Morning everyone!
If I am working on a recipe and I increase my grain percentage by, say, 5% to achieve a target ABV, should increase my hop quantities by the same 5% or is it more complicated than that?
Thanks in advance!
Recipe design question
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weisseguy
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Recipe design question
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LiverDance
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Re: Recipe design question
It's more a little more complicated than that. Are you using software? If not I suggest you use it. Do you have a certain BU:GU ratio you are shooting for?
"Twenty years ago — a time, by the way, that hops such as Simcoe and Citra were already being developed, but weren’t about to find immediate popularity — there wasn’t a brewer on earth who would have gone to the annual Hop Growers of American convention and said, “I’m going to have a beer that we make 4,000 barrels of, one time a year. It flies off the shelf at damn near $20 a six-pack, and you know what it smells like? It smells like your cat ate your weed and then pissed in the Christmas tree.” - Bell’s Brewery Director of Operations John Mallet on the scent of their popular Hopslam.
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jason.loxton
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Re: Recipe design question
When you say adjust the grain to reach a target ABV, do you mean to adjust for your individual mash efficiency so that you can hit the target in the recipe? If so, then you don't need to adjust the hops at all. The hop level in a recipe is set relative to an expected gravity level. It doesn't matter how much grain you need to run through your system to get there, but rather what the gravity going into and out of your kettle is.
If you mean you want to bump up the ABV from what's in the recipe, then you've got to alter your IBUs to compensate for the increased residual sweetness. In your hypothetical example, 5% is within the margin of error/taste threshold, and I don't think I'd bother doing anything. For larger changes, its almost a relative increase, with the caveat that increased gravity leads to decreased hop utilization, so the amount of hops needs to increase slightly more than the amount of grain. To the best of my knowledge, there's no effect on extraction of flavour and aromatic compounds with increased gravity, so if you're just tweaking ABV a touch, and not changing style, you can probably leave your late additions alone (unless you're getting a substantial portion of your bittering from giant whirlpool additions or something).
If you mean you want to bump up the ABV from what's in the recipe, then you've got to alter your IBUs to compensate for the increased residual sweetness. In your hypothetical example, 5% is within the margin of error/taste threshold, and I don't think I'd bother doing anything. For larger changes, its almost a relative increase, with the caveat that increased gravity leads to decreased hop utilization, so the amount of hops needs to increase slightly more than the amount of grain. To the best of my knowledge, there's no effect on extraction of flavour and aromatic compounds with increased gravity, so if you're just tweaking ABV a touch, and not changing style, you can probably leave your late additions alone (unless you're getting a substantial portion of your bittering from giant whirlpool additions or something).
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