'll need another week or two to get the BIABacus out as an official release. It can be easily laughed at as it is only a spreadsheet (free of charge, mind you). But it is a game-changer.

I'm just hoping that AHB's most respected posters will take some time to pass on the 3 rogue elephants we have outlined above and the ones here as well as the 90 minute mash thing.

In other words, I hope this thread becomes more about passing on high quality information and education. I'll certainly spend time answering those questions if people have listened to the podcast.

I better go!
PP

P.S. Crusty - good on you. A very old PM is probably is still in your other box. Bribie, your post on the 90 minute thing was excellent! I'll email you re that because open-mindedness like that is just brilliant :super: .

Hi Pat

Apologies again, as I said don’t mean to upset anyone. I do seem to ruffle feathers whenever I mention anything I saw when I lived in The UK and Ireland.
As an enthusiast I thought you would be interested in the fact both brewing in a bag and full volume mash had actually been in use long before you guys thought of it.

As I said in my post that you linked above I always sparged, however after writing that post I was discussing brewing with my Uncle and he told me he did not sparge, just mashed full volume in his kettle.

I wasn’t trying to diminish the fact that you cleverly worked out the idea without any outside reference and shared your findings here on AHB.
If you prefer to be known as the inventor of the method that’s fine by me. I’m happy for the mods to edit my posts and take out any reference to the methods being in use pre AHB.

Hence forth it will be known that though home brewing was invented by the American pioneer John Palmer who also developed the 3v system and copper manifold, it was on AHB that the brewing process was simplified and improved with the advent of BIAB here in Australia.
We will concede that the Poms made an alcoholic beverage using a grain bag but they only used the bag to tip the spent grain down the toilet and the resulting beverage was a sad travesty of a beer served warm and un-carbonated.

No need to ever mention the Irish and their full volume Poteen mash, everyone knows they are a bunch of clueless drunks and probably didn’t know what they were doing anyway.

So without any further ado we will return to the subject of the pod cast. Thanks for sharing that with us Pat great stuff.

Cheers Sean

 

[PistolPatch]

Ruckus, I'll come to you in a minute but I really want to knock this full-volume / who invented BIAB thing on the head. It's not important but I don't like credit being taken away from the many people on this site who made it mainstream. We spent many posts and many hours doing this. If full-volume mashing had been mainstream before, then I think that any one of the many members of this site who are English and Irish would have jumped in and helped us along from day one and said, "Why are you even exploring this? We have been doing it for years!" I've never said that it had never been done before but a couple of people doing it does not mean that it was a mainstream method, published and oft-used previously.

If you want to continue this conversation Sean, please quote the above and my prior post and post it in the other thread. I hope that is fair. (I'll reply in that thread if you do so but I won't do it here anymore.) I think the stuff below is far more interesting and helpful. Do you know it?

Ruckus, I think when I posted above I was drunk but I did talk about elephants so let's go hunting ...

There's three 'sugar' losses you will get in a brew. The first one is in your mashing, sparging, lautering. In other words, how much available sugar you leave behind in your grist. Commercial software leads people to believe that efficiency (whether it be kettle or fermentor efficiency) will be the same whether you are brewing a beer with an OG of 1.040 or 1.070. This is not correct at all. If you give me a really dirty pair of jeans, obviously I will need more water to get them clean than a pair of jeans you only wore for a day. High gravity worts are dirtier than low gravity worts. If you use the same amount of water on both of them, the high gravity wort 'jeans' will come out of that wash a lot dirtier (less efficient) than the low gravity wort jeans.

Make sense?

As far as we currently know, no sugars are lost during the boil so if you were able to read your volume and gravity at both the beginning and end of the boil accurately (which you can't), theoretically, if you multiplied the volume by the gravity points (eg 1.040 G = 40 gravity points) before and after the boil, they should equal. In reality, measuring is hard and inaccurate at a home brew level but you get the idea.

The second "sugar" loss is when you transfer from the kettle to the fermentor. In other words, the volume you lose between kettle and fermentor is literally sugar down the drain. But, it is not best practice to drag all that debris etc into your fermentor so we make a compromise at this point. We leave some sugar and junk behind to help us get a clearer brew.

The third sugar loss is when we package. The yeast cake that will have settled on the bottom of your fermentor is not something you want to package! So once again we sacrifice some more volume (and theoretically sugar) from the batch.

If we add hops into the above equation (which I'm doing in BIABacus 1.0) you can obviously see that a really hoppy brew will lead to higher 'Kettle to Fermentor Loss -KFL' and a beer with dry hopping will lead to larger 'Fermentor to Packaging Loss (FOPL) than one with no dry hops.

Make sense?

