72.41 IBUs?

if its all based on science and math, you can get as specific as you want.

 

haha yea, but if you dont mind me asking, whats the beer and who did it?

 

wow dont rememer seeing that on the label. guess ill hafta check again.

**walks to the closet to find the empty bottle being saved for homebrew**

it says 66.6 IBUs. did you get a different batch or were they were going for something there?

 

yea I saw that when i actually typed up a review this time. Theres like 3 on Untappd as well. I had the short stubby bottle, which did you have?

 

IBU's are calculated via formula - thus, it can get that specific.

 

True, but if that is the case they should add theoretical, because in the real world there are always tolerances.

 

i know. that 120 IBU tolerance is just annoying.

 

My theoretical tolerance is 5000 ibu...

 

i suspect that the laboratory method can get extremely accurate. any lab of modest capacity can measure compounds into the parts per billion, so long as the equipment is well maintained and the technician has the skill.

i do however suspect that unless the brewery is submitting every single batch for analysis they are blowing smoke. the variables are too great to be dead on every time. boil time, vigour of boil, hop addition rates, and most importantly, the precise AA% of the hops being added. since most craft brewers are not doing this sort of calculation in house, they must rely on the data provided from the vendor and estimate their target.
too many variables to be that precise as far as i can tell.

also, it is irrelevant. as we are aware, 76.55 IBUs is the same as 79 IBUs is the same as 73 IBUs.
Cheers.

 

The hops used are usually given to 3 significant digits. The output from the calculation should be rounded to 3 digits from the calculation.

If they have a lab, this might be their way of saying "We have a lab, and can measure to 0.01 IBU"

 

Found the lab procedure here: http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/spectrophotometric-method-ibu-determination-177102/

It’s actually simpler than I thought it’d be – just a phase separation and then a reading on a UV/vis. I use UV/vis pretty regularly at work to determine concentrations of colloidal solutions. The software reads out to I think at least 4 decimal places; I usually calculate out concentrations to 2 decimal places. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s that accurate (you can easily get slightly different results just because of the difference between cuvettes), but in my case there’s an enormous difference between 0.8 mg/mL and 0.9 mg/mL so I can’t afford to cut off that hundredths digit. I would easily trust that IBU measurement to the tenths place though.

 

If I recall correctly, Undercover Shutdown had the ABV listed as 9.99% in years past as well. It's all the same to me, still tastes damn good.

 

It's nonsense as beer doesn't stay the same over time. It might have this IBU figure on analysis but by the time you drink it it will have changed.

 

it's as easy to measure/theorize as having $2,342,323.23, and makes as big a difference as having that instead of $2,342,323.55.

 

When I took Lagunitas tour last month the tour guide - can't remember his name - had a pretty big, and funny, story about how Undercover Investigation came to life (Starting with the Kronik Censored) and he might (I'm not sure, I may have drunk too much that day) have said something about the beer's IBU having something to do with the story so maybe it's not that the figure is so precise but it is close enough so the number can be used as some sort of internal joke.

If only my memory could serve me better...