Well, first off let me thank you guys for the wholesome welcome & support. Let's see if we can get somewhere here...
You're writing on a forum to collect opinions from an international community of home brewers. Thats not very "old fashioned".
Agreed. But before the acquisitions, I will just throw it out there that the way I was taught to brew was by my Father - who never had the internet, fancy calculators, brewing groups, etc. He was a farm man that worked his fields for a living. He made his own recipes - he gathered his own rain water, he grew his own barley in the fields, malted it himself every harvest. Grew his own hops up the side of the barn, forged his own kettle, blah blah blah. There was no other way for him to learn other than by trial and error in the back of the barn. He has since passed and I try to keep the family tradition of beer making as true to my original education as possible. Doing it the 'old fashioned' way. However, I do have the luxury of the internet, and more profound information. So, I was taught that if you don't know it is better to ask than to make an ass of yourself and screw something up. On the farm, that can cost a family their meal, and most certainly cost you an ass whoopin. Get where I'm coming from? So, if you have nothing useful to contribute, then just politely chuckle to yourself about my post, think I'm an uneducated idiot, and just move on.
We'll, a lot depends on what kind of levels of hop you want for your imperial version. Since you clearly need to up the grain bill to meet this goal, what IBUs are you shooting for? Or do you just to have some equivalent number in comparison to the increased grain bill?
I guess I would be shooting for something that matches the original, in terms of IBU ratio. With the grain bill increasing by roughly 38% (on the strong side) I originally thought of taking the hops up by that same percentage, or maybe around 25%. But, that leads me to believe that the extra hops would up the IBU's to a level that would not match that of the original, if you follow. That's why I was looking to see if there was a 'standard' in increasing a recipe to an Imperial while trying to keep the same flavor profile - per se...
Old fashioned - just wing it!
Past fashioned - figure out the calculations for hop utility based on Alpha acids and boil timing.
My suggestion is to use one of the calculators that you are bashing!
Please point out where I was 'bashing' these calculators. I simply stated that brewing in my family was done the old fashioned way - without the technology, high tech equipment, and so on - that is available these days. This was stated above in my first response. Never once bashed it. Just do it as close to the way it was done before our time as possible. The true sense...
Anyways, I do agree with your theory on calc'ing the utilization of hops based on AA and boil time, but (for lack of better examples) a beer with 10 lbs of grain and 2 oz of hops will not be the same beer with 20 lbs of grain and 4 oz of hops, ya know. IBU's, at least in modern fashion, are calc'd by AA, boil time, & amount of hops. However, it does not really cover the grain amount into that figure.
That's why I was looking for a point in the right direction. Desperate times call for desperate measures. It's like the last fat chick out the door at 2:12 AM... Sometimes, it just has to be done because its the only option left.
