Looking for the original Bar Towel blog? You can find it at www.thebartowel.com.

We have a trivia question in order to register to prevent bots. If you have any issues with answering, contact us at cass@bartowel.com for help.

Introducing Light Mode! If you would like a Bar Towel social experience that isn't the traditional blue, you can now select Light Mode. Go to the User Control Panel and then Board Preferences, and select "Day Drinking" (Light Mode) from the My Board Style drop-down menu. You can always switch back to "Night Drinking" (Dark Mode). Enjoy!

IBUs and Pounds per Barrel of Hops

Discuss beer or anything else that comes to mind in here.

Moderators: Craig, Cass

User avatar
markaberrant
Seasoned Drinker
Posts: 1664
Joined: Fri Nov 16, 2007 4:28 pm
Location: Regina, SK

Post by markaberrant »

Just to follow up on modern Fullers:

For their Bitter, London Pride and ESB, they use Target for bittering, Challenger and Northdown at the end of the boil, and then 3 seperate dry hop additions (Goldings and Target, Goldings, and then more Goldings added to the cask).

Chiswick Bitter specs:
OG 1.040
IBU 33
If I upscale the homebrew recipe provided by Fullers for CB, it calls for the equivalent of 1.4lbs of hops per UK barrel.
Last edited by markaberrant on Thu Feb 12, 2009 8:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
markaberrant
Seasoned Drinker
Posts: 1664
Joined: Fri Nov 16, 2007 4:28 pm
Location: Regina, SK

Post by markaberrant »

old faithful wrote:I'll have to try Pliny The Elder.
I have only tried it once, this past fall. I don't remember it being overly bitter (I'd say Stone Ruination and Great Divide Hercules are more bitter), but it had huge aroma and flavour.

old faithful
Bar Fly
Posts: 986
Joined: Fri Oct 10, 2003 8:00 pm

Post by old faithful »

Thanks for that information on Fuller's Chiswick Bitter. One and half pounds per barrel (I'll assume they use whole flowers) is about the average which I've read was typical starting from about 1900. It sounds similar to the low end of hopping for pale ales in the 1800's, and perhaps became the norm after 1900. I would think improved refrigeration and better yeasts enabled lower hopping levels to be used. The three stages of dry hopping is interesting, they want to impart hop aroma more than bitterness clearly and indeed that was one object of hopping for ales.

Well, it sounds like Pliny The Elder or Dogfish Head 60 minutes might reach in hop intensity an export IPA of the 1800's while Chiswick Bitter might be similar to a pale ale or (more likely I think) an AK or light bitter of the time, i.e., one intended for local consumption in England.

Gary

tuqueboy
Bar Fly
Posts: 577
Joined: Thu Sep 14, 2006 11:36 pm
Location: Toronto

Post by tuqueboy »

old faithful wrote:Thanks for that information on Fuller's Chiswick Bitter. One and half pounds per barrel (I'll assume they use whole flowers) is about the average which I've read was typical starting from about 1900. It sounds similar to the low end of hopping for pale ales in the 1800's, and perhaps became the norm after 1900. I would think improved refrigeration and better yeasts enabled lower hopping levels to be used. The three stages of dry hopping is interesting, they want to impart hop aroma more than bitterness clearly and indeed that was one object of hopping for ales.

Well, it sounds like Pliny The Elder or Dogfish Head 60 minutes might reach in hop intensity an export IPA of the 1800's while Chiswick Bitter might be similar to a pale ale or (more likely I think) an AK or light bitter of the time, i.e., one intended for local consumption in England.

Gary
Gary, with all due respect, I'm a little baffled by your seeming certainty on this. As others have pointed out, with difference in storage technique, and efficiency of modern brewing equipment, there's really no way to say with any level of assurance what kind of IBUs there would have been in old beers. Then, of course, there's growing conditions, which of course can play a role. As fun as this discussion has been, to say that these historic IBU counts are anything more than an educated guess is just silly.

old faithful
Bar Fly
Posts: 986
Joined: Fri Oct 10, 2003 8:00 pm

Post by old faithful »

My feelings are based on a lot of things. They are based for example on having read recently that porter in the 1800's should taste "pleasantly bitter" and slightly acid. I can understand what that means, there are many porters today that taste like that. Or that ale - at least not that exported - should be "sweetish or at least free from bitter". You really do get a sense of what things tasted like a long time ago from such things and I try to tie them into more numerical data and make deductions. (Of course we will never know for sure, I did say that earlier). As for variations in storage methods, possibly levels of active ingredients like alpha acids, etc., sure they exist. But they did 100 years ago too, I think. There were so many breweries then, so many local practices... Things change but they are always in flux; on the other hand certain things don't change, I believe. I believe that bitter ale in London today tastes essentially as it did 100 years ago, for example, or rather the representative range of beers available then was similar to that today, with some changes of emphasis (in general more beers today are lower-hopped). I will give further examples (in a week or two when I have more time) from period literature.

Gary

tuqueboy
Bar Fly
Posts: 577
Joined: Thu Sep 14, 2006 11:36 pm
Location: Toronto

Post by tuqueboy »

old faithful wrote: (Of course we will never know for sure, I did say that earlier). Gary
that's the only thing i thought was missing -- didn't realize you'd already mentioned that. it's a fun discussion. i just thought it was good to note that it's all a guess/projection, even if it is very well educated.

