An IBU by any other name would taste just as bitter… or would it?
That’s the question that we set out to discover recently with the help of our volunteer IGORs.
For this experiment, the goal was to determine how closely IBU estimates in a recipe match the actual finished beer. Whether homebrewers use a spreadsheet they put together themselves, a pencil and paper, or brewing software, everyone sets an IBU target and then tries to figure out how to hit it. But variations in hops and brewing processes can mess with the actual figures, making them diverge from the predictions. We set out to see how close the finished beer was to the prediction of bitterness.
What’s an IBU
What is an International Bittering Unit? Colloquially we think of it as a measure of how bitter a beer is.
That’s kinda wrong.
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Cherry nose with a light pale malt background for the nose. Almost perfumy. Tis pleasing an inviting. 
More and more, lately, I seem to be faced with reminding people of producers whose names have become submerged a bit in that vast sea of the New and Buzz-worthy – those breweries and wineries that you probably liked at one time but trampled a bit in your understandable rush to try and explore new things. That’s not a criticism. I do it, too. Everybody does it. What’s new is always more interesting than what’s been done, seen, tasted, experienced before. That’s human nature but human nature also dictates, as time passes, that we read a name online or in a magazine or on TV that prompts a little spark to crackle inside our synapses, causing us to mutter, “Oh, yeah…”
Seven years ago, I would have taken a Full Sail beer if one was handed to me but the name was not at all in the front of my mind. I had tasted everything and it was all enjoyable but none of it – except for that majestic barrel-aged Imperial Stout – moved my meter much at all.
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