Talk to me about hop bursting

[snarf7]

This is for an 5 gallon NEIPA brew, I haven't done one in almost 2 years but that's what the wife requested
So I want to try doing one with no boil hops, do all my hops at flameout or thereafter as it cools with the immersion chiller.
This will be the first time i've ever omitted boil-time hops completely. I have tried hop standing/whirlpooling at around 170-180F with different degrees of success before but never all post boil
I'm going with a combo of Sabro + El Dorado for my hops, shooting for 30ish IBUs.

Can anyone recommend a schedule that has worked well for them in post boil that I could adapt? <My initial thought was to dump one charge of hops right at flameout to get my bitterness and another at 170F to get my aroma but having no experience I have no idea how much to use, how quickly to cool it down to 170F etc

much obliged gang!

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

Bru*phy: hop stand vs 20 min boil addition with lab measured IBUs.

Basic Brewing: November 1, 2018 - IBUs vs Wort Gravity and Hop Stand Temps (link to 2019 episodes) has some additional preliminary data.

Occasionally, @dmtaylor posts a model & equation he came up with. I have one from early 2020 in my notes. Maybe he will have some spare hobby time to post his most current ideas here.

 

[dmtaylor]

As hinted by @BrewnWKopperKat, following is a summary of my two methods for calculating IBUs from hop stand a.k.a. whirlpool where the hops are left hanging around at about 160-180 F for about 10-30 minutes typically. You can either: (A) use the back-of-napkin rule of 6's in top half of this thing, which is based on my analysis of data from James Spencer of Basic Brewing, and hop utilization factors from John Palmer, and attempting to emulate the results from the Tinseth equation; OR (B) you can use the simplified square root equation at the bottom of the page, also based on the same but makes the calculations simpler for anyone using a spreadsheet. I think you'll find it very accurate and useful for determining approximate IBUs from hop stand / whirlpool additions.

 

[yowzers]

This isn't technical, but I make a fantastic hop burst pale ale that uses 0.5 oz of Warrior for a 15 min boil and then 6 to 8 oz of hops in the boil kettle for 30 min immediately after flameout. I leave them in while I cool it and remove the hop bag after 45 min total.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

my analysis of data from James Spencer of Basic Brewing

Did you include the data from the BBR episode I mentioned in #2? (If so, i can stop mentioning the show and link your reply instead).

 

[dmtaylor]

Did you include the data from the BBR episode I mentioned in #2? (If so, i can stop mentioning the show and link your reply instead).

Indeed, there was a whole string of BBR episodes that I analyzed, I'm not sure if that exact episode was but probably. My method is not exact but typically comes pretty damned close to real data, like I say, within ~10 IBUs at most, and often within just 5 IBUs.

 

[dmtaylor]

I'm going with a combo of Sabro + El Dorado for my hops, shooting for 30ish IBUs.

Can anyone recommend a schedule that has worked well for them in post boil that I could adapt? <My initial thought was to dump one charge of hops right at flameout to get my bitterness and another at 170F to get my aroma but having no experience I have no idea how much to use, how quickly to cool it down to 170F etc

much obliged gang!

And now, since I haven't addressed the above yet specifically, here's my thoughts on this:

Both El Dorado and Sabro average about 15% alpha acids. Yay, that makes my math a little easier. You'll need to adjust later for the exact alpha for each when you buy them.

I know from experience with both, that Sabro is an extremely aggressive hop, and El Dorado is pretty much the opposite, takes an awful lot to get good aroma and flavor out of it. So I would suggest using them in a ratio of about 3:1 ED:Sabro.

Now let's see how much total you would need at 15% alpha to get about 30 IBUs in 5 gallons...

Hmm... let's figure a 20-minute hop stand, which is about the same IBUs as if boiled for 10 minutes. My "magic factor" for 10 minute boil or 20 minute hop stand = 1.6. So, we need X ounces times 15(%) times 1.6 = 30 IBUs. Solving for X, we need about 1.25 ounces of hops total.

