This highlights an interesting point: because ‘IBU’ is a flawed system (insert Denny here), and because a hop’s alpha acids can vary from farm to farm or year to year, shouldn’t there be a more accurate way to describe a recipe so it is useful to another brewer using a different AA of the same hop or a different hop altogether? IOW similar to fermentables being described in % of total which is easily transferred from one brewery with certain Brewhouse characteristics to another brewery with different characteristics, shouldn’t hops be described in Alpha Acid Units like Charlie does in ‘the Joy’. ...or at least list the weight along with AA of the hops used so a translation can be made? I wonder why that didn’t take off? ...seems much more useful to me. Kinda like Renner coordinates.
It would be so much easier to list “2.5 AAU of x hop at 30 min” (.5 oz of 5% AA ‘x hop’) in a recipe so the user could substitute .71 oz of his/her 3.5% AA ‘x hop’. I think BYO had an article on that.
An example would be the recent English Bitter I brewed. BeerSmith defaulted to 11% AA for Target hops. But the Target I received was 3.5% AA. I did a little cypherin and determined the AAU then did some guzintas to get the weight I needed to get the same effect. What I didn’t have was the AA of Target hops the original author used. He just listed x amount of Target. Who knows if his hops were 11% AA or not. Bummer.
(Edited for readability)
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