International Bluster Unit

Michael Donaldson is hopping mad about meaningless numbers

The blurb arrived for a new beer with the claim: “the high residual malt sweetness gives the beer substance and balances up nicely against the 65 IBU of hop bitterness”.

And when I was in a bar recently I saw a poster for an Imperial Pilsner with the figure 45 IBU stamped on it.

Nothing wrong with either per se but they are an example of marketing beer based on IBUs – or international bittering units – which is fast becoming an almost meaningless phrase for most consumers.

Those examples come from a couple of big breweries (oh, if you insist: Mac’s and Monteith’s)

I don’t pick on these two because they are Lion and DB-owned – I single them out because they are the breweries who can afford marketing ploys such as widely-distributed press releases and posters and therefore make themselves an easier target.

I’ll be clear, they are not doing anything wrong by stating the IBU level of their beers – it’s just that IBU is such a nebulous term and using it as a marketing gimmick does no favours for the beer-drinking public.

The simplest way to look at the nonsense of stating IBUs is to compare a standard pilsner with a milk stout. The pilsner can be expected to have an IBU level of between 25 and 45. The stout? Try 20-40 IBU. Would you market a milk stout as having 40 IBU? Of course not.

Even 65 IBU is nothing to write home about if you were making a barley wine, in fact 65 would be about right but you wouldn’t try to sell a barley wine based on IBUs.

Most beers (sours aside) need some level of hop bitterness to offset the malt and alcohol sweetness – both real and perceived. This is Brewing 101. Yes, there was a period when (brief, thankfully) people were a bit hung up about “bitterness” and many thought the more IBUs in a beer the better it was, as in: “Hey, I had a 65 IBU the other day and it was really good so now I’m looking for an 80 IBU beer as it can only be better, eh?”

(That road leads only one place – and it tastes like Mikkeller’s 1000 IBU which I poured down the sink in the hope it might unblock my drain.) Lord knows what a 2500 IBU beer tastes like but if you want to try, Flying Monkeys Brewery of Ontario has Alpha Fornication, which says it all really as your palate will be screwed. The crazy thing is that the IBU scale doesn’t have any bearing on what a beer might taste like, or even how bitter it seems.

High alcohol beers mask bitterness, residual sugars counter bitterness, malt can add acidity (which feels like bitterness). And anyway, IBU is calculated using what is effectively a magical number – the so-called utilisation of the brewing system. Most brewers guess the utilisation factor, using well-established charts that give what amounts to a random number.

Stating the IBUs is a short-handed but wrong-headed way of talking about hoppiness – because hops are more than bitter little pills. In fact, the trend now is for less bitterness, more hop aroma and flavour, and an increase in perceived sweetness.

The real boast about a hoppy beer is about what it tastes like. And to Mac’s’ credit their press release does talk about all that, giving a flavour profile and explaining how the flavour was achieved – late-hopping, whirlpool hopping, dry-hopping – and listing the hops used at each stage.

That is good information – relevant information – and means more to a consumers looking for a hoppy experience than an abbreviation attached to a meaningless number.