Question regarding IBU's for my Galaxy Pale Ale

As with so many topics in brewing, my answer is "it depends." Not knowing the exact alpha acid % of your Galaxy hops or the boil gravity, it's hard to know exactly what to expect. That said, an American Pale Ale will presumably have a moderate to low boil gravity, and Galaxy is a high-alpha hop. You should expect to get high utilization and could easily make this beer far more bitter than you are intending.

Specifically, your 60 minute hop addition will add in the ballpark of 50 IBU, which is singlehandedly more than you want. A simple adjustment to your recipe would be to add only .5 oz at 60 minutes. Alternatively, you could maintain the same quantity of hops but do your first hop addition at 15 minutes. That would cut the IBU contribution about in half and also give you some great flavor.

Hope this helps, and happy brewing!

 

As @aobrehm stated, the 1 ounce of Galaxy boiled for 60 minutes will get you >50 IBUs.

You need to reduce your hop amounts if you want to achieve 40-45 IBUs.

Cheers!

 

Alternatively, moving the 60 minute addition to later in the boil would work. 5 oz is already on the low end for a hop-forward beer.

 

Yeah, that could work too.

I personally do not think there is a need to utilize a 'metric' of overall hops used (e.g., 5 ounces) to define what constitutes a hoppy American Pale Ale. Use the amounts necessary to achieve the goals desired. In fact just using 2.5 ounces with 0.5 added for a 60 minute boil, 1 ounce for the last 10 minutes of boil and 1 ounce at the end of boil (and I would suggest a 20 minute hopstand as well) would make a nice and hoppy APA.

Cheers!