With respects to gravity: all calculators that I have messed with agree on gravity within 0.001. It's just the IBUs with hopville that I saw issues with.
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I like the Hopville recipe formulator, I use it for all of my recipes (except the ones that I develop on-the-go using Brew Pal on the iPhone).
FWIW, I've switched to the "Hopville" calculation method for my hand-built recipes, and find that the bitterness (and BU:GU balance) is pretty accurate. Because the IBU calculation will affect the ratio between bitterness and gravity, the method you choose will affect this balance. A BU:GU ratio of 0.50 is well-balanced; I strive for such balance in my milds and browns, whereas IPAs move higher towards 1.00, and weizens lower towards 0.30.
If I am cloning a recipe in a book or magazine, I check to see what calculation method they use, and then choose that method with the drop-down box in Hopville. It can't get much easier than that. If you're finding calculation errors, then I suspect that you're not using the proper calculation method.
If I am cloning a recipe in a book or magazine, I check to see what calculation method they use, and then choose that method with the drop-down box in Hopville. It can't get much easier than that. If you're finding calculation errors, then I suspect that you're not using the proper calculation method.
It was actually a post from you that made me check out hopville's calculator.
Someone posted a recipe that had an IBU count of about 49, and you responded that the IBUs were actually closer to 30-ish using hopville's calculator.
That's when I plugged the recipe into both ProMash and BeerSmith and found that those two programs also came up with 50 IBUs.
I checked out some other free calculators and got ranges of 30-42 or so.
My point is that the couple of commercial software packages were coming up with consistent numbers, and those numbers were differrent than every free calculator I tried.
edit for clarification: not every recipe I threw through the calculators came up with large differences, but I saw several that came up way different than ProMash and BeerSmith.
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I understand that different methods give different results and all are "correct"... I was just shocked to see a different of aruond 15 IBUs in a moderately hoppy beer. Seemed too much of a difference to me...
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It was actually a post from you that made me check out hopville's calculator.
I do appreciate the double-check! I am new to the hobby, and it's something that I am learning as I go.
As I mentioned, I find that the BU:GU guidance given by hopville using the "Hopville Method" of IBU calculation seems to taste pretty good in the batches that I've done. If hopville indicates that I'm close to a 0.50 BU:GU, then I expect a pretty fair balance. If it's closer to a whole number, I'll expect a hop-bomb.
Short of lab tests, it's hard to really pin down whose calculation algorithm is closer to accurate. I guess you could report it as a bug to the developer of hopville, if BeerSmith and ProMash are consistent with their calculation. But it will take a lab test to really prove who's more accurate, and that may be research that has to be undertaken by one of the deep pockets in the industry.
"was" or "wasn't" as hoppy as you thought it should be?
If hopville gave you 85 IBU, my limited set of experiments says that your beer (using promash or beersmith) would have had HIGHER than 85 IBUs.
I checked again last night. It does seem hoppier. It had been awhile since I had one and I misspoke myself. I quickly read yesterday and thought it was supposed to be less IBU that what hopville says.
Tastybrew doesn't seem to calculate the IBU's correctly for a partial boil. Hop utilization goes up when it should go down. However if I assume a full boil (which i can do because I'll be doing a late extract addition) the two sites seem pretty close, within 1 point in IBUs for my recipe. I do appreciate that the Tastybrew site allows you to choose a "steep" option for the grains area. Hopville doesn't accommodate steeping grains that I can see.
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