Focus | Bitterness Why understanding the human side of bitter will help you understand your customers better

BREWING BITTERNESS AND BETTER BEER

UNDERSTANDING THE HUMAN SIDE OF BITTER WILL HELP YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS BETTER WHICH LEADS TO BETTER BITTER SALES. VELO MITROVICH REPORTS.

While this sounds like the start of a ‘priest, minister, and rabbi’ joke, it’s a true story. A Californian walks into a London pub and asks for the most hoppy IPA available – tap, bottled or canned, it doesn’t matter as long as the bitternes is there. “If you want hops, then try this,” says the barman, with a sly expression like he just snuck a Ghost Chili into the tourist’s beer.

Back at the table, the Californian stares at his beer. “What’s up?” asks his friends. “I asked for a hoppy IPA, I don’t know what this is supposed to be. A lager?” Some beer drinkers talk about IBUs, hoppy-bitter flavours, like they’re 13-yearold boys discussing the hair on their neither regions, with ‘more’ always seen as better. But in Europe is there really a demand or desire for an IPA that would win applause on the US West Coast? In a move some saw as pure arrogance and ignorance, San Diego’s ultra-hop – or ultra-hip – brewery Stone decided it was going to bring “real” beer back to Germany by building a California-style brewery in Berlin.

“We started Stone in 1996 because we weren’t OK with the status quo of beer in the US,” said Greg Koch, Stone executive chairman and co-founder. “We felt Americans deserved better, so we brewed it for them. When we saw much of Germany stuck in a similar status quo of cheap beer, we were convinced we could help. As it stands now, German beer prices are among the cheapest in Western Europe. As most of us know from life, the best things are rarely the cheapest.

“Amazing beer is being brewed by amazing brewers all over the country [Germany]. Unfortunately, according to the stats, most Germans are still ignoring these wonderful beers and buying the cheap stuff. We invested a significant portion of a decade and significant millions [$30m] building Stone Berlin. And it didn’t work out. These things hurt and these things happen. This one happened. And this one hurts a lot.” On opening day in 2016, Stone Brewery created a pyramid out of German beers, lifted a stone above it with a crane, and let it go, symbolically smashing Germany’s beer industry. Three years later, Stone fled back to the States with its tail between its legs, its brewery a flop. So, why brew high IBU hoppy beers now? While Germany has an increasing number of craft breweries which have bitter IPAs, in France you’re more likely to

find beer being flavoured by sweet fruit syrup. The UK and Ireland claim to have hoppy IPAs, but what one person calls ‘hoppy’, another would call weak tea. And on the Planet of Belgium where beer is brewed under a different sun, IPA doesn’t translate.

However, the world beer industry has been undergoing a massive upheaval over the last four to five months and it hasn’t been a pretty site. Craft breweries need to create excitement and conversation; they need to get bums on seats and lips around a glass or bottle. In achieving this, breweries are most definitely in the driver’s seat this year in commanding decent hop prices. Even before the virus hit, figures were being tallied and 2019’s hop harvest was one of the biggest on record. While in 2018 hops were a bugger to buy, 2020 was shaping up to be the complete opposite. Now, in the UK some hop farmers think they might be going out of business due to the amount of hops on the market.

Add to this abudence of hops is the lack of brewing which has occurred due to pubs, taprooms and restaurants being closed. If you want to get crazy with hops, there will never be a better time to stretch your brewing views and add some bitter into your line-up. Through our own fault of not educating customers, most of the time they equate IBU solely with hop flavour. This whole bitterness argument has been going on for each and every year since the 1990s when craft brewing crawled out from hobbyists’ basements, and into a proper commercial kettle. The answers that were lacking then, are still lacking today.

Since then, like chilli-heads making hotter and hotter hot sauce, some brewers seem to think that the more bitter, hop taste you can cram in that bottle or can, the better. But, if you’re trying to sell beer instead of creating headlines, is this such a good move? There is a reason why some of us like bitter and a reason why some of us hate it. There is a reason why most times you’re doing your customers no favours by listing IBUs, and there is a reason for that matter why IBUs might have had their day. But let’s forget bitterness for a second and talk about chillies.

