AAU Calculations

Brad,
I never used AAU until the other day, so forgive my ignorance on how it worked, I know now. I was entering a recipe into Beersmith the other day & the recipe said to shoot for 12.75 AAU of Northern Brewer hops for bittering. I plugged in all of my batch sizes etc, & then started uping the hop quantity until I reached 12.75 AAU. It ended up that Beersmith said I needed 8oz of 8% hops to get there! The recipe actually only called for 1.5oz. Is this a bug, or different method of calculating AAU?

Thanks,
Danno

whats your batch size?

BeerSmith calculates AAU per gallon of beer (to account for differing batch sizes).

 AAU = %alpha_acid * ozs_of_hops
     (NOTE: can be done for each hop - then summed)

 (AAU per gallon) = AAU / batch_size

However, I should probably make that quite a bit more obvious in the documentation which is addmittedly poorly written in this case.

I apologize for the confusion - and I will certainly correct it in the next version.

Cheers!
Brad

the way I see it if you are following a recipe they tell you the hops they use.

so 12.75AAU /8.5=1.5 oz

if the hops that you have are 8 %AA then you would use

12.75AAU/8=1.59 oz

hops very lot to lot and year to year so they gave you some info to make an adjustment.

However, I should probably make that quite a bit more obvious in the documentation which is addmittedly poorly written in this case.

Click to expand...

Dragging this up from '04 because I just spent some time confused on Brew Smith's calculation.  Personally I'd rather see the standard AAU value (just oz X AA) and not a per gallon value.  However, if for some reason it's felt necessary to leave it in what appears to me to be a non-standard form, then I would definitely add a "/gal" to the display under the hop tool and anywhere else that it's used in this fashion.  Would 'a saved me a half an hour. 

Just one user's opinion; thanks for listening.

Rick