Wheeler's Beer Engine

[Graham]

Nice to see you can put in zero time hops without going over 100% now

I am now toying with the idea of negative times for hops, such as minus 30-minutes. This is to account for post-boil steep hops. Sara Carter's prize winning recipe, published in Brewer's Contact, calls for 110 grammes of high-alpha post-boil hops, eqivalent to 9% alpha, steeped for 30 minutes. Someone brewed something similar, based upon it, and the result was overpoweringly bitter. The recipe is unusual inasmuch as there is only 29 grammes of full-time bittering hops, but 110 grammes of post-boil hops. Obviously, at this level of hops, steeped for 30 minutes, the bitterness contribution will be substantial, so, if this becomes a frequent practice, a means of accessing the bitterness of such additions could be usefully incorporated into beer engine. The negative boil time could be used by Beer Engine to signify steep hops and a steep algorithm employed to deal with it instead of the usual stuff. I have a suspicion that the recipe printed in Brewer's Contact may be in error - everything seems to be the wrong way round, so I will wait until the next edition and see if an errata is printed before moving further on it. Innovative stuff I reckon, if I ever get round to doing it.

[Aleman]

I have a suspicion that the recipe printed in Brewer's Contact may be in error - everything seems to be the wrong way round, so I will wait until the next edition and see if an errata is printed before moving further on it. Innovative stuff I reckon, if I ever get round to doing it.

There is no errata for that recipe in the March Issue , and I'm fairly sure that Sara did brew it that way quite deliberately . . .Goes under the name of scarer on here AFAIK

[Graham]

Thanks very much Graham

Your welcome Sorry about the upcock - fixed one bug and introduced another at the same time.

[Graham]

Yep, 'tis the way she meant it to be. Found it here:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12097&p=209045#p209040
and there are definately 110 grammes of post-boil hops.

That means that the standard bitterness prediction algorithms probably won't work too well, particularly if the steep is at a temperature lower than 100°C, say 80°C. Even at 100°C, the lack of mechanical agitation (being off the boil), will reduce the utilisation by a certain (unknown) amount. At least steep temperature could be factored in with negative boil times. An idea probably left on the back burner for now though.

[Aleman]

I remember some posts (possibly not here, could have been UK Homebrew) from David Edge a while ago regarding IBU contribution from Steeped hops . . . IIRC He and Ralf had done the 5 day home brewers course at Brewlab and they measured the IBU levels of wort once steeping hops had been added at various times . . . . Results were surprising as to the amount of additional bitterness they contribute.

I guess its something that could be derived experimentally if you had access to a fully equipped lab . . . such as the Darwin Annex . . . but then different worts, different kit, different geometry, hot break levels, cooling rates while steeping are all going to have an effect

[Graham]

I guess its something that could be derived experimentally if you had access to a fully equipped lab . . . such as the Darwin Annex . . . but then different worts, different kit, different geometry, hot break levels, cooling rates while steeping are all going to have an effect

Yes, but the same is true of the more usual hop utilisation formulae, except for temperature, and people are quite happy to use Tinseth, for example, without questioning it. At least steep temperature could be factored in and perhaps another factor to compensate for the lack of agitation.

It would be difficult, without extensive data, because the major contribution to utilisation is alpha absorbed by the protein, the trub, and alpha coating (stuck to) the sides of the vessel. That is why vessel geometry makes such a difference. Tall, narrow vessels have a smaller internal surface area than short, fat vessels of the same volume, and thus tall vessels give better utilisation; even home brewers have noted considerable differences in utilisation when upgrading to different vessels.

When steeping, the trub is beginning to settle and the vessels walls are already coated, so utilisation is bound to be affected positively. Is there a limit to how much alpha can be absorbed by the protein? I believe there is, which is why I do not hold much faith with the 'gravity factors' in the common utilisation formula. I would give my kingdom for tons of measured data so that I could come up with an answer. My old contacts and laboratory facilities that I had access to in the 80s and 90s have now gone, and it would take me years and a small fortune in alpha-acid measurements to come up with sufficient data myself.

[Graham]

I believe this is the other thread which raises the issue viewtopic.php?p=243025#p243025

Ah yes, it was Marmite who pm'd me and sparked me off on all this.

Thing is that steep hops are usually 15-20% of the total hops, low alpha, for ten minutes or so, so the bitterness contribution could probably be safely ignored, but the Sara Carter recipe has 66% of the total as steep hops, high alpha, for 30 minutes and the bitterness contribution probably can not be ignored. Mind you, the two additions of primary bittering hops give about 80 EBU, according to Tinseth, and that is quite bitter by modern standards, so perhaps the late hops do not make as huge a bitterness contribution as the quantities would suggest, but is probably still significant. Certainly Marmite made two beers one with and one without the late hops, and the difference in bitterness was substantial - bordering on 'yuk' from what I can gather.

