beer engine

[sam c]

i ve noticed that on the beer engine the default for hop utillisation is set at 39.75% which seems a bit high compared to what graham talks about in his book.

so in the future should i be changing the default setting depending on the O.G according to the chart in the book?
for example if my O.G is 1.040 before adding the hops into the engine should i change the hop utillisation to 26.8% as per the book.

[Graham]

i ve noticed that on the beer engine the default for hop utillisation is set at 39.75% which seems a bit high compared to what graham talks about in his book.

so in the future should i be changing the default setting depending on the O.G according to the chart in the book?
for example if my O.G is 1.040 before adding the hops into the engine should i change the hop utillisation to 26.8% as per the book.

No, the 39.75% is there to match Tinseth.

If you want to match the utilisations in the book: Go to defaults and hit the set to linear button. The gravity compensation will set itself to linear. The Boil Time Compensation will set itself to none. The Base Utilisation will set itself to 35%.

With those settings the %Util column on the main page of BeerEngine will match the the utilisations used in the book. Because all the recipes in the book have a fixed boil time of 90 minutes, there is no need to bother with boil time compensation, so it is switched off.

[sam c]

thanks very much.

so unless i want to match the ones in the book i can just leave it as it is and the EBU's will be correct?

[Graham]

thanks very much.
so unless i want to match the ones in the book i can just leave it as it is and the EBU's will be correct?

Yes, the EBUs won't match the book exactly if left as is, but they will match Tinseth which is what many, if not most, people use.

I forgot that there was a "Set to linear" button in the defaults pop-up, so I have edited my previous post.

[sam c]

thanks again graham.

i think i will leave it as it is then and not let things get too complicated.

cheers

[norstar]

Sorry to drag up an old post, but this business of hop utilisation is driving me mad!

Graham, you said in your post on this thread and on others:

"If you want to match the utilisations in the book: Go to defaults and hit the set to linear button. The gravity compensation will set itself to linear. The Boil Time Compensation will set itself to none. The Base Utilisation will set itself to 35%."

The problem is, I have your book here and looking at the Ringwood Bitter recipe, which calls for a 90 min boil with 40g of Challenger and 15g of Goldings, if I click "set to linear", I get 40 bitterness units, not 24 as the recipe says. What's awry?

It seems the recipe only works if I set Beer engine to Tinseth and then adjust the base utilisation to 25%. Voila! 24 bitterness units. But this contradicts what you and everyone else says about linear matching the book. Have I got an old version?

I'm just getting really frustrated in formulating recipes and I don't know each time if my hop additions are going to be way under or over. I'd really like to establish what defaults I'd be best using in the software to get the right results when making recipes...

[Graham]

Hop utilisation drives everybody mad, including me. It is not a clear-cut thing, almost a pseudo-science as far as home brewing goes. In the first and second editions of the recipe books I used a fixed utilisation of 20%. This can be achieved in BeerEngine by going to "Defaults" and setting both the "Gravity Compensation" and "Boil Time Compensation" to "None" and putting 20 into the "Base Utilisation" box. This 20% was fine for several years with many accolades from correspondents saying how good the beers were and how close many of them were to the originals.

Then came mass enrolment to the Internet and UK exposure to people like Rager, Garetz and Tinseth. At this point certain people on the U.K.forums began to say that Wheeler's recipes were overhopped. I do not believe that these critics based their statements on personal experience, but instead saw that the utilisation figures given by the aforementioned people were somewhat higher than 20%, and chose to take their side. In the third edition, as a matter of appeasement, I chose to use a sliding scale of utilisation that gave figures that more closely matched mass expectations.

In none of the books is the bitterness of late hops taken into account; trying to estimate that is just chasing fool's gold, particularly as the quantities of late hops specified in the books are relatively low, and their bitterness contribution is deemed (by me) to be insignificant.

However, I have no faith in any of the current hop utilisation formulae because I believe them to based on flawed concepts and they all give widely different numbers when compared to each other. I still think that a fixed utilisation, perhaps around 25%, is a better way of dealing with EBUs.

[norstar]

Thanks Graham, nice detailed answer - I think I have the first or second edition of the book so that might well explain it. 25% also seems to work and match most posted recipes elsewhere as well so I'll run with that. I only adjust it if I've got old hops now.

Cheers!