Hot answers tagged bitterness
12
Boiling is a fairly poorly understood process. That being said here is what I know.
Partial-wort Boil
Ups
You probably already have all the necessary equipment
Small footprint
Easy to manage
You can use your kettle for other things
Downs
Hop utilization suffers, meaning you must use more hops to get the same level of bitterness
There is a limit to ...
11
Hop bursting is a technique where all hops are added late, with 30 minutes or less left in the boil.
Hops contain lots of oils that impart aroma and taste into the final beer. However, when added early in the boil, most of these volatile oils boil off. Thus the oils from bittering hops added early in the boil tend to boil off and the hops only contribute to ...
11
That quote you posted is a mess. I don't even know what they're trying to say there.
Yes, dry hopping will add bitterness, but not in the usual sense (which is iso-alpha acids). Dry hopping is done cold, so there is essentially no isomerization of alpha acids going on, which is what normally happens in the kettle boil. The bitterness that comes from dry ...
9
Paraphrasing from Fundamentals of Beer and Hop Chemistry (text below), 2/3 of the hop bitterness in wort has a half-life in excess of 5 years, and the remaining 1/3 as a half-life of 1 year. From that, I've made a table showing the amount remaining over time. The total column shows the percentage of bitterness compared to the total at the start:
months ...
8
Put in the volume of the water you're boiling. Hopville knows how to handle partial boils.
As for your second question, I think that's still up for debate. Beer bitterness and hop utilization is not fully understood. The original theory was that the high concentration of sugar in a partial boil (or any high-gravity boil) would prevent the alpha acids from ...
7
This answers your question. Your beer is young and very green. It needs time to age. Don't despair. Give it time, both to carbonate in the bottle and age a bit after that.
Many home brewers are too quick to judge in the primary, secondary, or bottle bucket. Excellent beer takes time. I've had beers that are TERRIBLE in the bottle bucket and AWESOME ...
7
I vote for ageing, 45 IBUs isn't that bitter, and the bitterness will round out over time. It's more important that you nail down if this is how it should have turned out, or if there was a process problem, so you can avoid doing the same again in future.
Are you accustomed to drinking IPAs? I remember my first which was around 45 IBUs, and thought it was ...
6
Your process sounds fine - it's the way you're using the hydrometer that's the problem.
To estimate alcohol content, you need to take a reading at the start of fermentation. You cannot read the alcohol content from the hydrometer alcohol scale at the end of fermentation.
The hydrometer cannot measure the alcohol content directly, but it can estimate how ...
6
Are you talking about not adding any hops at the beginning of the boil and relying on only late addition hops for bitterness? This is a technique I have read about and tasted a few examples and the results were pretty good. This works well in moderately bitter beers where you want a lot of hop flavor and aroma.
Basically you eliminate the 60 minute ...
6
This is a nice technical question involving some organic chemistry I do not comprehend. I'll begin with what I do know about bittering contributions from alpha acid and beta acids.
These acids are components of the hop cone and contribute to bitterness in slightly different ways. The more familiar one is probably alpha acid since most hop bags are labeled ...
5
First wort hopping is the practice of adding hops to kettle when you take first runnings from the mash tun. As the kettle fills you heat the wort to boiling. The "boil hops" are in the kettle before the boil begins and steep in the warm wort.
The best way to carry this over to extract brewing would be to add your first hops to the kettle when the wort ...
4
No matter when you add hops, you'll get some bitterness. That amount will decrease the later in the boil you add them. As Chris noted, you can add larger amounts of hops later in the boil (usually at 20 min. or less) to get bittering levels equivalent to the traditional 60 min. bittering addition, but the character of the bitterness will be different.
4
The hop bitterness will decrease somewhat as the beer ages and will also smooth out to a degree. The dryer the beer is the more the bitterness is going to come through because there isn't much sweetness to balance the bitterness. There isn't much you can do with the beer at this point other than possibly blending it with a less hoppy or sweeter beer before ...
