good calibration beer for new brewery?

I'm not a pro, but I've known home brewers that went pro, and they found their efficiency went from like usual 70s to 90's on profesional.

So, what you don't want to do is try to make a light style like an anber or apa, because if you over shoot, you won't be in any discernable style and you'll need to blend.

So, if go straight for a Russian imperial stout, shoot for the low end on style recognizing that there isn't much of an upper limit.

(That's why half acre had a goofy beer called overale)

 

I wouldn't worry about utilization as much as your brewhouse efficiency on a new system...seems like an average ~1.060 beer would be the first order.

 

I think a big beer would be a bad choice simply because efficiency numbers get skewed at higher gravity anyway. A 1.050 blonde may work simply from a finished beer perspective. You could go saison, biere de garde, american blonde etc. Gravity doesn't matter so much with those styles.

 

A good calibration beer would be a style you are familiar with and like, and preferably something you have brewed on another system to your satisfaction. The best calibration beer also may depend on what aspect of the process you want to investigate. Moderate gravity, pale lagers, kolsch-style ales, and blonds are ideal for testing fermentation process because off flavors should be pretty noticeable in these beers. Higher gravity beers might be good for testing your efficiency at the limits of maximum mash volume/grist mass. Hoppy IPAs for testing utilization changes due to boil dynamics. There's no substitute for brewing often.

 

I've "started" at two breweries, meaning the system had never been used, or had never been used by me, and I'd suggest you're barking up the wrong tree. Relax and have a home-brew.

Unless you're doing a spiced beer everything should scale pretty well, and it's really the system that you have to focus on. I think an American wheat with or without fruit, a pale ale, or a porter/stout would be a good starter as there's some flexibility.

You should get a pretty good sense of what your utilization will be on your first brew unless there are issues (milling, hot liquor temp., etc.) - and there are always issues, but you should certainly have it roughly dialed in by the third or fourth brew. No one expects to knock it out of the park on the first swing; and if you're like most brewers I know it's always about improving.

The system itself is the most important thing though. Your mash tun should be wide enough to accommodate the grain for a smaller beer while still having a proper grain bed (depth), and your kettle should have enough heating power that it can reasonably get to a boil and maintain it. There's so much more, but I can only give you the basics here.

 

I vote for an APA. It's a pretty wide window to hit style-wise and it will give you info about your brewhouse efficiency, hop utilization, boil rate, etc. without creating anything you have to dump (assuming decent sanitation).

Scaling up is generally more efficient but equipment varies so much you really just have to brew to figure it out.

 

Hop utilization is the harder to get right on a new system than brewhouse efficiency is. With a properly designed mash/lauter tun, your dimensions should be specified for the gravity of beers you plan to brew, so that the grain bed thickness is proper for the beers you plan on brewing. If you go with a higher gravity beer than what your system is rated for, then a lot of brewers will decrease the volume they lauter, never going lower than the level of your jackets or elements. If the mash tun is properly designed, you crush to ASBC specs, and you lauter with good technique, than 87-93% efficiency is easy to achieve. If you are lower than expected, stop your lauter early and adjust. If you are higher, dilute a little bit pre-boil

For hop additions, it is system dependent. At my brewery when we opened about 6 months ago, I brewed 3 batches my first day. ESB, IPA, and a Blonde. The next brewday I brewed a DIPA, Pale Ale, and Scotch Ale. All of them turned out as expected, no surprises, but our system is spec'd exactly as we wanted it to be using a spreadsheet that I developed while in school. There is a huge difference in quality of brewhouse manufacturers, so it is really hard to say what your utilization will be like, but in general, a 60 minute bittering addition on a direct fire 10 BBL system will be around 37%. If you use a calandria, it might be more like 40%.

Again though, it is system and technique dependent... a 10 minute whirlpool with 25 minute rest will result in higher utilization than a 5 minute whirlpool and 15 minute rest for example.

Also worth noting, most brewhouse manufacturers will not be telling you how to brew on their system. It is on you to estimate trub loss, beer loss to yeast/dry hops, evaporation rate, shrinkage rate, etc. I saw a lot of systems this last week at CBC that were clearly not going to yield the size of batch that they claimed the brewhouse as being. I also see a lot of undersized fermenters in breweries for having good headspace. A lot of them have operating volumes that are the size that you expect to yield, plus 25-30% headspace. You won't yield a full volume out of that unless you overfill the fermenter and then you have a big mess to clean up every day of fermentation.

To answer your question, the best style to "calibrate" your system is the style that you plan to brew the most. Don't be surprised if the beer isn't exactly as you think it will be if you don't have experience with brewhouse design or an experienced brewer helping you out. If that happens, you'll need to be prepared to either dump the beer or determine even if it's not exactly as you imagined, if it is "good enough."

 

...which is why I would start with brewhouse efficiency on a new system

 

I think that is solid advice.

As a rule of thumb when I was contract brewing for new brewers, if they didn't have any of their home brew batches available for testing, I would take their 5 gallon recipe and scale it linearly to 15 BBL, then decrease the bittering addition by 15% and move all the flavoring additions 10 minutes later in the boil. So a 20 minute homebrew batch would use a 10 minute addition. The only time a brewer requested that I scale exactly linearly, they changed their mind after the first batch came out more bitter and less aromatic. Sometimes there were tweaks requested by other brewers after the first batch, but they were normally small tweaks and the first batches were deemed to be close enough to their intended outcome to sell.