Confused on late addition and Beersmith question

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BillTheSlink

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Hello Everyone:

Had to take some time off from brewing due to some health issues and haven't been around in a while. Since I have been away from the hobby and still have some issues I decided to go back to extract for a couple of brews and get my brew grove back.

I am going to do a Kölsch that is in "Brewing Classic Styles" that was written as an extract without steeping grains. Here is the recipe:

Pilsner LME 8 LBS
Munich LME .25 LBS
Hallertau 4% for 60MIN for 24.6 IBU
Wyeast 2565

Now, this being a light beer I was thinking of doing a late addition. I did a search, but am still very confused. I am doing a full boil. The recipe gives a pre-boil volume of 7 gallons for a finish of 6.

#1. I have read both do/do not do late additions with a full boil. I am confused. I really do want my color to be right. Should I, or shouldn't I?

#2. If we do split the additions how much goes in at first?

#3. I have read Beersmith has a button to check to use with late additions to adjust for late additions. Where in the heck is it?
 
If you're trying to keep the color light, a late extract addition may be helpful. You won't see as much difference with a full boil as you would with a partial boil. I haven't done extract brewing in some time, but honestly I never saw a huge difference with late additions. I generally split the extract into two additions, half when the boil was achieved and the remainder with about 10 minutes to go.

What you WILL see a big difference in is hop utilization. With a lower gravity through much of the boil you'll see more IBUs in the the final beer, so you'll want to adjust your hopping schedule.

Within Beersmith, double-click on the late extract addition in your recipe...you'll see a window pop-up with various information about the ingredient. Click the "Late Extract Boil for" box and enter the number of minutes you intend to boil it. While Beersmith does adjust for IBUs, I don't believe it compensates for color.
 
If you're trying to keep the color light, a late extract addition may be helpful.
Yep, and you'll avoid caramelization/maillard flavors as well.

What you WILL see a big difference in is hop utilization. With a lower gravity through much of the boil you'll see more IBUs in the the final beer, so you'll want to adjust your hopping schedule.

No. Hop utilization is independent of wort gravity. This is something that brewing software gets wrong; whether you're doing a full boil or a partial boil you should lie to your software and tell it that it's a full boil. They get it wrong because up until 2008 almost all books on home brewing got it wrong, too, but since then the actual science has been getting disseminated.

Basic Brewing Radio actually did the test recently--they brewed the same recipe (same hops schedule) as a full boil, partial boil, and partial boil with late extract additions, then measured the IBUs of the 3 beers in the lab. Hop utilization was identical. March 4, 2010 - BYO-BBR Experiment III:
http://www.basicbrewing.com/index.php?page=radio

Listen to John Palmer's "What is an IBU, Really?" from 20 March 2008 where he talks about it (including apologizing for getting this wrong in the most recent edition of How to Brew); he was one of the first home brewing authorities to start getting this right:
http://www.basicbrewing.com/index.php?page=basic-brewing-radio-2008

The commercial brewing literature is littered with this information, going back decades. e.g. the American Society of Brewing Chemists in 1989:
http://www.asbcnet.org/journal/abstracts/backissues/47-14.htm says
"In the range 10.5-13.5° P, no relationship between hop utilization and original gravity was found. ", and that range has been extended by subsequent results.

More discussion here:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/estimating-bitterness-algorithms-state-art-109681/
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/hop-utilization-178668/
 
Interesting points Sumner. I'm not ready to take this as gospel just yet based on a few sources, but it's food for thought and deserving of further research. If you're correct, it would seem most of the brewing world is wrong...including a lot of highly respected brewers. It certainly flies in the face of my own experiences.
 
Interesting points Sumner. I'm not ready to take this as gospel just yet based on a few sources, but it's food for thought and deserving of further research. If you're correct, it would seem most of the brewing world is wrong...including a lot of highly respected brewers. It certainly flies in the face of my own experiences.

I'm not sure I'd say most of the brewing world is wrong; commercial brewing chemists have been operating under the "utilization is independent of gravity" theory for at least the last 20 years (from what's documented; I have no reason to believe that they thought differently before that).

