IoB and EBC Methods on Sorghum

The Institute of Brewing and European Brewery Convention methods are the other barley lineage applied to sorghum — and their coexistence with SABS and ASBC methods created the unit fragmentation that makes half the sorghum literature hard to compare.

Part of the Evaluation Methods survey.

What they are

The IoB (Institute of Brewing) and EBC (European Brewery Convention) malt analysis methods — the European counterparts to ASBC practice — applied to sorghum malt by researchers and labs in their respective spheres of influence, chiefly for diastatic power and extract. Like the barley-adapted ASBC approach, they are self-conversion instruments inherited from barley.

The distinctive problem: units

Their sorghum legacy is fragmentation. DP from an IoB lab, an EBC lab, a SABS lab, and an ASBC lab arrives in different units with no clean interconversion — a problem significant enough that the Journal of the Institute of Brewing published a dedicated convertibility study for sorghum DP across IoB, EBC, and SABS methods.¹ When a field needs a paper to translate its own central measurement between its own labs, the measurement system is broken. Our 2002–2004 dataset's unlabeled DP column is a small monument to the same problem.

The verdict

Same premise critique as every barley lineage, plus the units lesson — which is why the GFB-SME proposal makes unit declarations mandatory on every enzymatic measure, whatever method produced it.

References

1. Convertibility of IoB, EBC and SABS Methods for Sorghum Diastatic Power. Journal of the Institute of Brewing (2004). Archived PDF ↩