Back in 1912, Wilbur Scoville was a pharmacologist who was working for America’s largest pharmaceutical company, Parke-Davis. Scoville had a problem. He was trying to improve one of the company’s products, a cream called ‘Heet’, which was used to treat sprained or sore muscles and is still around today. At the time, the active ingredient in Heet was capsaicin, the key chemical that makes chilli peppers hot. Parke-Davis, however, didn’t always use the same type of pepper to extract the capsaicin and in different chillies, the ‘heat’ varied. If you’re trying to make a consistent product, you need some sort of way of measuring this – it’s not enough to bite into a chilli, count the drops of sweat on your forehead, and say one variety is hotter than another. According to John McQuaid in his book Tasty, Scoville’s method was to dry out peppers and then dissolve a specific weight of dried pepper in oil in order to extract the heat compounds. The extract was then diluted in sugar water and given to a panel of five tasters. The amount of sugar needed to make the heat undetectable to a majority of tasters determined the Scoville rating of the pepper.

While for Parke-Davis the whole capsaicin thing didn’t work out – it now uses an extract derived from wintergreen – Scoville’s scale has stayed with us, although now the measuring process is considerably more technical than finding five mates who like chillies.

Why do we like the sensation of our mouth on fire in the first place? The burning sensation capsaicin induces in the mouth leads the body to produce endorphins as a countermeasure. With the Scoville scale, you know exactly how much heat you’re subjecting yourself to, and this has led to pepper-heads to go after ever-hotter sensations. Hearing that cash register ring, plant breeders and sauce makers are happy to oblige them and they have come up with hotter and hotter chillies. How hot? Your bog-standard jalapeno, which pretty much any of us can eat without our faces turning too red, is anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000 Scoville heat units (SHU). The Carolina Reaper chilli, developed by Ed Currie’s PuckerButt Pepper Company, boasts 2.2 million SHU, making it around 200 times hotter than a jalapeno.

But, that’s chump-change. By cooking down and concentrating a chilli’s capsaicin content and using such chilli-blasters as the Reaper, the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, or the Ghost Pepper, sauce makers have come out with blends that have anywhere from 6 million to 9 million SHUs.

While sauces such as Black Mamba, Mad Dog or Blistered Bunghole all have truly impressive SHU units, does anyone actually use them on their vindaloos, or do they sit on a collector’s shelf in original unopened wrappers next to the asbestos gloves?

“Ass-destroying hot sauces – hell and death are also popular themes – mostly taste like shit and are usually designed solely with heat in mind, never flavour, and consuming them is a party trick where the trick is trying not to die,” writes Ashwin Rodrigues for MEL.

The reality is, the top five sellers by volume in the States, range from rather tame 1,000 to 5,000 SHUs. If you want to get some publicity, you go hotter than hot. If you want to make money, you go sensible.

At this point the thought might be occurring to you that there are similarities between SHU and International Bitterness Unit (IBU), especially how we perceive and use the scale.

Like the problem of trying to produce a consistent product that uses capsaicin, beer makers needed a way of producing a consistent tasting beer and in the mid 1950s scientists started working on a way of measuring the amount of ‘bitterness’ that was in a beer.

In 1955, two researchers extracted the bitter substance from beer by using chloroform and then weighing the dried extract. This was about as easy and fast as it sounds, and this process was further complicated by the need to measure unhoped wort, which was needed to provide a base number to all of this.

This article will not even attempt to go into the chemistry of the methods then used to make the process more accurate, except to say that the process was refined by taking iso-octane extracts of the acidified beer and diluting them with methyl. This produced an alkaline that could be measured by ultraviolet light and those results were agreed upon by a tasting panel.

Faster approaches were developed, which did away with having to make the extract alkaline and instead relied on a higher ultraviolet wavelength to measure bitterness.

All was then well? Far from it. Not only were there different methods being used to determine bitterness, it also varied on which side of the Pond you were on.

Finally in 1965 there was a meeting of minds between the Analysis Committee of the European Brewery Convention and the Isohumulone Sub-committee of the American Society of Brewing Chemists. A standard test method was agreed upon, along with a bitterness scale.

But. There is always a ‘but’.

