The bar at Widmer’s Gasthaus brewery-pub here in Portland, OR, was fairly crowded as I settled in to relax a bit before going home. The fellow next to me asked what I was drinking, I told him, and he said he was just moving to Portland from Seattle. I genially commented that our (Portland) beer was better, even when it was bad, than Seattle beer, even when that was good. I had been joking, of course, but he agreed.
The interesting thing about Budweiser is that Anheuser-Busch takes better care of the tiny hop increment that actually gets into their beer than any other brewer does on the planet.
I asked if he had tasted Widmer’s newest “collaborator beer” (a beer designed by a homebrewer and then brewed by Widmer at their nearby 10-barrell Rose Garden brewery). He had, and he waxed on enthusiastically about that beer, which I still had not tasted myself.
The beer, Hopgnosis, designed by Brian Butenschoen, is a very strong IPA (India pale ale): 8.5 percent ABV (alcohol by volume), original gravity 18.5 Plato, and a stunning (but well-balanced) 72 IBUs.
His first question was, “What are I-B-Us?”
The Hop Factor
Most of us have no grasp of how the hop factor is measured. IBUs (International Bittering Units) are a measurement of the alpha-resin content in the beer. The alpha-resins are the major flavoring and bittering element in hops as they are incorporated into the beer. According to Ray Daniels (Designing Great Beers), “The IBU is a measure of the concentration of iso-alpha acids, in parts per million (mg/liter) in the finished beer .”
Ray has a formula for understanding this relationship: GU:BU. I call it the “GooBoo” ratio, which is Gravity Units—original specific gravity of the beer, less 1.000—divided by the IBUs. The above-mentioned Hopgnosis, for example, has an original gravity of 18.5-Plato, which is 1.076 specific gravity, less 1.000 = 76. Now divide that by 72 (IBUs) to get the GooBoo at 1.05. The lower the GooBoo, the higher the hop ratio. A well-balanced beer such as Czechvar (formerly Budvar from the Czech Republic) at just over 11-Plato—1.045—and 35 IBUs (45/35) would finish with a GooBoo of 1.3. Nice. Budweiser at 11-Plato—1.044—and only 10.5 IBUs, would have a GooBoo of 4.2 (44/10.5), very high.
The interesting thing about Budweiser is that Anheuser-Busch takes better care of the tiny hop increment that actually gets into their beer than any other brewer does on the planet. They even have their own hop farm in northern Idaho.
Hop vines are perennial climbers (12 to 15 feet high), but it is only the female plant that spawns the precious hop cones. At the end of the growing season (August-September), the hop vines are cut down and mechanically separated from their flower cones. The cones are dried and packaged in huge, 200-pound bales. They may also be presented as concentrated pellets, which look like rabbit pellets if the truth were known, or alternately, as concentrated hop extract.
Without hops, beer would be fairly boring. It was the use of hops in beer in the 15th century that constituted the first great beer revolution, when their use became common on the continent. It was Good King Wenceslaus who declared a death penalty on anyone smuggling the great Saaz hops out of Bohemia (now Czech Republic) and it was England’s King Henry VIII (he of the six wives fame) who made it unlawful to use hops in English ale, a ban that lasted for nearly 300 years.
