AAU - Alpha Acid Units

[bzwrxbz]

I have come across a recipe that specs out the hops in AAU.

Is there a way to make the calculation in BTP? (I know it is a super easy one to make, but I can be lazy)

Also, is there a way to possibly incorporate this into the display?

cheers!

[billvelek]

Try the menu bar command: 'Session | Utilization | Custom | Edit | Use'. I don't know if that will help or not; other than that, I have no idea.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

[bzwrxbz]

AAU is a number that gives an idea of bitterness... i think AAU = AA% * ounces.

The only reason i ask is because BYO gives some of their recipe hop additions in AAU (as well as normal) numbers, and it would be helpful to see this value on the display so I can maintain individual hop bitterness values when making AA percentage substitutions, or hop substitutions.

Feature Request: Perhaps in the third graphical column for the hops, there could be an "AAU" graph instead of the "mg/L" that I currently see.

cheers!

[ColoradoBrewer]

Feature Request: Perhaps in the third graphical column for the hops, there could be an "AAU" graph instead of the "mg/L" that I currently see.cheers!

I was just about to post this myself, until I read bswrxbz's post. So thanks for bringing it up. Mg/L is totally meaningless to me so I'd really like to see bitterness contributions displayed as AAU's or even IBU's. Perhaps it could be made an option under preferences.

[just-cj]

Isn't mg/l the same as IBUs?

[slothrob]

Sure enough, 1 IBU is 1 mg/L or 1 ppm of iso-alpha-acid in a solution.

[bzwrxbz]

Perhaps BTP should allow the user to choose whether "IBU", "mg/L", or "AAU" should be shown in the graph.

I did not know mg/L was IBU... I learn something new everyday.

cheers!

[ColoradoBrewer]

I too was not aware of that. Thanks cj and slothrob for filling us in. However, I would hazard a guess that there are a lot of homebrewers that also aren't aware of it, so I think it should be changed.

[slothrob]

I only know because I asked the same question elsewhere about 3 months ago. I always forget the ppm thing, as well, and have to "recalculate" it every time I want to make a conversion, which is why I mentioned that.

Frankly, I don't know why the hobby doesn't use a universally meaningful unit like mg/mL instead of the odd IBU term that means the same thing. ppm just seems archaic to me, like measuring tubing in cubits, I have no idea why that's used by anyone. But, the hobby uses IBU, so I'd agree that IBU would mean more to more people than mg/mL.

[ColoradoBrewer]

Frankly, I don't know why the hobby doesn't use a universally meaningful unit like mg/mL instead of the odd IBU term that means the same thing. ppm just seems archaic to me, like measuring tubing in cubits, I have no idea why that's used by anyone. But, the hobby uses IBU, so I'd agree that IBU would mean more to more people than mg/mL.

Now that I know what it means I agree that mg/L makes more sense, but I wasn't even aware of it as a measure of bitterness until I started using BTP. The literature that I've read always uses AAU or IBU, and the hops I buy always have the bitterness indicated as AAU's. I don't know how we would go about getting authors and suppliers to change so I guess we're stuck with AAU and IBU.

[slothrob]

I don't know how we would go about getting authors and suppliers to change so I guess we're stuck with AAU and IBU.

Exactly, sometimes you're stuck with the accepted methods, even if they seem a bit silly. Of course that's coming from someone who spends all day thinking of things in terms of mg/mL, other people never have to think about concentration and IBU correlates to bitterness for them.