User avatar
Derek
Beer Superstar
Posts: 3192
Joined: Fri Oct 22, 2004 2:11 pm
Location: Kelowna, BC
Contact:

Post by Derek »

old faithful wrote:As for variations in storage methods, possibly levels of active ingredients like alpha acids, etc., sure they exist. But they did 100 years ago too, I think.
In terms of IBU's, there can be quite a difference. After 6 months at room temperature, the alpha acids in Goldings will decrease to about 65-80% of their original value. So if you took ~70% as a pessimistic average, after one year you'd be down ~50%. So a 3% AA hop is now only 1.5%.

With vacuum packing and refrigeration/freezing, it's not as bad now.

And now that we know that AA's produce bitterness, we're breeding high alpha hops to get more bang for the buck. A lot of these new hops are well over 10% AA.

Now that said, when hops oxidize they produce different flavours. Some actually become more flavourful as they age (even though the AA decreases & they're less bitter). So using old hops may have produced even more flavour (despite the lower bitterness).

On the malt side of the equation, it wasn't as highly modified, so more complex sugars and proteins made it into the brew. Modern brewers use crystal malt to get a little more body & residual sweetness, but that isn't the same.

BTW, the BJCP puts English IPA's at 40-60 IBU's, which is probably a reasonable estimate:
http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/style14.php

Indeed an interesting discussion.

User avatar
Derek
Beer Superstar
Posts: 3192
Joined: Fri Oct 22, 2004 2:11 pm
Location: Kelowna, BC
Contact:

Post by Derek »

old faithful wrote:porter in the 1800's should taste "pleasantly bitter" and slightly acid. I can understand what that means, there are many porters today that taste like that. Or that ale - at least not that exported - should be "sweetish or at least free from bitter".
This got me thinking about the malt side of the equation, so I dug up my "Pale Ale" book from Brewers publications.

In the early 1800's, apparent attenuation was generally around 60% (leaving plenty of residual sweetness). With the use of the hydrometer & pale ale malt, that quickly increased. There were certainly financial incentives, as you could get more alcohol per pound of grain.

IIRC, by the 1880's the IPA's were up around 75-80% attenuation, which is similar to what they are today.

So as the bitterness-to-gravity ratio's were changing, people's perception of the bitterness was probably changing as well.

I suspect the "pleasantly bitter" porters were the new thing, with mostly pale ale & a little black pattent for colour.

User avatar
markaberrant
Seasoned Drinker
Posts: 1664
Joined: Fri Nov 16, 2007 4:28 pm
Location: Regina, SK

Post by markaberrant »

Derek wrote:
old faithful wrote:I suspect the "pleasantly bitter" porters were the new thing, with mostly pale ale & a little black pattent for colour.
In general, Porter started as 100% brown malt, then slowly added amber, pale and black patent (in that order), then finally became just pale and black patent.

User avatar
Derek
Beer Superstar
Posts: 3192
Joined: Fri Oct 22, 2004 2:11 pm
Location: Kelowna, BC
Contact:

Post by Derek »

markaberrant wrote:In general, Porter started as 100% brown malt, then slowly added amber, pale and black patent (in that order), then finally became just pale and black patent.
Yeah, the original one's may have had attenuation's as low as 50%... and would certainly be considered 'sweet' by today's standards.

old faithful
Bar Fly
Posts: 986
Joined: Fri Oct 10, 2003 8:00 pm

Post by old faithful »

From my reading, there is a distinction between ale sold for quick consumption, which would be little hopped; porter sold for ditto, which was ditto; and beers (ale, porter or other) stored to be served months hence or longer, which were more alcoholic, hoppier, and dryer due to periodic ferments in storage (warm conditioning, the counterpart to lagering if you will).

My point in mentioning the taste note of the porter drinker of the 1800's was simply to suggest that we can sometimes figure out what they were drinking, more or less. He was drinking a vatted porter, one that either was a mix of mild and aged ("stale") porter prepared in the pub or one sent out in that condition by the brewery. He contrasted in the same passage a porter that was "clammy", which I believe was a sweet, mild porter without the zest produced by addition of some aged, vinous beer. I will try to find the citation and reproduce it here.

I think in most cases, the beers we know today are "mild" in the terminology of the 1800's, that is, not meant for long storage and therefore not heavily hopped. The heavy-hopped beers were those that needed to keep a long time. Too short an attenuation risked spoilage via consumption of malt sugars by wild yeasts and bacteria. The old IPAs were dry beers, as e.g., Greene King's modern emulation is, and the Granite's, too, essentially. A rich sweetish "IPA" in my opinion was more what was called a strong mild ale (e.g., XXX), or perhaps a AK or AKK. Remember too gravities were higher on average back then.

Gary

User avatar
Derek
Beer Superstar
Posts: 3192
Joined: Fri Oct 22, 2004 2:11 pm
Location: Kelowna, BC
Contact:

Post by Derek »

Yes, the IPA's were probably always dry. When they were introduced, they probably seemed REALLY dry & bitter.

You might be interested in some of the classic reprint series from beerbooks:
http://www.beerbooks.com/

There's a menu on the lower right of the main page:

Also check out —
...Classic Reprint Series

I just picked up "Louis Pasteur's Studies on Fermentation: The Diseases of Beer, Their Causes, and the Means of Preventing Them".

Hey, I'm a scientist, so I HAD to. :D

It's a high quality reproduction, so hopefully that's an indication of the quality of their other ones (you can check out inside samples online as well). They're not cheap though... especially with shipping.

old faithful
Bar Fly
Posts: 986
Joined: Fri Oct 10, 2003 8:00 pm

Post by old faithful »

Thanks for that, Derek, I will check it out.

I had the good fortune recently to taste Dorothy Goodbody's stout on cask in New York at Gingerman in exemplary condition. Its taste was similar to the taste note from the mid-1800's porter writer I mentioned. Black Katt is pretty close too.

Gary

Post Reply