Saturday 7 March 2009

Truman 1850 Imperial

Hey, I told you it was Truman week. Here's a recipe from 1850 for Imperial, their top of the range Stout.


Is it me, or are there a ton of hops in that?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a good looking recipe which has been added to the "to do" list.

Ron: There are quite a lot of hops in it. Using Wheeler's Beer Engine and plugging in 2008 Fuggles at AA 3.7% I get a bitterness level of 117 IBUs. (Don't tell the BJCP but that's not to style).

Mind you if I were to use 2007 Fuggles at 6.1% we would get 193 IBUs. Blimey!

Anonymous said...

It looks great. It's interesting to me that it uses such a small percent of black malt. I would have expected a bit more. Some of the other 19th Century recipes I've looked at were closer to 4-5% black malt. Were most of the Truman stouts similar to the 2% listed here? Also, you had mentioned some time back that sometimes half of the black malt was added directly to the copper and not in the mash. Any indicaiton Truman did that or was all of the black malt mashed?

It is a huge amount of hops and it looks like this recipe didn't use older hops. Granted you'd get lower bitterness extraction in a high gravity wort, but that's still a huge amount of hops.

Ron Pattinson said...

MentalDental, you should see the 1850 Barclay Perkins Imperial Brown Stout. Menno at de Molen was rather shocked by the recipe - he calculated it to be over 200 IBUs.

You need to remember that a beer like this was probably vatted for at least 2 years.

Ron Pattinson said...

Bill, I've answered your question in detail in today's post.

Ed said...

Is it possible to get IBUs that high? I'm sure I read that no matter how much hops you put in the maximum amount of isomerised alpha acids you can get in wort is around 100 IBUs.

Anonymous said...

"You should see the 1850 Barclay Perkins Imperial Brown Stout. Menno at de Molen was rather shocked by the recipe - he calculated it to be over 200 IBUs."

I would like to see than one. Any chance of posting it a some point?

Ron Pattinson said...

Ed, yes that's a theoretical IBU number. I doubt you could actually get that high a level and I'm certain that it's way beyond the threshold of human perception.