Beersmith IBU's vs Pro IBU's

So yesterday I brewed a DFH Raison d'etre clone. I used an extract recipe based on Sam's from extreme brewing.

That recipie had .5oz of Warrior at 60min, and .5oz of Vanguard at flameout. Beersmith put the IBU's of that schedule at around 11, much lower than typical for a Belgian Dark Strong. Since DFH lists the beer at 25 IBU, I figured I'd try to hit it.

So I waited 20min into the boil to add the first half of the DME, then added the rest @30 min. This pushed my IBU estimate to 24 or so.

Now the more I read about IBU calc in beersmith, I could actually have way too large a hop profile compared to the DFH beer. Is this just something I need to learn about beersmith? What 25 tastes from beersmith may not be what the Pro's consider 25?

BeerSmith has 3 different methods of calculating IBUs which will give you 3 different numbers. Use the 'Hop Bitterness' page and you can see the difference by changing the type at the bottom.

To see what your recipes are set to, go to Tools - Options - Bitterness.

Which is right? I don't know. Personally I prefer Rager, seems to give me the results I want.

when adding hops to a recipe in any program you need to adjust the AA% of each hop, rare does a hop I buy have the same aa as what is keyed into BS2.

example BS2 says Cascade is 5.5%AA where are the cascade FarmhouseBrewing Farmhouse Brewing Supply has on hand right now is 6.9%AA

you can't just add your hops by the oz and come up with an accurate IBU unless you change the AA% of the hops you are using to reflect the actual AA% of the hops.

-=Jason=-