It would be interesting to see a decent study undertaken whereby IBU’s are analyzed totally individually and separately for additions made with 90, 60, 45, 30, 15, and 1 minute respective remaining boil times for whole cone and T-90 pellet hops sourced from the same hop farm, picked on the same date from the same plants, and with identical weights of addition with regard specifically to AA’s. And of course with identical worts (for which 12 Plato sounds about right for such a test).
The problem with that is that there’s no way to get both pellets and whole hops from the same lots. And that’s been done many years ago…you get about 10% more IBUs from pellets.
I didn’t intend to take a stand on either side of this discussion. I just thought it was cool TOH did a segment on SN.
For what it’s worth, I use mostly, if not all, pellets. They take up less space in the freezer and have always worked well for me. IMHO, YMMV, SWMBO approved and all that jazz.
This guy did a carefully undertaken study which revealed that at only about 25 minutes of boil time, T-90 pellet hops have already released essentially all of the IBU’s to the wort that they are ever going to release. For whole hops you would expect this to require more on the order of from 60 to 90 minutes of boil time. The IBU release for pellets therefore takes place vastly sooner than for whole, and this must be true for the really short boil times as well, making it likely that the old adage of 10% more across the board IBU’s for pellets is clearly obsolete, and for really short duration remaining boil times it may even be more like magnitudes more.
I just revisited this data, and it can be seen that in only 1 minute of boiling a T-90 pellet has already released roughly 62% of its maximum averaged IBU release potential. For the Tinseth calculator this IBU release is computed to be roughly 3% to 4% at 1 minute depending upon who’s implementation of Tinseth one chooses to use. That’s a whopping error for pellets. The magnitude for which is 15X to 20X.
Tinseth never tested a pellet hop. His formula is useless for application to pellets. And the same is likely true for Rager, Daniels, and others.
The Tinseth equation is still the best thing we’ve got, pellets or not. It’s pretty darn accurate to my taste buds, assuming about a 10% difference between it and whole hops. So be very careful not to dismiss Tinseth… because there really is NOTHING ELSE BETTER out there anywhere. Just because it all began with whole hops doesn’t mean you’ll have any idea what the frick you’re doing on bittering with pellets if you blindly throw out Tinseth and just use somebody else’s wild guesses or your own guesses. Tinseth is still “close enough for most intents & purposes” in my experience, which = “good enough” to meet my own satisfaction.
So I guess what I’m saying is, I’m still using Tinseth, dammit, and I’d encourage all of you to still do the same, until/unless you can provide something better, in which case, I still probably won’t believe you. ;D
I’ve used Tinseth to estimate IBU for both pellets and whole hops. Despite all the reasons it shouldn’t work (remember, I’m the guy who broke the news about it) when I had those beers analyzed they were remarkankky close to the estimates. Be careful not to let what you read influence real life. Test it yourself.