🍺 A bitter ingredient 😖 Making bitter

bittering

7.1

A substance like hops added to beer to give a bitter taste

noun
/ˈbɪtərɪŋ/

Specialized

: amargor

For a balanced flavor, the recipe calls for a precise amount of bittering hops during the boil.

Examples

The brewing process requires adding specific hops to achieve the desired bittering effect in the beer.
I'm an electrical engineer who watches Dr. Who, reads science books for fun, lectures everyone about how great the metric system is, records Nova programs, and calculates the ABV (alcohol by volume) and IBUs (International Bittering Units) in the beer I brew.

Blog text (12)
Craft brewers often experiment with different varieties of hops for effective bittering in their ales.

Synonyms

flavoring

vsbittering

16 1.1

A thing added to food or drink to give it a certain taste

is specifically used to create a bitter taste rather than change taste generally

hops

vsbittering

Specialized

5.6

Dried flowers from a climbing plant used to give beer a bitter taste and smell

is the broader class for any ingredient added to make drinks bitter

Antonyms

sweetening

2.6

Something added to food or drink to make it sweeter

Surface Forms

bittering singular

bitterings plural

Morphology

bittering = bitter (semi-transparent) = bitter + ing

Formed regularly from 'bitter' + '-ing', but the specialized brewing sense 'a substance used to impart bitterness' is jargon that may not be obvious to all learners.

Etymology

Bittering comes from the old English word bitter, which is related to bite and means a 'sharp' taste that seems to 'bite' your tongue. So bittering is the substance (like hops) added to beer to give that 'bitter' or sharp taste.