In existing programs, they all expect you to get the same kettle efficiency, the same KFL and the same FPL. If you question them on this the answer will be, "Just set up a different profile for each recipe you do." That's the mother of all elephants. Basically, the software is asking you to do all the difficult estimates (kettle efficiency, KFL and FPL) before you even type in a brew. It's pretty silly and it took me years to realise just how silly it was.

The BIABacus does a lot of exciting stuff. For example it works out kettle efficiency automatically. It works out how clean you will get your jeans based on how dirty they are and how much water you are using to clean them. It also auto-estimates your KFL and FPL (and in the final release, the hop bill has been accounted for.)

...

There are a lot of silly spreadsheets, programs, recipes about. You can imagine how frustrated I get when I see that this site or BIABrewer.info don't even appear on the first page of Google when you type in "BIAB Calculator" (I'm pretty sure I started "The Calculator" here on AHB). All the results you get now are nothing short of atrocious. None of them even approach the complexity of the original, extremely basic, "The Calculator" which did, at least address the basic interrelationships of volume, grain bill, OG and IBU's.

I think that is enough for now ,
PP

 

[mje1980]

10 year 3v masher here looking to try out BIAB soon. My brewing space isn't that big and watching BIAB in action not long ago a light bulb went off. Hope to get one going in the next few weeks. Will be checking out biabbrewer

 

[Liam_snorkel]

Hey Pat, FTR I found "the calculator" extremely useful when starting BIAB. I've used the efficiency tab to keep track of the last 40 or so brews also and plotted my kettle efficiency vs L:G... there is a definite trend downwards as the L:G ratio decreases but there is still a fair spread (R^2 value of 43% obviously I'm inconsistent with my measurements!). So does the BIABacus calculate/estimate the kettle efficiency automatically, or is there still some level of input from the brewer? I'm looking forward to checking it properly (I've had a quick squiz) because it sounds like something I would like to use.

 

[geneabovill]

Made perfect sense.. And I do like knowing stuff like that.

Mostly I understand the losses, and how to compensate for them. I don't use software as such, only to record recipes.

MHB has recipe formulation software on his website with a built in ordering system that I find does the trick for me.

My current calculations to compensate go like this: how much do I want to package? 23L (19L for the keg and a few longnecks for sharing). Potential mash gravity, boil off rate (on average) - kettle loss = intended gravity. Then trub loss in fermenter = 23L of my intended beer.

Sorry - hungover math is hard.

 

[Damn]

Thank you Ruckus for starting this topic.

What an excellent, entertaining, educating Podcast. As I'm a numbers man I've been very frustrated with my current software and taken it for granted their calculations are spot on. Well, what on a eye opener. I've read it before here and there that brewhouse efficiency is a variable, not a constant but maybe trusted my software too much as I'm only in my 2nd year of brewing. I don't want to totally can the software I use but are now having a good hard look at the BIABacus because as it seems to keep it simple enough. In one hand I'm disappointed that my equipment can't have a constant brewhouse eff from recipe to recipe to make my results predictable but now understand why not. On the other hand I'm pleased and relieved with my awakening of this fact. I really appreciate PP's analogy of the Dirty Jeans and that is sinking in now.

I think its a good listen for any homebrewer not just BIABers. Pat's contribution to homebrewing and BIAB is colossal and this in just another gem (not to take anything away from the other 2 gents on the podcast).

 

[Bribie G]

I use BrewMate and I've long known that my efficiency varies from brew to brew depending on the gravity. It came to my attention when I bought a refractometer and noticed that my OGs were often a few points off what BM predicted. So according to the OG as reported at ambient temperature by the refractometer I would bring up the recipe in BM and click up or down the efficiency spin box until the OG in BM agreed with the actual OG reported by the refractometer.

It fairly quickly became obvious that my efficiency with stronger beers was lower than that of weaker ones. Aha, you say, shows that you should be sparging and should have built a proper 3 vessel system to start off with.

Indeed sparging of big grain bills does work to an extent, but with any system, be it 3 Vessel or 2 Vessel or 1 Vessel you will still end up washing extra sugars out if the mash but, because you have used extra water, end up with a weaker wort if you oversparge in your desire to improve efficiency for that particular batch.

Then you have to boil for a much longer time to get the wort back to the high gravity that was the whole point of doing the brew in the first place, and probably changing the nature of the wort compared to a shorter boil.... sounds like herding cats to me. (I've done it myself with a RIS and ended up with a 12 hour brew day that included a three hour boil.)

So it's going to be brilliant to have software that tells you what your efficiency is likely to be before you brew, rather than having to do a post mortem with the refrac after the brew.

 

[geneabovill]

Damn: I didn't start the topic, just commented on it. But I understand your need to have tangible numbers to play with.