The great thing is that you don't have to take it as gospel, though; it's easy enough to brew up an identical hop schedule beer and send it off to be tested for IBUs. The Basic Brewing Radio link I posted above has them doing exactly that, but more people replicating those results (or contradicting them) would be great.

The only other publically available result I know of is:
IMPROVING THE HOP UTILIZATION IN THE BEER BIOTECHNOLOGY Mudura Elena , Sevastita Muste, Maria Tofana, Sonia A. Socaci, Veronica Goina
University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine,
Faculty of Agriculture, 3-5 Manastur Street, 400372 Cluj-Napoca,
e-mail: [email protected]
Bulletin UASVM, Agriculture 65(2)/2008
pISSN 1843-5246; eISSN 1843-5386

which showed:
Gravity Utilization
10°P 21.25%
12°P 25.00%
14°P 25.00%
A very small sample size, but if anything shows higher utilization with higher gravities. I'd be inclined to write that off as some other outside effect, but it merits testing before any conclusion is drawn.

Again, it's worth listening to the John Palmer podcast or reading the links above because there are a number of factors (e.g. break material adsorption) that can be conflated with wort gravity affecting utilization; duplicating the BBR experiment with an all-grain brew would be quite interesting.
 
All I mean to say Sumner, is that outside the links you've provided, it's very difficult to find any additional data supporting this POV. Furthermore, the gravity range mentioned in the ASBC study (or at least the tiny synopsis I'm privy to) is fairly narrow...about 1.040 to 1.053. A homebrewer withholding 1/2 to 3/4 of his extract until the final minutes of his boil is going to see a much wider difference.

Do a quick Google search for "hop utilization specific gravity." Notice that EVERY link you find supports the notion that lower specific gravity results in higher hop utilization. There are all sorts of tools out there that exist specifically to help adjust for this...software, tables, calculators. If this is a fallacy, it's an awfully widespread fallacy, and it means the vast majority of the homebrewing community is spectacularly wrong on this point. Now that's entirely possible...and I do think a lot of us blindly accept what we're told, including some questionable info. There are certainly plenty of homebrewing myths out there. But let's just say I'm not ready to ignore the vast body of conventional wisdom on this topic...just yet. ;)

So, question for the OP: have we cleared up your confusion regarding late extract additions? I'm guessing not... :D
 
No not really, but in all honesty I think your both right. If you're talking differences between boil gravity that are fairly close I think you're not probably going to see any difference. But if you're talking about withholding half or more of your fermentable material making for an extremely low boil gravity in a full boil you're going to see a difference.

In my case making the adjustment worked out well. I have two ounces of vacuumed packed Pacific Hallertaur from the 2008 growing season in my freezer I won in a brewing contest last Summer. When I used the hop age tool in Brewsmith it turns out I need the full two ounces to be spot on when adjusting for a late addition. If I didn't adjust I would need more. Quite a bit more.
 
In brewing classic styles, jamil or john say to use late addition extract. They as I remember discuss figuring out the right amount of extract so your full boil is the same og as allgrain and then add bulk of extract at flameout. Allthough they may have u doing this with a partial boil. I'll have to reread it when I get home.

By doing it the way they say hop utilization is identical. They give a specific example in the first section.
 
In brewing classic styles, jamil or john say to use late addition extract. They as I remember discuss figuring out the right amount of extract so your full boil is the same og as allgrain and then add bulk of extract at flameout. Allthough they may have u doing this with a partial boil. I'll have to reread it when I get home.

By doing it the way they say hop utilization is identical. They give a specific example in the first section.

John also has gone on record since then apologizing for getting this wrong and explaining that gravity really isn't at play here. See the interview with BBR I linked above. Excerpt:
James Spencer: We have been trained through reading literature of all kinds that alpha acid isomerization is affected by wort gravity?

