gr8shandini
Well-Known Member
Hey all,
I just put my first batch into the primary yesterday and it's bubbling away happily, but now I'm second guessing myself. I bought an extract + specialty grain kit for an English pale ale and followed the directions but there was an extra packet of hops in the kit that wasn't in the recipe. I did some quick calculations using the IBU equations in Palmer and got ~30 IBU which is smack in the middle of the predicted range of 20 - 40, so I left it out.
However, I realized today that I had used the boil volume, not the total volume in the equation. So I recalculated and came up with 19 IBU and it turns out that I would have ended up with 33 if I had used the "extra" hops.
Is it possible to boil them in a small volume of water for the appropriate amount of time and add it to the beer when I rack it to secondary? Or should I just live with the fact that the beer will be less bitter than I like?
Here's the recipe if anyone wants to check my math:
3.3 lbs light LME
2 lbs light DME
8 oz. crystal malt 60L steeped for 30 min
1 oz Kent (marked 4.5% alpha) at 60 min
2 oz Cascade (3.2% alpha) at 15 min
1 oz Glacier (6.0% alpha) at 5 min
1 packet Nottingham yeast
Per directions, that was all in a 2 gal boil with 3 gal of water added to the wort in the primary. The "mystery hops" were 1 oz of Columbus marked 12.2% alpha. They were also marked "flavoring hops" like the Cascade, so I assume that they were meant to be in for 15 min. I calculated the boil gravity to be 1.099 and used the utilization tables for 1.100 since that was the closest. OG was measured at 1.044 at roughly 80F if that helps.
I just put my first batch into the primary yesterday and it's bubbling away happily, but now I'm second guessing myself. I bought an extract + specialty grain kit for an English pale ale and followed the directions but there was an extra packet of hops in the kit that wasn't in the recipe. I did some quick calculations using the IBU equations in Palmer and got ~30 IBU which is smack in the middle of the predicted range of 20 - 40, so I left it out.
However, I realized today that I had used the boil volume, not the total volume in the equation. So I recalculated and came up with 19 IBU and it turns out that I would have ended up with 33 if I had used the "extra" hops.
Is it possible to boil them in a small volume of water for the appropriate amount of time and add it to the beer when I rack it to secondary? Or should I just live with the fact that the beer will be less bitter than I like?
Here's the recipe if anyone wants to check my math:
3.3 lbs light LME
2 lbs light DME
8 oz. crystal malt 60L steeped for 30 min
1 oz Kent (marked 4.5% alpha) at 60 min
2 oz Cascade (3.2% alpha) at 15 min
1 oz Glacier (6.0% alpha) at 5 min
1 packet Nottingham yeast
Per directions, that was all in a 2 gal boil with 3 gal of water added to the wort in the primary. The "mystery hops" were 1 oz of Columbus marked 12.2% alpha. They were also marked "flavoring hops" like the Cascade, so I assume that they were meant to be in for 15 min. I calculated the boil gravity to be 1.099 and used the utilization tables for 1.100 since that was the closest. OG was measured at 1.044 at roughly 80F if that helps.