Page 1 of 1

Request for changes re 'First Wort Hopping'

Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2009 12:45 pm
by billvelek
Currently, selecting "First Wort (Kettle)" as the 'stage' for a particular hop addition doesn't seem to do anything at all except change the label in the ingredients panel; the 'Boil' time doesn't change or blank-out nor do the line-graphs on the right, and "Bitterness" is uneffected. This can lead to confusion, especially for a newbie who might not know that FWH changes the "perceived" bitterness for an addition, or that they need to set their "Boil" time to approximately 20 minutes despite that those hops are in the kettle for the full duration of the boil. Pro-Mash apparently attempts to compensate for this by permitting a user to set some value to compensate for FWH, and obviously BTP should, as well. The settings for 'First Wort Hop' utilization should therefore be user adjustable for a couple of reasons:
1. Not everyone's palate is the same and the 'perceived' bitterness in any given beer will not always be the same to everyone;
2. This could _possibly_ be affected to some degree by such variables as the beer style and overall bitterness, and perhaps even by the particular variety of hops used (I haven't experimented with it enough).

Now, after giving this some more thought, if I am going to be able to adjust it to the equivalent of a 20 minute boil for one particular recipe, and 18' ... or 24' ... et cetera for other recipes, then the user setting ought to be stored for each individual recipe -- not only for future use of that recipe but also for purposes of transferring the recipe to other brewers. I also share slothrob's concern -- especially since I will often brew three different recipes in the same session -- that having the time displayed could cause me (especially after a couple of brews) to add a hop addition 20 minutes before end of boil because I'd forgotten that it was a FWH which had already been added. So the time should blank out because that info isn't needed during brewing, but the info (the user adjusted equivalent time) should be displayed somewhere such as perhaps under the 'Analysis' or 'Summary' tabs for the bottom panel.

For purposes of this feature request, as noted in another thread, you might need to change the label of "Bitterness" under the 'Style' tab to something like "Perceived Bitterness" or "Bitterness (Real or Perceived)" or something like that. Maybe with a bubble note to explain this whenever a user hoovers over the label. Jeff, thanks for suggesting that my concerns be posted in this forum.

Cheers.

Bill Velek