John Palmer: Yeah we have haven't we. Yeah, and like I said this seminar, this conference was a real eye opener for me. Made me realize that I had been, you know, following the same assumptions as everyone else for a long time. But, yeah, it turns out that isomerization kinetics--that is the rate at which aa will isomerize into isoalpha and become soluable--that's pretty constant. The amount of wort gravity really doesn't affect that, you know hardly at all.

All I mean to say Sumner, is that outside the links you've provided, it's very difficult to find any additional data supporting this POV.

This is true, but there's absolutely zero data I can find supporting the other point of view. There are plenty of unsubstantiated quotes from home brewing texts, though some of their authors (e.g. John Palmer) have since changed their minds on the issue. Those texts tend to be the same ones that make fundamental errors like claiming that an IBU is defined as "1 mg of isoalpha per 1l of beer" or something equally erroneous. It isn't really a place where the home brewing world has traditionally paid close attention to the actual brewing science. Heck, just look at the utilization curve of the Rager formula vs. the Tinseth formula--they're totally different. At least one of the two is obviously quite wrong, yet home brewers (and brewing software) continue to use both.

The only data I've seen supports the assertion that boil gravity has no effect (though break material and other factors may). Sadly, there isn't a ton of data; it's entirely possible that the model will be refined further with more study (e.g. if the IBUs reach a saturation point, that would cap the maximum possible bitterness in a certain size boil). But since Palmer's visit to the conference, there've been more and more corroborating reports coming out. To wit...

No not really, but in all honesty I think your both right. If you're talking differences between boil gravity that are fairly close I think you're not probably going to see any difference. But if you're talking about withholding half or more of your fermentable material making for an extremely low boil gravity in a full boil you're going to see a difference.

...BBR and Brew Your Own's test (linked above) earlier this year used 3 extract-based worts with the same hop schedule:
Full Boil: Boil gravity 1.068.
Normal partial boil: Boil gravity 1.127
Partial boil, late addition of 1/2 extract: Boil gravity 1.077

Those are pretty significant differences in boil gravity, and hop utilization was essentially the same between the 3.

Like I said, though, the beautiful thing is that there's no reason to trust anyone or take their word for it; it's easy enough to do the test on your own.
 
To throw a monkey wrench into all of this (and I really think we need to close this, and reopen in a different thread- this is really not a "beginner's beer" question), I spoke with John Palmer about this a couple of weeks ago.

Wort gravity does NOT impact hops utilization. But, break material DOES. So, even though the gravity isn't the cause of lower hops utilization, the software for figuring IBUs isn't a bad way to day with (with the late extract addition figuring) because higher gravity worts usually have more break material associated with it.

Simply anecdotally, I used to do extract brewing as a partial boil. When I started doing late extract additions of the exact same recipe, the beer was indeed more bitter. Using software later showed that the late extract addition would be more bitter. Of course, the assumption at the time (maybe 4 years ago) was because of the wort gravity. Now, better science has shown that it's not because of wort gravity at all, but because of break material Regardless, the beer was more bitter with the same recipe and late extract addition.

I am not certain why my simple experiment would be so different than BBR's except that it was a bigger beer, and it was NOT a hoppy beer to begin with. (It was my Dead Guy clone recipe). It was still good, but markedly more bitter. I didn't even know until later that this was a possibility, so it wasn't the power of suggestion. Perhaps it was a higher OG, lower hopped beer, and that's why it was so noticeable. Maybe in an APA or IPA with late hops it would be negligible.

My point is that there are some changes in the finished beer, BBR's experiment nonwithstanding. The causes are debatable, and even the amount of hops isomerization is debatable.
 
To throw a monkey wrench into all of this (and I really think we need to close this, and reopen in a different thread- this is really not a "beginner's beer" question), I spoke with John Palmer about this a couple of weeks ago.

Wort gravity does NOT impact hops utilization. But, break material DOES. So, even though the gravity isn't the cause of lower hops utilization, the software for figuring IBUs isn't a bad way to day with (with the late extract addition figuring) because higher gravity worts usually have more break material associated with it.

