Beat The Hop Shortage With No-chill.

[Thirsty Boy]

I propose an experiment - looking for feedback on the experiment design please.

This weekend (or next depending on my time) I will brew two very small extract batches.

They both will be - 1.0L in volume with 0.13kg of DME for an OG of 1.050 - boiled for 60mins

Batch A will get the following hop additions which are appropriate for a "hoppy" APA

Cascade (6% AA pellets) 1g @60min
Cascade (6% AA pellets) 2g @10min
Cascade (6% AA pellets) 3g @Flame Out

Chilled in a water bath and transferred to a 1.25l PET bottle for fermentation (with 10ml of whatever yeast slurry I have on the stir plate at the time)

Batch B will get the following hop additions

Kettle Hopping - None
Cascade (6% AA pellets) 3.5g @ Cube Hopped

The wort will be transferred to a 1L milk bottle NC cube - this cube will be placed in a hot water bath and it rate of cooling will be controlled. This is to compensate for the fact that such a small NC cube will cool down much faster than a full sized cube. I will control the temp with an electric hotplate and a PID. Every ten minutes for the first 2hours I will give the cube a shake to agitate the hops, and I will drop the set-point of the controller by 2C. So hopefully after two hours the temp will be around 70-75. After that I will just let it cool at ambient and I will stop shaking it.

Once cool to pitching temp it will get the same amount of the same yeast as Batch A (I will hold off inoculating batch A, so they are both pitched at the same time)

According to promash - Batch A will have a bitterness of 27.3IBU and Batch B is calculated as though it were a 25min addition and the 3.5g would give 27.8 IBU if that holds true.

The savings on hops are (6-3.5)/6x100 = 41.7% so if the bitterness aroma and flavour are comparable - that would make it worth it

Both batches will be fermented side by side at ambient and bottled into 3 x 330ml bottles and will set up a few brewers as a tasting panel to compare them. If I do a bit of wrangling - I might even be able to get the beers tasted by a pro-brewer from the tasting panel at work and have them analyzed for ISO levels.

I realise that I should really do a Batch C with nothing but a 27.3 IBU bittering addition as a control - and I might get enthusiastic enough to do that... but probably not.

Any suggestions to improve the design of the experiment??

Cheers

TB

PS - I will borrow Spills' 0.01g hop scales.. so accuracy levels should be fine

 

[therook]

Great work Thirsty, i will eagerly wait for the outcome.

This is a very interesting topic.

Rook

 

[lagers44]

Hi Thirsty

I've had a re-read of the article I linked to & have taken this excerpt from it. Paragraph 2 is where I read that you need more late addition hops for bittering than for early additions ( i've hi-lighted in red ).

I can't get my head around the fact that you can use less hops later to forgo bittering additions early on. That is what you are saying isn't it ?

Maybe I'm just set in my ways , but your experiment will tell.


"Calculating the Numbers

To use this technique in your own beers, replace all or part of your traditional bittering hop additions with additions at 20 minutes or less left in the boil, increasing the amount of hops to get the same IBUs. Replace all of your bittering hops for an intense hop flavor. Replace a lesser amount to just enhance the hop flavor.

While isomerization is limited during a short boil, hop utilization isn't linear across the boil time. You don't need 6 times as much hops for a 10 minute boil as compared to a 60 minute boil. Assuming you're getting about 30% utilization at 60 minutes, you'll get around 17% at 20 minutes, 14% at 15 minutes, and around 10% at 10 minutes. So you'll need to approximately double or triple your hops to get an equivalent bitterness. If you're already calculating your bitterness with software or some other tool, use the same method to make this adjustment.

It is said that most formulas for calculating bitterness are not as reliable for very late hop additions, but don't let that stop you. It is quite difficult to detect a 5 IBU difference in most moderately bittered beers and impossible in a highly bittered beer.