Bribie: Efficiency calculations never take into consideration the time used/wasted on correcting for this sort of error, which is why I've done away with worrying about numbers. My first couple batches I was sooooo stressed about hitting numbers that I spent a lot of time and effort correcting them as best I could and found that my brew day became a stressful and massively time consuming process. Which, in turn makes for a very inefficient process.

 

[S.E]

Ruckus, I'll come to you in a minute but I really want to knock this full-volume / who invented BIAB thing on the head. It's not important but I don't like credit being taken away from the many people on this site who made it mainstream. We spent many posts and many hours doing this. If full-volume mashing had been mainstream before, then I think that any one of the many members of this site who are English and Irish would have jumped in and helped us along from day one and said, "Why are you even exploring this? We have been doing it for years!" I've never said that it had never been done before but a couple of people doing it does not mean that it was a mainstream method, published and oft-used previously.

If you want to continue this conversation Sean, please quote the above and my prior post and post it in the other thread. I hope that is fair. (I'll reply in that thread if you do so but I won't do it here anymore.) I think the stuff below is far more interesting and helpful. Do you know it?

Hi Pat
I don’t think [SIZE=12pt]full-volume mashing[/SIZE] would have been or indeed is considered mainstream as such in home brewing, not when brewing in small quantities anyway as it’s so easy to give the grain a quick rinse.

Poteen distilling was (and still is without a licence) illegal in Ireland. It was/is produced in large quantities for sale illegally with often very simple crude and easy to hide/disguise equipment so eliminating any sparging or rinsing would just be easier and practical.

Home brewing beer in the UK was only legal after 1963 so there were no publications on the methods used prior to that I am aware of. Methods were passed on word of mouth.

I can’t explain why no one mentioned full volume mashing and brewing in a bag had been done before, or that grain bags were readily and cheaply available already.

It surprises me to hear that Bribie G had been doing BIAB in the UK before you thought of it but didn’t mention the fact. Perhaps he is just smarter than me and knew when to stay quiet.

I saw your BIAB threads pop up now and again when I first joined AHB but didn’t read them as I was no longer really interested in brewing in a bag. I didn’t realise you were reinventing it. The “who invented BIAB” thread caught my eye one day but when I contributed what little info I knew about the origins it just upset everyone.

No need to continue this conversation in the “who invented BIAB thread”. If you wish you can update that thread however you see fit. It’s not really important to me who invented it, I was just sharing the info I knew and I have already said everything I know on the subject. (well apart from the owner of a guest house in Sappa North Vietnam I was staying at gave me rice wine and showed me his brewing equipment that included a muslin bag)

I’m happy to go with BIAB was invented by you and developed on AHB if everyone is happier with that.

Cheers Sean

 

[S.E]

10 year 3v masher here looking to try out BIAB soon. My brewing space isn't that big and watching BIAB in action not long ago a light bulb went off. Hope to get one going in the next few weeks. Will be checking out biabbrewer

Mark. I still have my Electrim bin and bag if you want to try out BIAB?

Cheers Sean

 

[Liam_snorkel]

-

 

[GrumpyPaul]

Dont know what you said before you edited Liam.....but i like it anyway.

(makes much mores sense than your current status)

 

[Liam_snorkel]

Dont know what you said before you edited Liam.....but i like it anyway.

(makes much mores sense than your current status)

I expressed relief that Sean had finished banging on about UK plastic brew bins, but spoke too soon. :icon_offtopic:

I've had a quick play with the pre-release BIABacus and plugged in values for OGs from 1.001 to 1.110, plotted the required L:G and expected kettle efficiency that it calculates.. so, whatever the equation for this curve is, is their formula:

 

[PistolPatch]

I'm short on time for the next few days but am making good progress on getting the BIABacus help written so you should have access to a proper release within a couple of weeks. I'll run through some of the questions asked above but accept my apologies if it takes a few days to reply to further questions.

Liam-snorkel - Great post. The BIABacus is totally flexible. All the things it estimates can be over-ridden. Auto estimates include, liquor retained by grain, kettle efficiency, evaporation, kettle to fermentor loss, fermentor efficiency and fermento to packaging loss. The auto-estimates are designed so that a brewer with very little knowledge can get under way safely. It also allows us to see if they are dong anything majorly wrong. The auto-estimates work very well and usually the brewer will get a little bit more beer than expected which is the safest approach when starting out.

One main priority of thee BIABAcus was to make it an educational tool that you could use straight away but also be able to learn at your own rate as fast or slow as you liked and finally do some very advanced stuff if you wanted to.

(Before a final release, it's not critical, but I want to make the auto-efficiency work more on a logarithmic curve than the linear one we currently have. Anyone know how to write logarithmic equations in Excel :blink:. As foryou r spread, that is totally normal. More below on that.)

