Recreating a beer on a different system

[honkey]

A few months ago, I brewed a Double IPA on a one barrel pilot system. I did not do any type of whirlpool or rest after the boil. I transferred immediately through a wort chiller and it only took about two minutes to get the full barrel down to pitching temp. Now we want to brew a 30 bbl batch of the same beer. With our 15 bbl boil kettle, we take 10 minutes to run a whirlpool and 25 minutes to let it all settle. Any ideas on the best way to adjust our hop times accordingly? The one barrel batch had 60 minute, 20 minute, 10 minute, and flameout additions. This is a heavily hopped DIPA with a little over 6 lbs of hops per barrel. It is not supposed to be very bitter, but it has a huge hop flavor.

[jmf143]

I'm curious to hear the answer to this. From what I gather, the whirlpooling will still be exracting bitterness as the temp will not have fallen much. I suppose the rest will extract bitternes as well, but not to the same extent as by then some more temp will have been lost.

Perhaps pushing back the 20 minute and less additions by 10 minutes to account for the whirlpooling is the answer?

[ColdFusion]

If you have data on how your pilot system and scale system differ in utilization then you should be able make a decent guess with your brewing software. If you don't have this information, it'll be much more difficult to make appropriate changes. My guess is that a hopback (possibly with a 2 min dwell time) is going to be a necessity to get the same flavour.

A side note about pilot systems but please don't take this as being overcritical. A real pilot system is one that only differs from the scale version insomuch as the actual size/rates. Everything else should be exactly the same. Having something different requires multivariable changes to the process which will are difficult to nail on scale up. Not terribly important if the beer doesn't need to be exactly the same. It just means you shouldn't fret too much tweaking a batch on your pilot.

[Trickster]

First off I wouldn't worry about it too much because its a double IPA and that final addition doesn't extract any bitterness. You only begin to get bitterness sometime after 30 minutes of vigorous boiling. At that point in the boil the only real thing extracted from the hop is the aroma. You can reduce your flameout addition because you really essientially didn't get anything from it when you did it on your pilot system. It looks like you will have around 90% more contact time with the finishing hops on the 30 barrel system so I would say somewhere between a 95% and 75% reduction in the finishing hop would be alright. I would lean more towards the 75% reduction in the finishing hop because the more hop in this style never hurts anything.

I also agree with Cold Fusion, you should not fret over this beer not being exactly the same because it was not brewed the same way on the pilot system. The same contact time, whirlpool, everything needs to be the same for a close match on pilot batch to real batch. The way you could do it is when you pilot, whirl pool and let it rest a little longer than the larger batch (knowing we can knock it out quicker) and start 5 minutes (or 3 minutes depending on your small knock out time) before the end of the larger knock out. If the beer was good on a pilot scale it up and see what happens, it should at the very least be drinkable.

Cheers