Europeans wanted to call the units of bitterness International Bitterness Units, while Americans were holding fast to Isohumulone Bitterness Unit. Some wise soul noticed that regardless the initials were the same, so IBU became the agreed upon name. Like with SHUs, brewers publicity like to push the IBU envelop in both directions. In one corner, wearing blue trunks and hailing from Virginia’s The Veil Brewing Company is ‘IdontwantoBU’, which claims to have zero IBU despite its intense hop flavour. In the opposite corner, wearing red trunks and hailing from Manchester is Carbon Smith’s ‘F**ks Up Your S**T IPA at a claimed 2,600 IBU. But, with Carbon Smith out of business since 2017, it’s difficult to find out how its brewers achieved this alleged figure. Other notables at the high end include Canada’s Flying Monkeys which came out in 2011 with 2,500 IBU ‘Alpha Fornication’. They had so much faith that this would be a big hit that they only make one keg and six bottles. USA’s Dogfish Head came out with ‘Hoo Lawd’, the only independently tested high IBU beer, which was 658 IBU and only available for one night. Most beers fall between 1 to 100, with 20-45 the most common range for those with a hops presence. The big commercial lagers, such as Budweiser and Millers, are around 10 IBU.

To interject this now, what throws off the average Joe and Jill beer lover is when they’re in your taproom – if they blindly follow IBUs – they’ll see your Russian Imperial Stout listed at 90 IBU and expect it to be more bitter than bitter and more hoppier than hop. Then in total confusion, their heads will pop off like your old ‘Rock ’Em-Sock ’Em-Robot’ toy when they realise there is no bitter or hop taste in it. You could tell them the stout is like lemonade, the sourer (bitter) it is, the more sugar (grain) you add. Or, you could spend an hour discussing grain, ABV, sweetness, hops, bitterness and IBUs. Or, you could just let them wallow in their ignorance and tend to other customers.

The problem is, when drinkers discovered the taste of hops in IPAs, they started seeing IBUs not as a measurement of bitterness, but as way of breweries to express how many hops they crammed into a bottle. If more hops pleased their taste buds, then a higher IBU must mean a better beer. Or, if they hate hops, then a

higher IBU must be avoided at all costs. To them, IBUs equate to hop flavour and aroma, not at all to bitterness.

“With the age of the New England IPA style upon us it’s a topic that sometimes enters the conversation between HonestBrew buyers particularly when it comes to the perceived reduction in IBUs even in seemingly ‘West Coast’ styles’,” says Cormac Wall, beer buyer at online bottle shop HonestBrew.

“I think for customers the talk of IBU is something that was prominent in the early years of this decade when several beers purported to wield hundreds of IBUs and it was a selling point for them.

“Occasionally we will still see a beer from a grizzled old West Coast brewer and they’ll proudly proclaim 200 IBU on the side of the can but on a whole, it seems to have passed from general consciousness among customers as most brewers avoid high bitterness levels so feel no need to mention IBUs anymore.”

Belgium brewery Brasseire de la Senne prides itself on the bitterness of its beers, which it describes as being the key characteristic of its beers.

“We have produced bitter beers since the beginning of our existence – and we are here to brew bitter beers,” says Yvan De Baets of Brasseire. “Our approach was simple: we wanted to brew beers to our liking that we could no longer find on the market. We took on the challenge to bring this flavour – so fundamental in the evolution of human societies but sadly neglected in our modern societies – up to date.”

De Baets, says, however, he is not tempted in the least to list IBUs.

“I pride myself on the balance in my beers. Not on their bitterness. They are not extremely bitter and don’t have an extreme bitterness perception. I would certainly not put indications such as IBUs on a label as beer making is not a penis contest. “I want the people to taste with their nose and taste buds and not with numbers. On the top of that, IBUs don’t say anything about the perceived bitterness,” he says. “For our beers, it’s their balance between hoppiness, bitterness, maltiness and fermentation flavours. And the reason for that is, that’s what I like. I pride myself being a selfish brewer.”

Breweries measure their IBU by using their own lab, or sending samples off to commercial labs, using a complicated math formula, or using the same formula as part of a free software – there are several found on the Net – or taking a sip.

While the cost of test equipment has dropped over the last few years, there are still reoccurring costs in using these machines. If you’re thinking of buying one, be sure to investigate what your total year-on costs will be. For smaller craft brewers, this could mean sending a sample to a lab will be your cheaper option. However, you’re then looking at 48 hours for results as opposed to results in 10 to 30 minutes.

