I want to take a five gallon recipe and make it into a 1 gallon recipe to see if I like it. Is there away to figure that out? I am terrible at math, so any help will be appreciated.
Yup, divide all your ingredients by 5. Or, make the recipe as-is, and pour out 4 gallons. :mrgreen:
Just divide all the ingredients by 5 like porky says. However, there’s one extra thing to keep in mind:
If boiling the batch for a full hour, add an extra gallon of distilled water to account for evaporation, as you’ll most likely concentrate the wort by about that much during the hour-long boil, assuming a good vigorous boil. Otherwise if you start with a gallon and boil for an hour, you’ll just end up with a pint of sticky caramel at the end which is no good. On the other hand, if you’re only boiling for like 10-20 minutes and not a full hour, then just add an extra quart of water to your gallon and everything will be just fine. Depends on your recipe.
Ok, thanks guys. I was way over thinking it. Thought there was a long drawn out mathematical problem involved. Lol.
Yup just divide everything by 5. Get a little kitchen scale too so you can weigh out the small quantities of hops.
For a 60min boil I start out with about 1.50 gallons, and I’ve calculated out about 15% loss per hour for evaporation for a nice rolling boil, minus about 0.1gallon for trub loss, and about 0.1 for equipment loss, equals about 1 gallon going into primary. You can do it in a 2-gallon kettle but you have to watch it carefully for boil-over.
