General Extract Method Question

[saracen]

[quote="Graham"]If you look around the home brewing Interweb you will see the firm assertion, by almost every 'expert', that hop utilisation efficiency decreases with increasing original gravity. I once believed that, and the reason for specifying full volume was to eliminate the complicated issue of adjusting hop rates to compensate for bitterness loss.

However, it turns out that those previously-thought ideas are not true. Hop utilisation seems to be almost independent of wort gravity - it is not really affected by it at all, as long as you are below saturation level. This means that it is quite okay to boil a concentrated wort without worrying about hop utilisation at normal bitterness levels.[/quote]

Now I'm confused.

I've been brewing for a while and I'm in a position to give advice to those just starting in the hobby. I have always used Beer Engine to formulate recipes as I consider it to be simple, straightforward and reliable. Also, along with many others, I consider you to be the best current authority on the subject. However, if what you say is correct, then Beer Engine can no longer be considered reliable as the program takes account of the decrease in efficiency with increasing SG. A simple brew, using DME and Chinook hops, at 1.035 and 44 EBU becomes 28 EBU when pushed to 1.087. In this case, I would increase the hops in the recipe to compensate for the apparent loss of bitterness. In this example the hops need to go from 30 gms to 48 gms to maintain 44 EBU. Are you saying that by increasing the hops as compensation, the EBU will actually go up to 71 EBU, because this is what happens when you use 48 gms of hops in a wort of 1.035? Beer Engine is not the only brewing software to apply this compensation. They all do it, so are they all wrong?