The traditional method for measuring bitterness often requires a laboratory with a laboratory technician, UV/Vis spectrophotometer, water bath, glassware, solvents etc. and can take anywhere from 15 – 30 minutes. This has changed though with the introduction of small, easy-to-use portable lab kits.

The best-selling brewery test kit in the UK is CDR’s Beerlab, sold locally through QCL Scientific and sold throughout the rest of Europe by various distributors. James Mallett of QCL tells Brewers Journal Europe that there are around 60 in use in the UK, with brewery size ranging in production from a small three-barrel operation to one of the UK’s largest international breweries that has four Beerlabs.

Mallet is currently working on a PhD in brewing science at Nottingham University, having originally done a BSc in Microbiology. After working at Lallemand, he worked as an assistant brewer at Blue Monkey and recently joined the team at QCL.

“I’ve seen breweries who use the drink test to check for IBUs which might work for them. However, if you’re quality focused you need to check your beer’s IBU so you can produce a consistent product,” he says.

“While I have a background in science, chemistry and research, you definitely do not need one to use a Beerlab,” says Mallett. “If you’re interested, we can come out to your brewery and demonstrate it to you. If you decided to purchase one, we’ll come by and train all your staff on how to use it – it’s very simple.

“Officially, you’re entitled to two more free training visits from us, but for the time being, we’ll come out as many times as you need us to – nobody’s taken advantage of us yet so we’ll keep doing this.”

Mallett says while there have been three and five-barrel breweries buying a Beerlab, it’s probably around the 10-barrel point that makes the most sense to own one. That said, the three-barrel is now doing 10+ barrel production, so it would seem that having a very consistent quality beer was fundamental to their growth plans.

The Beerlab IBU test can be performed directly at every step of the beer production process and so you have the possibility to study your recipe, optimizing the additions of the hops and monitoring the actual extraction of the bitter. This is important if you add hops later on.

A recurring cost for doing IBU tests with the Beerlab is for the reagents that come in boxes of either 10 or 100. Not adding in the cost of the Beerlab, which is around £5,500 €6,154), the cost per test is around £6.00 (€6.71). Besides the IBU test, the Beerlab does around 20 other tests.

The next step down in testing, which many smaller breweries use all the time or others us in brewing one-offs, is the math formula method. While this is the cheapest way, it’s not the most accurate as there can be other variables thrown in the mix.

In looking at some breweries’ IBU numbers, you have to suspect they’re primarily using the dartboard method. And indeed, a few years back in the US state of Oregon, a group of craft beer drinkers sued a number of Oregon brewers for not having accurate IBUs listed on their cans and bottles, according to Aubrey Laurence reporting for Tap Trail.

“Essentially, this is a case of false advertising,” said Tim Crews, one of the plaintiffs filing the suit. “These breweries are putting inaccurate IBU numbers on their beer labels, and it’s time they answered to those misleading claims.”

Milford S. Auggenpot, the defence lawyer representing the breweries, admits that the IBU numbers printed on the beer bottle labels may be slightly off, as they are just calculations. But he notes that perceived bitterness is subjective, and he’s quick to point out that a 50-IBU pale ale will seem like it has much more bitterness than a 50-IBU, high ABV barley wine.

Phil Hague, a member of the American Society of Brewing Chemists, agrees that most IBU numbers out there are just rough estimates, and that most of them are overstated. “Unless you have a centrifuge and a UV-Vis Spectrometer, you’ll never be able to determine the exact IBU number in a beer,” he says. “Of course, you also have to know about isooctanes, isohumulones, hydrochloric acid, flasks and cuvettes, and be nerdy enough to know how to put it all together. Most breweries do not have these things.”

Still, it doesn’t matter how accurate of system you’re using to get your IBU numbers, many see problems with the current IBU system, which hasn’t moved on with the industry.

Once upon a time, hops were only added to boiling wort during the initial brewing

process to convert humulones to isohumulones, adding bitterness and producing a balance to the naturally sweet flavour of wort from the grains – doing the opposite of our lemonade analogy.

However, modern styles of beer have seen an increase in hops added at different stages of the brewing process, including at the end of the wort boil (late-hopping) and near the end of fermentation (dry-hopping).