3
Yes, hops contain two major organic acids generally refereed to as alpha acids and beta acids. When hops are added to boiling wort about 40% of the alpha acids undergo a thermal isomerization to form isoalpha acids. Iso-alpha acids are the actual bitter compound found in beer. When people talk about IBU they are talking about the concentration of isoalpha ...
3
From the website:
alcohol content 7.2% by volume
beginning gravity 17.3 Plato (~1.070 SG)
ending gravity 4.2 Plato (~1.017 SG)
bitterness units 65
malts Two-row Pale, & Crystal
yeast Ale Yeast
bittering hops Magnum
finishing hops Magnum & Crystal
dry hopping Magnum, Crystal & Citra
The values for gravity and IBU are measured in their lab, not ...
3
One technique with the hop tea would be to maybe hop burst it. Where you boil say 4 oz for just 10 minutes. There will be some complete conversion to bittered iso-acids, just not much in 10 minutes. Hence the use of 4 oz and the term bursting. The downside to this is that you are also going to bring along ALOT of hop aroma and flavor. Which might be ...
3
Hops add bittering via isomerization. When you add the hops to the boil, the alpha acids are extracted, and eventually isomerize and provide bitter flavors. This happens with or without sugars. Ray Daniels's book Designing Great Beers has lots of useful formulae and equations, including how to calculate IBU. Basically it looks like this:
IBU = Woz * U% ...
2
A friend of mine said he had cold brewed coffee using a french press. This makes it less bitter and you still get a lot of the good coffee flavors [http://www.thenourishinggourmet.com/2012/05/how-to-cold-brew-coffee.html]. Still will have to adjust the overall amount you add though and keep the balance with the hops. His beer he made this way turned out ...
2
As an alternative to drinking it, you could cook with it and use it in marinades. In this arena you can take advantage of the concentrated flavors and bitterness. Obvious examples would be beer brats, beer cheese soup, beer cheese dip, beer bread etc.
Over the time it would take you to cook with 5 gallons of beer, it would still offer you the chance to see ...
2
I've recently done the experiment. Zero boil hops, but dry-hopped with 6 ounces of high alpha acid hops (Summit, Simcoe and Apollo). This brew is quite bitter, whatever the reason, and it is of the same "kind" of bitterness one would expect from hopping in the boil and not particularly astringent.
1
Adding to MDMA's informative chart - the Trans/Cis isomer ratio can be calculated using the following chart taken from A Kinetic Study on the Isomerization of Hop r-Acid - Jaksula, et. all
x = time at temp
y = temp
value = T/C ratio
Table 3. T/C-ratio (%)a as a Function of Reaction Time and Temperature: Experiment 1
5min 10m 15m 20m 30m 45m ...
1
That level of attenuation( (61-20)/61 = 0.67 ) is a bit low for a Belgian beer. You might be able to get it to finish off the last few points by raising the temperature to 70-72F for a few days and rousing the yeast a couple of times a day by rocking the fermentor to get it swirled up and back into suspension. That may or may not work, since the gravity ...
1
Your calculations should use the amount of the partial boil. The calculated IBUs change because the alpha acids are not utilized as effectively when the gravity of the wort is higher. Higher gravity readings result in lower isomerization of the alpha acids. When doing a partial boil, the sugars are concentrated and your hop utilization rate drops.
1
I brewed a spin-off/inspired of Jamil Z.'s Evil Twin using his 20-10-0 addition schedule and it's still fermenting, but it smeels awesome and the fermenting wort tastes great. The hop aroma is VERY strong, which is fine for my beer, but may not be for yours.
If you chose your hops carefully and added them at 20 minutes only you would get a good bit of ...
1
They're both good dual purpose hops. The Centennial has a lower AA% at 9-12, versus Columbus 14-16.
I think your best bet is to brew two identical beers, one using only Centennial and one using only Columbus, then do a triangle test to decide which you like best.
Short Columbus Overview
Short Centennial Overview
(Triangle test: someone puts two of one ...
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