Well, 1.25 ounces is not enough for a good IPA, honestly. You want to be using at least 4 ounces for enough of a hop punch.

So let's instead try reducing the hop stand time to say, 5 minutes instead of 20 minutes. Cool. So then the "magic factor" for 5 minute hop stand is about 0.6. Again, solving the above math for 0.6 instead of 1.6, the result is... 3.33 ounces. That's pretty close to my suggested goal of 4 ounces. If you go ahead and use 4 ounces with a 5-minute hop stand, I would estimate your IBUs being close to 4 times 15 times 0.6 = 36 IBUs. How does that sound? If you still want closer to 30 IBUs, you could reduce the hop stand to like just 3 minutes, but wow that seems very short.

And using my other square root formula, let's see where that comes out... If you only do a hop stand with no other additions, we can skip the first half of the formula and just use square root of (2 times Hop Stand time) divided by 5 gallons, times the ounces and alpha. So that's 4 times 15 times sqrt(2*5) all divided by 5. That's.... 38 IBUs. Or change the hop stand time from 5 minutes to 3 minutes, take the square root of 6 then instead of 10, and you get... 29 IBUs.

Now.... since we decided we wanted to use 4 ounces total hops in a 3:1 ratio... that would be 3 ounces El Dorado, and 1 ounce Sabro. That would be my final recommendation. All as Hop Stand only for 3 to 5 minutes. If you leave the hop stand for any longer than 5 minutes, you're going to start ratcheting up IBUs click click click click until they hit the ceiling of 90 IBUs. So, if you really truly only want about 30 IBUs, you must limit the hop stand time as I recommend.

That's a good example of how to use my methods. Hope it helps you or anybody. Cheers all.

 

[snarf7]

Wow this is awesome dude, thanks so much, I'm a programmer so I'll probably coalsece this into a little app I can use to play around with numbers easily. The only thing I don't see here is what is your temp for the hop stand? Are you assuming a constant temp range or just accounting for dropping hops right at flameout then the time in HS determines what final temp it ultimately falls to? That's the only flaw I see here is that external conditions can change things quite dramatically. Consider two different boils in my driveway

Scenario 1: Its 100F July day, I finish my boil, I drop the hops, let is stand for 30 mins covered...final temp might be 180F

Scenario 2: it's -10F in January, I finish my boil, I drop the hops let it stand for 30 mins uncovered...final temp might be 100F

 

[dmtaylor]

Wow this is awesome dude, thanks so much, I'm a programmer so I'll probably coalsece this into a little app I can use to play around with numbers easily. The only thing I don't see here is what is your temp for the hop stand? Are you assuming a constant temp range or just accounting for dropping hops right at flameout then the time in HS determines what final temp it ultimately falls to? That's the only flaw I see here is that external conditions can change things quite dramatically. Consider two different boils in my driveway

Scenario 1: Its 100F July day, I finish my boil, I drop the hops, let is stand for 30 mins covered...final temp might be 180F

Scenario 2: it's -10F in January, I finish my boil, I drop the hops let it stand for 30 mins uncovered...final temp might be 100F

Great question. I have no hard data to provide, but my assumption is that the amount of time spent at temperatures anywhere around 150 to 190 F is what really counts as part of the "hop stand" time. Below that range, there are still some impacts but it all really centers around about 170-180 F, that's about the standard guidance online all over for hop stands / whirlpools. So for your Scenario 1, if you start chilling right away after 30 minutes, you'll quickly fall below the ~150 F mark. Whereas with Scenario 2, you've really only done a "hop stand" for roughly 10-15 minutes, after which the temperature has already fallen too far to have much impact. But even for just those few first minutes, the impact can be very significant, as discussed previously.

 

[snarf7]

OK, I think I'll take your advice and experiment with this a bit.

I think I'll treat my Sabro as my bittering and drop them right at flameout...maybe scale it back to 3/4 oz
Let it cool to 175F then drop 3 oz of El Dorado

I have an inkling this will be pretty good but we'll see once fermentation is winding down I'll give it taste and then probably dry hop it for 3 days