10 gallons to 10 Barrels Hopping Help

I brew on a 1 barrel system and use about 8 oz for a 3% session IPA and 30 oz for a 9% DIPA in the whirlpool. Then another 16 oz (3% beer) to 30 oz (9% beer) in the dry hop. I'm not sure how that will scale even further up, but I thought it might help somewhat. I'm finding that I need to find the right quantity for different hop combinations to get the brightness I'm looking for (and that frequently means less). It's going to be hard to nail the quantity without experience on that system.

 

Here is the 5 gallons hopping:
30 minute WP:
4.50 oz Mosaic
4.00 oz Amarillo
2.00 oz Simcoe

DH
3.00 oz Mosaic
2.00 oz Amarillo
1.00 oz Simcoe

I can't help you with scaling up to a multi-barrel equivalent . . . but if you get it correctly I suggest you call the brew JUMP-UP IPA. 'Cause when a drinkers olfactory organ comes into close proximity to it that will be their reaction !

 

FWIW, I know a few 10 - 15 bbl breweries (don't ask me to name names) who generally dry hop IPA's in the 1-2# per bbl range and DIPA's in the 2-3.5# per bbl range.

As for the whirlpool, I know of one brewery (again, not going to drop a name) who adds about 0.5 - 0.6# per bbl on an IPA but I consider them to be very conservative with hop additions in general.

P.S. I recommend searching some threads on probrewer.com for more opinions. Or just do a google search for "probrewer dry hop rates" / "probrewer hop addition rates". Just realize you will get a wide array of answers and you may or may not be familiar with the beer of the brewer/brewery giving the answer. So take those quotes with a grain of salt and use them to establish a common range.

 

That was what I was going to say... No one knows what a system will put out better than the brewer him/herself. Good luck!

 

You need to know the utilization on the big system. It's a Swag if you don't. The ones I have done going from 10 gallons to 7 barrels were OK, but different. Good luck!

When breweries scale up the brew house they brew multiple batches to flavor match. Some of those get dumped.

 

I regularly scale recipes up from 10gal to 15BBL.

In my experience, you pretty much have to scale aroma hops up 1:1 with the volume. In your case that would mean multiplying your 5gal amounts by 62. Your dry hops work out to something like 2.3#/BBL which is pretty standard for a hop forward beer. Your whirlpool hops would be just over 4#/BBL... which is a lot. Hopefully the brewery you are brewing with is used to brewing really hoppy beers or they might be a bit taken aback by your hop bill.

For comparison I use about 2.3#/BBL dry hops and 1.8#/BBL late hops in an american IPA. It is just under 7% and has a hop intensity comparable to something like Stone IPA or 2 hearted.

Some people think that bigger systems are more efficient and that they can use proportionately less hops, but that just isn't the case with aroma. Bitterness can be scaled back as that does tend to be more efficient (and you will get more bitterness out of your late hops as well), but aroma doesn't really see any increase in efficiency at this scale.

 

No problem with what you state. If you do long steeps/whirls at different temps and the brewery does not, there is as difference. If the brewery uses a hop back and you do not, there is another. Changes in process will give you a different end result, it may be close, but it is different.

 

How do you scale back your bitterness then from 10 gal to 10 bbl? use 75%, 50%, 25% of the bittering charge?

 

When I brewed my scaled up (5 gallons to 15 barrels) Bo Pils, hop flavor and aroma went through the roof. I reckon times and temperatures (like the long forced (i.e. no choice) "hopstand" during the slow chill) had something to do with that.

 

Something like that. I might use 2 pounds of bettering hops in a mildly bitter beer like a weizen or amber ale that has little or no late hops, but then only 0.5 to 1 pound in a strongly bitter beer like an American IPA or DIPA. This is due to the utilization going up in the large late additions as you suggest.

 

It does apply a bit more to "American hoppy" than European style beers for whatever reason. In Belgian beers with late hop additions I use maybe half the proportion of late hops I'd use in a homebrew sized batch. But with IPAs and such I have found that anything less than 1:1 scaling up of late additions results in disappointing hop character.

 

I guess my question was: if you were to add say 5 oz per 10 gallons of bittering hops for your small scale batch, which works out to be 1 pound of bittering hops per barrel if you scale linearly, how would you account for the increase in utilization on a 15 barrel scale? Instead of 15 pounds, would it then be like 7.5 pounds or something like that? Just curious, I find this whole utilization thing fascinating, and no one seems to have any real answers on how to do it.

 

If you check the pro forums, the consensus seems to be that it is very system/process specific. So even though everyone knows that hop utilization increases on the big systems, there are no universal scale-up rules of thumb that everyone can agree with.

 

Even the pros go through some test batches when they expand capacity. Vinnie Cilurzo talked about matching when they got the production brew house. Same water, malts, hops,yeast, procedures and brewers, the system was the difference. Talking with A local brewer, they went through batches to get the same flavor profile when they went to a very modern system 4 times the size of the old system, which they kept in production, and once again everything else was the same.

 

Yes I agree, but the lack of data on this is surprising. Was hoping for an n of 1 in terms of data from @nickfl.

 

I'm afraid I don't have much in the way of hard data, just some practical advice. I use values of 30% @ 60 min, 20% @ 20 min and 10% @ 2 min for my utilization curve to calculate ibus. This is close enough for me to know what level of bitterness it will produce and it allows me to formulate my recipes and scale up with a minimum of unpleasantly bitter surprises. I haven't seen much in the way of more data driven numbers, and it seems to be so effected by variables like brew size, equipment specifics and the individual recipe that it may be impossible to come up with a hard and fast rule for scaling hops and utilization. There are of course several utilization formulas out there derived from hard data, but they fall apart when you deviate from the circumstances in which they were derived. In any case, IBU measurements, calculated or measured only take you part of the way and I have found that the above mentioned method of estimating ibus and knowing what that scale means in terms of my own perception, combined with an experience based understanding of how to scale up late and dry hops in different styles (1:1 in American styles, somewhat less in other styles) is enough to go from 10gal pilot batches to 15bbl batches with reasonable accuracy.

 

NOTE: Utilization, as commonly defined, is a measure of the bitterness extracted from hops. From a slightly antiquated perspective, it's strictly a measure of isomerized alpha acids.

I know of no exact formula for scaling up utilization, let alone measuring utilization.

% utilization is largely determined by:

1. Length of time hops in boil (longer = more)
2. Intensity of boil (more intense = more)
3. Hop format (leaf, pellet, extract = less to more)
4. % alpha acid (lower = more)
5. Wort pH (higher = more)
6. Wort strength (lower = more)

25% - 35% hop utilization is a general commercial range, with 28% - 33% being typical
25% - 30% typically for whole leaf, 30% - 35% for pellets, 33% - 38% for extract
"Reduced Extracts" (like tetra and hexa) can yield 90%+ utilization

 

This is fantastic info and more than I've seen in most forums. Thanks.

My guess is there is a way to collapse all of this data by normalizing to batch size, perhaps via surface area to volume ratio. My guess is some of the big breweries have done it already, but it's still only a ballpark relationship, and not something that any brewery would publish, ie trade secret info, which is why you see nothing out there with this info. These obscure "unmeasurable" items are usually the ones that interest me the most. Thanks again.