In beers with significant bitterness (50+ IBU), you might still want to add a charge of high alpha hops early in the boil. If you don't, the amount of hop flavor can completely overwhelm some beers. "

 

[Kai]

Kai - Cool, someone who does it regularly. Mate you are a man with brewing knowledge out the proverbial. You count the cube addition as equal to a 5-10min boil addition - what do you think the differences between an addition to a kettle and an addition to hot but not boiling wort in a cube are? My guesses would be temperature and agitation. The cube is going to be hot - but less than 100C - even if not a lot less over a period of an hour or so. But I think the main difference is probably the agitation. Hops in a kettle are getting swished about the place fairly vigorously; and in the cube they are just sitting on the bottom. Kind of like comparing jiggling or dangling a teabag. (this is also a difference between a cube and a whirlpool addition) If the object of the game was to increase the utilisation of the hops in the cube - do you think that shaking the cube up every now and again while it was still nice and hot, might increase the bitterness extracted? And if so, do you think it could get up to the levels of a 25-30min addition?? That seems to be the point at which you would actually be able to use cube hopping as a "hop saving" method.

I'd be really interested in what you think

Thirsty

The teabag analogy is a good one, agitation is definitely an important factor but I'd be wary of shaking a cube up too much while it's got hot wort in it. Flipping it around several times in the first half hour or so might have an effect, and that's something I do anyway so all the surfaces get some hot wort contact. I reckon you'd definitely get more BUs if you did that but still less than you would in the kettle. To be honest though my 5-10 minute estimate is just a stab in the dark, though now I am tempted to brew up a side-by side and measure the IBUs at work.

 

[Stuster]

now I am tempted to brew up a side-by side and measure the IBUs at work.

Sounds like a great idea, Kai. What else important are you doing there? h34r:

 

[PostModern]

now I am tempted to brew up a side-by side and measure the IBUs at work.

Science is NOTHING without measurement.

 

[Kai]

Sensory evaluation is still a valid scientific method though!

 

[Adamt]

Valid method yes, definitely not enough for a convincing argument though.

 

[PostModern]

Sensory evaluation is still a valid scientific method though!

Good enough for government work.

 

[dig]

Valid method yes, definitely not enough for a convincing argument though.

Aah, but surely the genius is in the observation. Who do we remember, Darwin for his theory or Mendel for proving it?

 

[dig]

Expanding on the tea bag analogy, you could get a bit of tannin pickup in the cube that may not complex with peptides the way it would in the kettle. Might lend a puckering astringent edge to the bitterness.

 

[dr K]

I am not all together certain that mendels observations of sweet peas proved Darwins theory of evolution.
In many ways it could be argued that Mendels observations were more in tune with the Lamarckian view of the world, oddly enough this actually does have an indirect connection with brewing as there were a number of of theories about in the 1800's about fermentation which were polished off by Pasteur.
But that, in itself, is another story.

K

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Valid method yes, definitely not enough for a convincing argument though.

Sensory evaluation is in this instance not only "good enough" it is the obvious choice.

This experiment isn't about numbers - its about impressions.

Does the beer taste as bitter?
Is there a comparable level of Hop flavour and/or aroma?
Are there any flavours off or otherwise that are present in one brew but not the other. Are they desirable or incidental?

I could (and might) have the actual levels of IBUs measured. But do they matter?? If a reasonable selection of brewers taste the beers and come up with conclusions - thats what counts. Beer is about drinking and tasting by people, not by gas chromatographs.

To make the "qualitative" analysis a little more acceptable to people with doubts - at least two of the tasters will be (if I can wrangle it anyway) formally trained in the sensory evaluation of beer, at least one of those with a set of quantitative flavour threshold levels to his name.

The rest will be homebrewers and my wife - and they are more important to me than the other tasters, because they are the target audience. Friends and family are the people who drink our beers. Its how they interpret the flavours that is the most important result of this experiment.

TB

 

[troydo]

need a proper blind 3 cup tasting

 

[PostModern]

Sensory evaluation is in this instance not only "good enough" it is the obvious choice.

This experiment isn't about numbers - its about impressions.

Does the beer taste as bitter?
Is there a comparable level of Hop flavour and/or aroma?
Are there any flavours off or otherwise that are present in one brew but not the other. Are they desirable or incidental?

I do agree with you to a very large extent but some of these factors may be swayed by uncontrolled variables. Pitching rates, fermentation temps, aeration levels, etc might differ even when the batches are brewed side by side.

