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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