[yashicamat]

Graham - this version is even better than the last! Top work!

[WishboneBrewery]

A suggestion:

I'm new to all this, but I'm finding the Beer Engine interesting and useful

First off I enter up all the ingredients for a 23 litre brew length.
Lets say I had one tin of LME at 1.5kg, and a few bits of grain and hops... I'm limited by the fact that I'm doing an extract brew with limited LME, it would be good to be able to have a 'Fixed' checkbox option for this LME and then be able to scale down somehow to a smaller brew length to suit the amount of LME.

I know I can already do this by guessing down the brew length untill the LME is around the 1.5kg LME mark...
Just an idea

[OldAl]

Graham, it's 1440 x 900 pixels. I tried changing the screen resolution to various settings, but even the lowest (800 x 600) just made the relative display size bigger but didn't cause it to "unwrap" or resolve the problem. My machine has an AMD Athlon 2400+ chip, btw, but I've never had any issues with it and SP3.

In that case I am stumped. It might possibly be that something got corrupted on the download, but I would expect that to cause it to crash. So I am afraid that we'll have wait and see if anyone else has the problem who uses the same combination of software / hardware as you, and then try to track it down.

Hi Graham,
Sorry to report that I've got exactly the same problem as hotmog with Beer Engine v109. My setup is:-
XP Home with SP3
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
19" widescreen LCD
ATI Sapphire X1650 pro graphics card
Screen reso 1440 x 900

Like hotmog I tried different resolutions with no joy.
I'm unable to resize the Beer Engine window by dragging the borders - is that the same for everyone?
I downloaded it with & without a download manager, but it made no difference.
Cant seem to paste the screenshot but its essentially the same as hotmog's.

[OldAl]

Hi Graham,
Further to my previous post Ive got a screenshot now, same problem but this is from my shed computer:-
XP Home SP3
AMD Athlon 64 3200
17" crt monitor
no graphics card
screen reso 1024 x 768

beer engine.JPG (79.07 KiB) Viewed 2638 times

Might it be somethimg to do with the fact that I've changed the size of some window items in Advanced Appearances in the Display option in Control Panel? Done this on both computers. I would restore the default values if I knew what they were and test it again. Any ideas?

[hotmog]

Hi Graham,
Further to my previous post Ive got a screenshot now, same problem but this is from my shed computer:-
XP Home SP3
AMD Athlon 64 3200
17" crt monitor
no graphics card
screen reso 1024 x 768

beer engine.JPG

Might it be somethimg to do with the fact that I've changed the size of some window items in Advanced Appearances in the Display option in Control Panel? Done this on both computers. I would restore the default values if I knew what they were and test it again. Any ideas?

Unfortunately I don't think that's the problem. I've just tried altering the sizes of all the window items on that menu which have size options, but whilst the relative height and width of the BE outside border may change, the internal field placement stays the same. Unfortunately it means that the grain and hop weights are completely blocked out by the adjustment buttons, so the only way I can use it is to zeroise the highlighted ingredient and manually keep a count of the number of times I click on an adjustment button.

[OldAl]

Unfortunately I don't think that's the problem. I've just tried altering the sizes of all the window items on that menu which have size options, but whilst the relative height and width of the BE outside border may change, the internal field placement stays the same. Unfortunately it means that the grain and hop weights are completely blocked out by the adjustment buttons, so the only way I can use it is to zeroise the highlighted ingredient and manually keep a count of the number of times I click on an adjustment button.

Ok, it was a long shot.
Luckily for me, I work in lbs/ozs and these are still visible though in the wrong column (the kg/gm are completely blocked). The 'Recipe to Browser' option in Printing works ok to display the recipe, so you can at least check up on things there.
The problem also extends to the Grain & Hops editors, where things seem to be squashed up.
The calculators & defaults windows seem ok.

[hotmog]

Unfortunately I don't think that's the problem. I've just tried altering the sizes of all the window items on that menu which have size options, but whilst the relative height and width of the BE outside border may change, the internal field placement stays the same. Unfortunately it means that the grain and hop weights are completely blocked out by the adjustment buttons, so the only way I can use it is to zeroise the highlighted ingredient and manually keep a count of the number of times I click on an adjustment button.

Ok, it was a long shot.
Luckily for me, I work in lbs/ozs and these are still visible though in the wrong column (the kg/gm are completely blocked). The 'Recipe to Browser' option in Printing works ok to display the recipe, so you can at least check up on things there. The problem also extends to the Grain & Hops editors, where things seem to be squashed up.
The calculators & defaults windows seem ok.

Thanks for pointing that out - I'd not tried that option before. What does Gyle Number refer to, incidentally?

[OldAl]

I had no idea but I Google'd it and got this:-

GYLE (NUMBER)
A batch number on the cask label identifying when it was brewed.

from http://www.cask-ale.co.uk/realale2.html