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I have just put down my first extract brew and am crossing my fingers that it will taste allright.Bcause i was too lazy to buy a bigger pot to boil my hops in i tried to do it the cheap way by boiling my hops in 5 litres of plain water(no extract)for an hour,with my flavour addition at 20 minutes.I used 56 grams of goldings @5.1% and 28 grams of fuggles @4.5%.After putting these figures through my formula i got 50.4 IBU in 22 litres of brew.I didn't work out the weight of hops to put into my brew,instead i relied on the homebrew shop bloke to work it out for me,so ihope his mathematics were up to scratch.I later ran these figures through Q brew,which uses tinseth,and got 61 IBU.I got the same IBU's from the calculators in both promash and beersmith,using tinseth again,so iguess that must be the figure i am settling on for bitterness.Is this IBU too bitter for a pale ale or is this normal?My OG was 1046 if that makes any difference.

http://www.realbeer.com/hops/FAQ.html#balance

That's going to be WAY too bitter... That bitterness is what you'd have for a bitter IPA.

So let me get this straight:

56g Goldings, 5.1%AA @ 60 mins?
28g Fuggles, 4.5%AA @ 20 mins?
Boil gravity 1.000.
58.6 IBU.

Sounds like the guy just made crap up. 2oz for 60 mins and 1oz for 20? Hahaha.

holy shit! bitterer than a bitter machine!

I'm about to do a similar deal (by similar, I mean extract with grain using fuggles & goldings) on the weekend with I think an 1.054 boil with 24g of 5.9AA EK Goldings for 60min & 10gm of 5.1%AA Fuggles for 10min to get a ~19IBU with a full brew gravity of 1.038 (or there abouts with the rest of the malt & water to 20l)


Also, a quick grapical guide to the balance of gravity & IBU in the final wort (it's a bit more detailed than the short list in that article rwh posted, even though that article is way more detailed overall of course!)
http://www.brewsupplies.com/hops-gravity.htm

My last brew had an OG of 1.030 with an IBU of ~21, so it's quite hoppy but not over the top IMO, my drinking buddy thinks it's my best yet anyway.

Crazy idea - could you rack 1/2 off, add a 1.5kg tin of LME to each fermenter and top up to whatever water level, then pitch the same yeast into each again? would roughly give a 29IBU brew with an OG of about the 1.048 he started with, assuming it doesn't get infected screwing around with it of course.

I assume mark would want to salvage this?

Another option is to boil up 2kg LDME, cool, and add to the fermenter, either straight to primary, or racking onto it in secondary. This would increase the malt character to balance, and would turn this into a delicious IPA.

Do you get good hop utilisation in just plain water?

60 ish IBU should still be IPA range? If it's too bitter let it age for a while.

velophile wrote:Do you get good hop utilisation in just plain water?

The lower the gravity, the higher the utilisation. So yes.

60 ish IBU should still be IPA range? If it's too bitter let it age for a while.

60IBU would be fine for an IPA with an OG of 1.100 or so. Or you could age it for like 2 years or something.

velophile wrote:Do you get good hop utilisation in just plain water?

60 ish IBU should still be IPA range? If it's too bitter let it age for a while.

Someone on here has advised in the past that you should be adding some gravity to any hop boil due to the beta acids being released in normal water, which give a harsh flavour. Apprentely a couple of tablespoons LDME in the boil will help this. Your utilisation would still be fine and not alot different.

Yes, I was under the impression there should be malt present in a boil... but I didn't know what the reason was.

rwh wrote:Another option is to boil up 2kg LDME, cool, and add to the fermenter, either straight to primary, or racking onto it in secondary. This would increase the malt character to balance, and would turn this into a delicious IPA.

I've done similar to fix a brew with two cans of Coopers Bitter, worked out well.

Pale's right. Just throw in a bit of dry malt. I now keep dry malt in a plastic container in the cupboard and use around 50-100g in the boil.

This is seriously strange.I tasted a hydro sample of this brew and expected it to be BITTER,but it is instead just nice,if even a little too light on the bitterness.Every formula and calculator i used gave me 55 to 60 ibu,whereas it tastes more like 20 ibu,so either the hops plugs i bought were very old,or,the utilisation for a boil of 5 litres,even if it is just straight water,is terrible.I very vaguely remember reading something on a forum elsewhere ,where the larger the boil volume the better the extraction of hop acids,so am guessing this is the reason my brew wasn't overly bitter.I have finally bought myself a 15 litre brewpot from big w for 18 bucks,so i shouldn't have any more issues with my next extract brew,i hope!!!

Yeah, I'd be interested if anyone has a table with the boil volume vs. hop efficiency at a certain gravity.

I reckon that additional boil volume increasing efficiency was due to additional dilution of the malt extract, assuming that you've put it all into the boil.

So you're saying that only gravity affects hop efficiency and not boil volume? This would make sense to me but have heard otherwise on this forum.

mark_68 wrote:This is seriously strange.I tasted a hydro sample of this brew and expected it to be BITTER,but it is instead just nice,if even a little too light on the bitterness.

Um, stacks of sugars in the unfermented malt shift the balance now compared to what it will finish like hey

Taste again in a week & see if it's still like this, though yeah old hops would be lower in AA than fresh ones

mark_68 wrote:This is seriously strange.I tasted a hydro sample of this brew and expected it to be BITTER,but it is instead just nice,if even a little too light on the bitterness.Every formula and calculator i used gave me 55 to 60 ibu,whereas it tastes more like 20 ibu,so either the hops plugs i bought were very old,or,the utilisation for a boil of 5 litres,even if it is just straight water,is terrible.I very vaguely remember reading something on a forum elsewhere ,where the larger the boil volume the better the extraction of hop acids,so am guessing this is the reason my brew wasn't overly bitter.I have finally bought myself a 15 litre brewpot from big w for 18 bucks,so i shouldn't have any more issues with my next extract brew,i hope!!!

Just a matter of interest, Big W have 19 litre stainless pots for $1 more than you paid for the 15

The Big W 19L are good for partial boils, and are still big enough to be handy when you go to all grain.

Cheers,
Greg

very handy, i heat my mash and sparge water ( seperately) in 1 and it works great for me, highly recomend them

19l for that price? Damn i want one! i'm going to have to go and check it out! but i wish they had a 25-30l!

I tasted this stuff at bottling today and it was ,a flat beer.I twasn't too bitter,it was just nice and i was over the moon,because i expected disaster.Now i've got a bigger brew pot i can utilise beersmiths calculator to estimate IBU in my brews.This brew was done in two pots and the boil was only 5 litres ,so i would have gotten terrible utilisation i guess.