While it has been thought that late-hopping and dry-hopping do not contribute to IBUs in beer, in a study conducted by London’s Hackney Brewery using a CDR BeerLab, it showed a considerable increase in IBU value from both late and dry-hopping suggesting that alternative compounds present in hops (such as humulinone) do in fact contribute to the IBU

value during the brewing process.

Other breweries and research groups have done similar tests and have achieved the same results. Research conducted last year by several Colorado breweries revealed that IBUs are not a good measure of bitterness in IPAs.

“The traditional way of measuring bitterness is not relevant, or accurate or even useful,” says Neil Fisher, the head brewer and owner at WeldWerks Brewing in Greeley.

The traditional test is why The Veil Brewing Company can produce a beer with an official IBU of zero, yet still have a bitter, hoppy flavour that tastes around 30-40 IBU. The Veil adds its hops later in the process, after the IBU measurement is made. Going by official IBU standards, there are no IBUs in it. The reality, however, if far from this. For the big breweries who are making lagers that rely more on malt for flavour and aren’t being creative with hops, the standard IBU works fine. However, for craft brewers, BU:GU ratio might make more sense. The BU:GU ratio is the IBUs divided by the gravity units. It represents the amount of bitterness balanced with the sweetness. Higher values mean more bitterness. The scale is roughly 0.25-0.35 for wheats, 0.4-0.8 for the majority of ales, and 1.0+ for IPAs.

Remember, there is no law or requirement for using IBU, the scale was set up to help brewers produce a consistent product. You need to find what works best for you.

All of this would be completely and totally irrelevant it we didn’t actually like bitter tastes, which shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

Millions of years of evolution has equipped us to respond negatively to bitter more than any other taste. The reason is simple: the vast majority of all poisonous plants and animals taste bitter. Have a child bite into something bitter and they instinctively spit it out. And we’re not alone with this. Jellyfish, fruit flies and bacteria – not known for being the world’s pickiest eaters – can all sense bitter compounds.

Humans have 24 bitter tasting genes, far more than other life forms, which includes sweet, salty, sour and umami. About 15 years ago it was discovered that besides the well-known bitter receptors on our tongues, we also have bitter receptors throughout our bodies in places such as the stomach, nose, lungs and brain. Why these other bitter receptors? Scientists haven’t figured that one out yet, but many believe they act as a shadow taste system.

Unlike jellyfish, humans are constantly twisting, challenging, and breaking evolutionary rules and in every culture, there

are bitter, bitter foods that are considered good. Bitter gourd in India, Icelandic fermented, rotted Greenland shark, and even uncured olives spring to mind, along with dark chocolate, broccoli, coffee, and beer.

It’s always been thought that enjoying bitter flavours is an acquired taste – like with hot chillies – but new research is pointing towards biological changes in our saliva as to why we end up loving a hoppy IPA.

Dr Cordelia Running, a sensory scientist at Purdue University wanted to know if there was a biological reason behind the change. She and her team at Purdue’s Saliva, Perception, Ingestion, and Tongues Laboratory (SPIT Lab) suspected that repeated exposure to bitter foods might actually change something in a person’s saliva.

Besides keeping our mouths moist, saliva begins the digestion process of food and the saliva makeup includes proteins that can affect how food and drink tastes. Running decided to run with the idea that exposure to bitter foods can actually change these proteins or the numbers of them. To test this theory, Running’s lab brought in 64 volunteers and gave them a sixweek trial of alternating diets. One week the human guinea pigs would give up nearly all bitter food. The next week, they would be given three-daily glasses of chocolate almond milk, due to chocolate containing bitter compounds known as polyphenols.

As suspected, the SPIT team was able to detect changes in the volunteers’ saliva after they consumed the chocolate almond milk. In particular, they saw an increase in a type of protein that naturally captures and binds to those bitter polyphenols, while, at the same time, test subjects began reporting the chocolate drink as tasting less bitter or astringent.

The more bitter foods the subjects ate, the more anti-bitter proteins they had in their saliva, and the more palatable the food seemed to become. In other words, it’s not that we just get used to bitterness, bitter flavours actually change the way we experience taste.

You drink a bitter IPA and the taste will grow on you and if you’re older, with more exposure to bitter foods over the years, the enjoyment of a bitter IPA will come quicker.

While appealing to young, hip drinkers is more trendy and fun, older drinkers will actually take to your bitter IPA a whole lot faster.