Late addition hop utilization

Hey all,

I’m noticing that in order to keep a beer paler you should add half or even all of your LME as a late addition.

If you do this then will it make the beer more bitter? If so how much more?

You can use any number of online calculators or a software package to do the math, but just as an example I set up a recipe for a 1.050 OG beer, 6-gal boil volume, 5-gal final volume, and added 1 oz of 8%AA hops at 60-min. A starting gravity of 1.042 ended up at 30 IBUs (this is basically a full-boil with all the extract at the beginning). Starting the boil with half the extract, an SG of 1.021, yielded 36 IBUs.

So not too bad then. Good to hear. I found out with a pale ale looks more like a brown ale in the fermentor that something needed to change if I wanted a pale beer.

Did you bottle and drink that pale ale yet? Because everything looks darker in the fermenter. Just like everything looks lighter running through the siphon. Just pointing that out, I’ve had pale ales that looked like porters at times but came out looking great, but this practice should help.

I plan to bottle it Sunday. If I didn’t know it was a pale ale I’d swear it was a porter or stout cause it’s pretty black…

It doesn’t really matter if it’s darker, I’d just like to somewhat stick to the style guidelines.