I think measured AA would be good just to validate what the trained palates pick up, although of course there's nothing like a trained palate to tell you how a beer tastes.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

I do agree with you to a very large extent but some of these factors may be swayed by uncontrolled variables. Pitching rates, fermentation temps, aeration levels, etc might differ even when the batches are brewed side by side.

I think measured AA would be good just to validate what the trained palates pick up, although of course there's nothing like a trained palate to tell you how a beer tastes.

Hopefully you are only right on one count about the uncontrollable variables. Aeration. I don't really have any way to be sure about that. I will be fermenting in 1.25L PET bottles and I will shake them exactly the same number of times - but thats hardly a "controlled" method, its at best just not completely random.

As for pitching rates - exactly 10ml (drawn off via syringe from the same stirred yeast slurry) will be inoculated into the wort, and I doubt if there is any way to be significantly more accurate than that.

Ferm temps - they will both be fermented in the same water bath with a pump recirculating the water to keep temp homogeneous.

This stuff is hard to control in full scale batches, but I only have a litre in each fermentor. Hell I've even gone to a bit of effort to get the same sort of 1.25L bottles so the fermentors have the same geometry.

I will try to get the ISO measured, but I will have to kiss up to the Lab people more than I like... damn white coaters

Troydo - a blind triangle test is only really any good to determine if samples differ from each other - which might be useful if they end up close together in attributes, might start with a triangle. But to be perfectly honest, I expect them to be fairly different, so a triangle test wont tell us too much. I will consult with the trainer at my next sensory evaluation session and ask him what the most appropriate style of test is. Its his job to know, so I'll just do what he says.

TB

PS: Beers are brewed and just waiting for the NC version to cool down to pitching temps before I pitch both samples. Yeast is a re-cultured yeast from a bottle of Three Ravens Blonde. So its an Alt yeast.

 

[Tony]

Gee your going to get thirsty brewing 1 liter at a time.

did i miss the point :blink:

I recon you will get some aroma but less bitterrness in the no chill bottle.

I read here once that once the wort cools to 90 deg...... the hop utilization drops to 10%.

I dont know that as a fact though........... only what i read on here so it could be hogwash.

cheers and keep us updated on results.

 

[pablo_h]

Any results TB?
I just started using the no chill cube method

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Actually - only the other day I remembered this experiment. The two 1.25L coke bottles that contained teh brews have been sitting at the back of my fridge for a couple of weeks and I forgot about em.

So I revived teh experiment by launching another one.

I bought 6 of those sediment reducing things that were on the New Inventors - the ones that according to the "consensus" are pretty much pointless even if they can be made to work. Transferred the experiment beers to 2 x 800ml twist top bottles along with a scoop of priming sugar. And twisted on the sedex tops.

They are now carbing up and clearing out ready for a tasting session.

The sedex doovalackies are perfect for this - I used a miserable alt yeast that just wont stay out of suspension and the volume is so low that the notion of filtering is just silly. I really hope they work because they will be perfect for small batches of sparkling mead.

The samples I had of the hop experiment beer - they seemed to have roughly the same bitterness. The hop character/aroma/flavour etc, will have to wait for a carbonated sample though.

Updates in a week or two

Thirsty

 

[Quintrex]

Actually - only the other day I remembered this experiment. The two 1.25L coke bottles that contained teh brews have been sitting at the back of my fridge for a couple of weeks and I forgot about em.

So I revived teh experiment by launching another one.

I bought 6 of those sediment reducing things that were on the New Inventors - the ones that according to the "consensus" are pretty much pointless even if they can be made to work. Transferred the experiment beers to 2 x 800ml twist top bottles along with a scoop of priming sugar. And twisted on the sedex tops.

They are now carbing up and clearing out ready for a tasting session.

The sedex doovalackies are perfect for this - I used a miserable alt yeast that just wont stay out of suspension and the volume is so low that the notion of filtering is just silly. I really hope they work because they will be perfect for small batches of sparkling mead.

The samples I had of the hop experiment beer - they seemed to have roughly the same bitterness. The hop character/aroma/flavour etc, will have to wait for a carbonated sample though.

Updates in a week or two

Thirsty

Oi thirsty, it's been a long few weeks any updates?
I've been quite interested in this idea
Q