I have nine pounds of Pale malt. I’m thinking of making seven gallons of wort with it, for a concentration of right around 1.28 pounds of malt per gallon. I figgered 3% of the nine pounds (4.1 kg) would be a good number for bittering; which would be 123-some grams. I went to a website that showed just half an ounce (14 grams) of Northern Brewer hops would bitter that nine pounds. 123-some grams is around four ounces. How could I be almost 9X wrong? My 3% is an uneducated guess as to how bitter are-- or not bitter-- are any variety of hops. What’s my next step?
The first thing to think of is your gravity - 9lbs in a 7 gallon batch will give you something like a mid 1.030’s gravity at normal efficiencies.
Northern Brewer packs a pretty good punch in terms of bittering potential and at the lower gravity range you’re looking at they’ll be even more efficient. For something that’s “sessionable” I normally use a 1/4-1/2 oz for something that isn’t meant to be super bitter.
Here’s what I found when I asked the search bar, “How much hops for nine pounds of malt?”
Looks like my four-some ounces to bitter would be wildly too much. So how do you eggspurts figger your hops?
I think I want a gravity of around 1.050, although I don’t really understand it. I come-up with the concentrations by dividing the mass of the malt (nine pounds) in the total fermenting volume (seven gallons). The mr. beer pre-hopped malt syrups figger-out at 0.88 pounds per gallon for the 1.87-pound cans, and 1.35 pounds per gallon for the 2.87-pound cans in the 2.125-gallon LBK. I want my beers to be somewhere close to these values, preferably in the 1.25 to 1.32 pounds of syrup per gallon of wort. I’m nowhere near the calibre of you gentlemen. I’m just a flavored-extract guy who can’t tell bowel waste from apple butter less’n I taste-test several heaping tablespoons of each.
I hear a couple of Whoppers calling me to dinner. Must go investigate…
Just to make sure we’re talking the same thing - I was assuming you’re talking 9 lbs of malt grain. Are you talking malt extract? Cause boy that changes things! 
The way I figure the gravity is to look at the sugar potentials and how much I’m going to dissolve into my final wort. So with grain, you can usually figure that max potential will be around 1.038 per pound in a gallon of wort, but you’re not going to get all of that into your beer. Figure that many home brew setups will extract ~70% of the sugar potential of grain that means about 1.027 per pound per gallon. The quick math would then be 9 lbs * 27 = 243. Divide that by your final volume 243 / 7 = 34.7 or 1.0347 (1.035 ish)
Liquid malt extract is about the same potential, but you get it all - so the math becomes 9*38=342, 342/7 = 1.048. Dry malt extract is stronger - 1.044-1.048 depending on the brand so 396-432 points yielding - 1.056-1.062.
For figuring out hop IBU’s, I plug that into a calculator because the actual regression equations for IBU are a little more complicated. (let the computer do the work!)
Yeah, pretty sure he uses liquid extract
I’m not sure you can calculate it that way… hops vary wildly in bitterness. Yakima Valley Hops lists their Northern Brewer at “6.0 - 10.0%” alpha acid; so even within the same variety from the same distributor, some crops will be almost double the strength of others.
Brewer’s Friend has a free web-based recipe calculator. Your best bet is to plug your recipe in there and go with the amount of hops needed for your target bitterness. Assuming you’re talking about liquid malt extract, using a 60-minute boil, and an AA% right in the middle (8%), Brewer’s Friend says 1 oz of Norther Brewer will get you about 22 IBU, 2 oz → 45 IBU, 3 oz → 68 IBU.
We know that calculated IBUs are an imperfect measure, but they give you somewhere to start.
I am just a low-level LME guy; I have zero ambition to ever do all-grain brewing. The two ounces of Northern Brewer giving an estimated 45 IBU is what I want to see. I calculated 1.5% of the 9.039 pounds to be 0.1356 pounds, which is 2.17 ounces. I have an electronic digital scale that can weigh down to 0.10 ounces, so I can stop at 2.10 ounces-- or go for broke and go all the way up to 2.20 ounces. Flavoring hops will be Cascade at 1.0% (0.0904 pounds; 1.45 ounces) of the 9.039 pounds. Aroma will be Cascade at 0.5% of the original mass.
I went back and recalculated the values after it was written in this thread that 3% of the 9-some pounds would be far too bitter. Once I saw the new values, I saw that they were more in-line with what we see in recipes for Pales and IPAs. I’d like to extend my thanks to those who corrected my errors before I committed them…
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