BeerSci: How Do We Measure The Bitterness Of Beer? Cool article about Victory's IBU measurements and how they use the information.
Thanks for the link, but notice that the article is mis-titled. It is about the measurement of IBUs not the measurement of bitterness. That is to come in a follow-on article. Since the author plans a second article hopefully this one lays the ground work and the next will be about perception of bitterness as promised.
I thought it was interesting that Victory utilizes IBU measurements more so for hop flower ‘quality control’ vs. measuring their beers: “When I asked Egan about the IBU measurements and why she was doing them, she explained that as brewers, she and her colleagues looks at IBU as a measure of the potency of the hops, and therefore the consistency of the product. Victory is the second largest American brewery still using only whole-leaf hops in their brewery, rather than pellets or extract or whatever other advanced hop products are on the market. (Sierra Nevada is the largest.) But while whole leaf hops have many advantages, they do tend to age more quickly than pellets. When hops age, one thing that drops is their humulone content. Humulone is the precursor to isohumulone; the conversion happens when brewers boil the hop-loaded wort. If the humulone content goes down, the available amount of isohumulones -- bitterness -- in the beer also goes down. In other words, Victory's brewers don't go out to make a beer with a specific IBU rating, they use IBUs as a gauge to ensure that they're consistently hopping their beers properly, given that the hops are constantly changing while in storage.” I would love to know the ‘official’ IBU measurement is for Prima Pils but maybe there is no official IBU advertised since each batch of Prima Pils will have differing values (the whole variability of whole-leaf hops thing)? Cheers!
Interesting article. I go total geek mode when i am researching beers. I am always interested to find the IBU for the beer as well as the specific hops used in the bittering and dry hopping phases. I love it when breweries give out that info for us.
Great share, please post the next article. I question the correctness of the UV-vis spectrometer image, but I understand that was not done by the author. I'd also like to see more info on the absorption spectrum to IBU transformation. The author says absorbance number, but that has no real meaning. P.S. How's this for circumstantial coincidence? http://teaching.shu.ac.uk/hwb/chemistry/tutorials/molspec/beers1.htm
