Introducing The Hop Calculus: A Proprietary Calculator Built From Real Brewing Data + Other BrüTools

Author: Marshall Schott

Anyone who’s been reading and listening to Brülosophy for any length of time knows that we’re obsessed with data. Every exBEERiment, every Hop Chronicles, every Short & Shoddy, it’s all in service of one simple idea – don’t tell people how they should brew or proudly act like we’re the authority on the subject, but test things out to see what happens and let people decide for themselves. Over the years, that’s resulted in a massive pile of information sitting in individual spreadsheets. As great as each result is on its own, it ultimately amounts to a pile of data that isn’t very useful after the fact.

Our solution was to build a suite of tools that does more of what we want. That’s not to say existing tools out there are bad, rather we found ourselves regularly running into frustrations when using them, so we did what any neurotically obsessed person would do and built versions of those tools that worked better for us. We’re starting off by offering a suite of 6 BrüTools, all free for anyone to use, and we’ll likely be adding more over time. While these have gone through beta testing, we expect there to be some bugs that we didn’t catch, so please let us know any issues you run into!

The purpose of this article is to introduce each tool and explain what makes them unique, starting the one we’re most excited about…

When we first started The Hop Chronicles series back in 2015, my aim was to provide information on hop characteristics that came from actual tasters who didn’t know what they were tasting instead of relying on general descriptions. Within a year, I knew we’d created something unique, as we were getting heaps of positive feedback from both homebrewers and pros from around the world. A handful of folks also reached out asking to use our findings to build their own tools, and while some were able to put the publicly available information to good use, we opted to keep the raw data private.

With well over 130 hop varieties tested at this point, I felt the time was right to finally build the tool I’d envisioned in my head all those years ago. We’re calling in The Hop Calculus, a multipurpose calculator that relies entirely on the raw data from The Hop Chronicles, where blind tasters rate what they perceive across 14 different aroma and flavor descriptors, to provide brewers with several helpful and unique features. So, what can it do?

Compare Hops

From the default Compare Hops tab, users can select up to 5 hop varieties and see their full sensory profiles laid out side-by-side on a radar graph, which will be familiar to readers, as it’s what we’ve used for The Hop Chronicles since the beginning. This comparative tool allows you to immediately spot what descriptors real tasters felt were the most and least prominent in specific varieties. Have some Saaz laying around but don’t feel like making another Czech Pale Lager? Use the tool to see what characteristics you might expect from them when used in a non-traditional way.

Find Hops for a Style

This flips the process around by allowing users to select the style of beer they’re brewing and the tool will display the hops tasters have historically felt would work well for said style. Again, this is based on the actual reports of blind tasters who sampled single hop beers, not generic recommendations based on the region a hop originated from or widely held industry opinions.

Find by Characteristics

Another rad option in The Hop Calculus is the ability to input what characteristics you want more or less of, and it will indicate the varieties that most closely match your preference based on real taster ratings. Chasing big citrus while specifically avoiding that dank, catty edge in your IPA? Tap citrus once, tap dank/catty twice, and the tool will rank hops and even blends by how well they thread that exact needle.

Hop Blend Predictions

Not its own tab, but a feature on the Find Hops for a Style and Find by Characteristics tabs, this is what I’m most thrilled about. Anyone who’s brewed for a while knows that single hop beers only tell you so much, and even the most experienced brewers rely on a bit of guesswork with a hefty dose of trial-and-error when it comes to combining hop varieties. The Hop Calculus changes that. Since we have real sensory data for every hop we’ve tested individually, the tool is able to combine those profiles mathematically and predict what a two hop blend is likely to taste like, giving brewers a more grounded starting point for recipe design.

This was the most painstaking aspect of The Hop Calculus, as it required more than just simply adding the individual hop rankings together – we understand that the whole is other than the sum of its parts. If you’re after a specific aroma/flavor profile and no single variety quite nails it, there’s a good chance a blend will get you there, and this tool will automatically recommend combinations that you may never have thought of. As far as I know, The Hop Calculus is the only tool available that offers such a feature, and it’s only possible because we’ve spent over a decade collecting the raw data from thousands of tasters. We think that’s pretty badass.

Finally, The Hop Calculus isn’t static. Every time we publish a new Hop Chronicles article, the tool gets a little smarter. A hop that’s missing today might show up next month. A blend prediction that’s based on thin data now will get more reliable as we test more varieties. This isn’t a finished product that we’re publishing and walking away from, it’s a living project that grows alongside The Hop Chronicles itself.

Other BrüTools

While The Hop Calculus is arguably the most unique BrüTool, we built five other calculators that we feel provide more user-friendly ways of dealing with common brewing issues.

Water Chemistry Calculator

Most water chemistry calculators require a decent amount of legwork, forcing you to pick individual salts and figure out the ratios yourself. Ours works backward from the beer. Simply select the style you’re brewing, input your starting water profile (which gets saved), and the tool provides you a straightforward salt recommendation to start from. If your water needs dilution to get close to a style’s traditional profile, it’ll give you details on that, along with what to expect flavor-wise if you don’t. For the real water nerds, every number the tool suggests can be tweaked to fit your exact preference, because we believe, for one, that preference supersedes tradition, and secondly, that a recommendation is a starting point rather than a mandate.

Yeast Starter & Pitch Rate Calculator

Pitch rate calculators are a dime a dozen these days, we’re well aware of that, and I’d be lying if I said ours is drastically different than others. As such, our focus was on building a user interface that was clean and simple to use. In my opinion, this is a feature in itself, but ours also offers the ability to easily calculate how much to overbuild a starter for the sake of harvesting, as well as the exact volume of starter to pull-off to ensure you get the precise amount of yeast you overbuilt for.

ABV & Attenuation Calculator

Again, this is nothing groundbreaking. In addition to offering an accurate way to turn FG and OG readings into real numbers, we feel it’s also cleaner and a little easier to use than other options.

Refractometer Correction Calculator

Many brewers find refractometers to be the preferable option for measuring the OG of their unfermented wort and would prefer to use it for FG as well, but they resort to using a hydrometer instead due to the effect alcohol has on light refraction. Our refractometer correction calculator allows brewers to keep the hydrometer in the drawer by using an established equation to correct for this refraction. Moreover, if your refractometer only measures in Brix, you can plug that into the tool and it’ll provide an accurate specific gravity reading accounting for the Wort Correction Factor (WCF).

Priming Sugar Calculator

Bottle and keg conditioning can feel like a guessing game, especially when switching between corn sugar, table sugar, honey, and other sugars. With just a few inputs, this tool accounts for your beer’s residual CO2 to give you the precise weight of whatever priming sugar you’re using that’s required to hit your target carbonation every time.

Try BrüTools!

All of these tools are live now and completely free to use. Inspired by our own wants and designed with ease-of-use in mind, we’re really proud of how these came together and think other brewers will find them beneficial as well. We also acknowledge that, given how new they are, there may still be a few bugs, which we’ll fix as quickly as possible. So, go kick the tires, especially on The Hop Calculus, and let us know what you think in the comments. You can’t hurt our feelings, as we look forward to actively improving these tools for a long time to come.

All of these calculators can be accessed by hovering over Tools in the header, and you can also get to them by clicking the links below.

The Hop Calculus	Water Chemistry	Yeast Starter & Pitch Rate
ABV & Attenuation	Refractometer Correction	Priming Sugar

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