For all-grain brews I agree totally; for extract brews I'm less sure; certainly the amount of change that Tinseth suggests for partial boils seemed far too much when I was doing partial boil extract brews, but I only did a few brews with a partial boil and never did a double-blind comparison so that's purely anecdotal, though the BBR results consistent with what I saw.

This exact issue is why I wrote above that "it's worth listening to the John Palmer podcast or reading the links above because there are a number of factors (e.g. break material adsorption) that can be conflated with wort gravity affecting utilization; duplicating the BBR experiment with an all-grain brew would be quite interesting."

Palmer and James Spencer talk about the break issue a considerable amount, as well as the fact that extract has far less break per gravity point than AG does (and simple sugar has even less, while wheat/rye have more).

It's a pretty complex field.

Simply anecdotally, I used to do extract brewing as a partial boil. When I started doing late extract additions of the exact same recipe, the beer was indeed more bitter. Using software later showed that the late extract addition would be more bitter. Of course, the assumption at the time (maybe 4 years ago) was because of the wort gravity. Now, better science has shown that it's not because of wort gravity at all, but because of break material Regardless, the beer was more bitter with the same recipe and late extract addition.

I am not certain why my simple experiment would be so different than BBR's except that it was a bigger beer, and it was NOT a hoppy beer to begin with. (It was my Dead Guy clone recipe). It was still good, but markedly more bitter. I didn't even know until later that this was a possibility, so it wasn't the power of suggestion. Perhaps it was a higher OG, lower hopped beer, and that's why it was so noticeable. Maybe in an APA or IPA with late hops it would be negligible.

Same kettle? Same yeast and pitch rate? Both of those can affect adsorption rates, too. Also, just out of curiousity, do you recall the brand of DME? There are a few that aren't really boiled and so would have higher break amounts. I'm presuming the hops were the same kind and form, and equally fresh in both cases.

My point is that there are some changes in the finished beer, BBR's experiment nonwithstanding.

Their experiment only tested IBUs, and really only directly applies to their ingredients and process; it's why more data would be great.

Even if the IBU result is extended, you can certainly have beers that have identical measured IBUs but different perceived bitterness; beta-heavy bitterness is going to taste smoother than iso-alpha-heavy bitterness, for one thing, and there are tons of other factors.
 
Same kettle? Same yeast and pitch rate? Both of those can affect adsorption rates, too. Also, just out of curiousity, do you recall the brand of DME? There are a few that aren't really boiled and so would have higher break amounts. I'm presuming the hops were the same kind and form, and equally fresh in both cases.



Their experiment only tested IBUs, and really only directly applies to their ingredients and process; it's why more data would be great.

Even if the IBU result is extended, you can certainly have beers that have identical measured IBUs but different perceived bitterness; beta-heavy bitterness is going to taste smoother than iso-alpha-heavy bitterness, for one thing, and there are tons of other factors.

Yep, same kettle, same pitch rate, same ingredients. I had only been brewing about a year, and heard about adding 1/2 the extract late in the boil to lessen carmelization. Of course, it wasn't true carmelization anyway, but that's a whole 'nother topic! Anyway, I sipped the beer upon bottling with a "whoa! It's like twice as bitter!" Several months later, I added recipes to Beersmith when I bought it, and when I did, the IBUs went from 15 to about 27 in this particular recipe. The only change was the late extract addition, of course, but that's when I did a head slapper. Well, my recollection was the beer was "twice as bitter", as was Bob's, but I wasn't very knowledgable at all about IBUs and software. It was a recipe I did often, though. Probably about every third or fourth batch at that time. It was extract, and probably Munton's, since that's what I found cheaper at that time. But I can't say that it WAS each time. I did find that cutting the bittering hops by about 20% in the late extract addition was perfect, and I continued doing that for all recipes until I went AG, about a year or so later.

So, whatever the cause I found that the hops utilization rates DID change in either a full boil or late extract additions. Perhaps it was break material, wort gravity, the amount of hops that can isomerize in a certain amount of liquid, or something completely different. I don't think that anyone knows for sure.
 
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