Damn - Glad some of the stuff rang a bell. The kettle efficiency (and fermentor efficiency) being a variable is a worry when you are using a program that fixes it and works on fermentor efficiency. I initially tried showing brewers how to work out how to deal with these limitations but it took hours to answer a single question. I then asked and hoped to see some other software move their base to a kettle efficiency system rather than a fermentor efficiency. That would have been much easier to educate around. I certainly didn't want / never intended to spend hours on this project. C'est la vie. Anyway, it's done now.

One more thing re your comment. One of the things that we hope giving brewers good numbers to handle is that they can paradoxically learn to disrespect them. In other words, they see that evaporation changes from day to day. They'll find themselves taking two consecutive gravity readings that don't exactly match etc. Even the big commercial breweries have to adjust their batches dur to variations such as grain specs or hop specs. We have a lot less control that they do so I think we need to be comfortable in hopefully getting within say plus or minus 5% of our goals on any one brew. I other words our average will be spot on but onl any one brew we realise that they do vary.

Ruckus - Hangover maths. Lol! I think the above relates to what you are saying. Knowing which numbers to respect and which to give little attention to is the balance we are hoping that brewers will get quickly.

Bribie - Nice post on explaining why very high gravity boils need longer boil times. Sometimes these need to be 180 mins.

Main problem with the BIABacus is that most information is on the first sheet. This is scary at first look but in the end really works to one's advantage as there is a simple logic to the lay-out and you can see all the interactions that occur when you make a change in one area. Hopefully we'll code the thing later to reduce the scary bit. Also, I think the help will make things less scary as well.

Thanks again for the interesting comments and questions.


Pat

 

[manticle]

Actually I just re-read the guideline and it makes no such distinction. Just says advertising and hyperlinking other brewing forums The discussion between moderators was in regards to signatures. I'll get clarification but based on the discussions admin and mods had at the time, I'm fairly certain it is intended to refer to signatures and any kind of aggressive 'recruiting' (along the lines of 'AHB sucks, join here instead').

OT again but the rule above (no.17) has now been adjusted. While blatant promotion/advertising of other forums and links in signatures are against guidelines, linking to legitimate pertinent discussions are not.
Hopefully that clears up any confusion.

 

[unionrdr]

I've been doing PB/PM BIAB (Partial Boil,Partial Mash Brew In A Bag) for over a year now myself. It's been popular as discussed on homebrewtalk.com for a couple years or so now. Simple & effective method of brewing. The only thing I had to add to my current extract brewing set up was a 5 gallon nylon paint strainer bag to mash the grains in. And since we had a nested set of stainless steel stock pots,I used a smaller one to dunk sparge the grain bag in with 1.5 gallons of local spring water @ 170F (76.67C). Add the sparge liquid to the main steep liquid of 2 gallons (7.57L) to get 3.5 gallon (13.25L) boil volume in my 5 gallon (18.93L) SS boil kettle. By the way,I mash 5-6 pounds of grains in that 2 gallons of water. I then add a 3lb (1.362Kg) plain DME at flame out to get my OG. I've even used Cooper's cans for this with great success. But usually Munton's plain DME's.

 

[stux]

Many thanks for the great feedback above. Really appreciate you taking the time to post how you found the podcast and/or BIAB generally. Hope you found Bob funny. He's a crack-up. Every time he writes something, I'm laughing for the rest of the day .

manticle, thanks for taking the time to investigate the above. Also much appreciated.

S.E. I think what was original about BIAB was not so much the bag but more the fact that it was a full-volume, single vessel method. I'm sure many people would have done full-volume mashing in a bag before but I'm pretty sure it was not really out in the public arena at all. Any popular method in the public arena, including the braumeisters, always involved an active sparge. So I think the hidden sparge / full volume / single vessel bit is the real key. Correct me please though if I have this wrong. If we could re-name it, maybe we would call it full-volume mashing, hidden sparge, single vessel all-grain method - lol!

bundy - that's a really accurate quote mate .

One more thing to pass on is that BIAB is best done with a 90 minute mash as we are mashing and sparging at the same time. This extra 30 minutes can make a real difference especially on certain grain bills.

Once again, thanks for your gracious posts :icon_cheers:.
Pat

Pat,

If you called it that, I guarantee it would never have taken off. I'm sure half the success is because of the catchy name

 

[stux]

There are a lot of silly spreadsheets, programs, recipes about. You can imagine how frustrated I get when I see that this site or BIABrewer.info don't even appear on the first page of Google when you type in "BIAB Calculator" (I'm pretty sure I started "The Calculator" here on AHB). All the results you get now are nothing short of atrocious. None of them even approach the complexity of the original, extremely basic, "The Calculator" which did, at least address the basic interrelationships of volume, grain bill, OG and IBU's.

I think that is enough for now ,
PP

I suspect if the BIABacus was available for direct download and labelled "The BIAB Calculator" the google ranking would improve