Wheelers Hopping

[froggi]

Forgive if this has been touched on before but here goes

Just looking through my copy of Wheeler and Protz Brew Your Own Real Ale At Home and noticed the first hop additions into the boiler on a recipe are fairly high.... plugged the numbers into BeerSmith for the style of beer and the IBU's are way off the scale.... adjusted everything to take in the malt bill and get the ABV° right, colour (I know this particular beer extremely well - was almost weaned on the stuff!!!) and the bittering is around double Wheeler et al suggest..... Anyone any thoughts or can signpost me to a past thread??

Cheers folks

[Normski]

Grahams recipes dont give the AA of the hops just the total EBU of the brew.
You should adjust the bittering hops to allow for this.
Norm

[jaroporter]

Graham himself has actually posted in response to this question before, worth digging around for the threads (other forums maybe) if you can find them. basically there are a few different methods used to calculate bitterness, and all are pretty flawed, some more than others! people and their software have their preferences and use different methods. i believe some claimed his recipes to be overhopped while others underhopped!
it's essentially an arbitrary figure anyways, so just pick one method and keep using it as a reference for consistancy

[IPA]

Forgive if this has been touched on before but here goes

Just looking through my copy of Wheeler and Protz Brew Your Own Real Ale At Home and noticed the first hop additions into the boiler on a recipe are fairly high.... plugged the numbers into BeerSmith for the style of beer and the IBU's are way off the scale.... adjusted everything to take in the malt bill and get the ABV° right, colour (I know this particular beer extremely well - was almost weaned on the stuff!!!) and the bittering is around double Wheeler et al suggest..... Anyone any thoughts or can signpost me to a past thread??

Cheers folks

Try using Graham's own calculator. It's free its English it gives a more accurate colour and it's here.

http://www.practicalbrewing.co.uk/main/ ... eerengine/

[McMullan]

GW’s book was written to get people home brewing without too much complication. He states clearly the recipes are starting points for home brewers to adjust as they wish based on personal taste and equipment. I’ve found the recipes to be valuable, in terms of great beer and inspiration. In terms of hopping, what you could try is adding more. A finished commercial beer may have about xIBUs, but due to losses in the boil and fermentation, you might want to add more than x in the recipe you are following, assuming it’s based on an accurate description of a beer produced commercially. Part of the fun is messing around with stuff

[Jim]

As said above, hop utilisation has so many difficult-to-control variables that no formula is going to work perfectly for everyone.

You need to experiment to see how recipes come out on your own particular brewing setup and adjust future recipes to suit.

[f00b4r]

These threads are definitely worth a read and contain some good information from the man himself as well as others (the first appears off topic but read the lot of it):

http://forum.craft brewing.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=8737&hilit=Abbot&start=25

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=65239&p=686262#p686262

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67578&p=710215#p710215

[froggi]

Many thanks gents... I knew someone was out there.... It's the first time I've used a recipe from 'the book' and didn't want to go ahead and screw up the hopping.... The beer in question is an old favourite of mine (although a mass produced, shadow of it's former self these days) and I wanted to do it justice..... Thanks all once again, you've been a great help

[rpt]

My edition of the book has a table in the hops chapter giving the AA% of every hop as used to formulate the recipes. If your hops have higher AA% then you will calculate a high bitterness. Some varieties vary a lot between harvests.