More on Mexico; A Lupulin Powder Blind Tasting

We have a new podcast for your listening pleasure. The main subject is Mexican craft beer, featuring an interview with Enrique Aceves-Vincent Ramirez of  Guadalajara’s Loba Brewing. We talk about the Mexican market, what it's like getting started there, and where things may be headed. A great primer for those of you interested in our southern neighbor.

Also on that podcast, a follow-up on my experiment with lupulin powder. (Manufacturer description: "the concentrated lupulin of whole-leaf hops containing resins and aromatic oils.") Recall that I received a package of a new product from YCH Hops--now apparently available for purchase--and used them in a batch of homebrew. Patrick and I had just brewed a pale ale when the package of Simcoe lupulin powder arrived, so I dry-hopped half the batch with that product, and half the batch with standard Simcoes.

I poured the two beers and had Patrick--who hadn't had a chance to taste them yet--taste them blind. That segment of the podcast has at least two surprises. I will of course leave it to you to listen and find out what they were. (I'm trying to get better at teasing this stuff!) It's actually a follow up to a different podcast, in which we visited Imperial Yeast. They gave us their "Dry Hop" blend to try, and it produced the sludgy look of a New England IPA all the geeks are excited about. We reflect a bit on that, too.

Give it a listen (it's available on iTunes and Google Play as well):

Lupulin Powder--the Next Big Thing?

A tipster pointed me to a new hop product that debuted (quietly, it seems) last fall: lupulin powder.

Lupulin powder – a purified concentration of the resin compounds and aromatic oils in whole hop flowers – is being test-marketed by Yakima-based YCH Hops (Yakima Chief-Hopunion).... YCH uses a proprietary cryogenic process to separate the powder from the leafy part of the hop cone. That’s also being sold separately as debittered hop leaf, to provide pure aroma along the lines of European noble hops.

Breweries that have tried it seem psyched. They're using the powder to dry hop the beers, and the saturation of aroma is apparently intense. One of the big downsides to dry-hopping (putting hops in the beer during or after fermentation) is loss; the hops function sort of like a sponge, and brewers lose substantial amounts of beer that gets trapped in the left-over hop slurry. This product vastly reduces the lost beer, so even if the sensory quality was the same as whole hops, it would be a big improvement.

Ben Edmunds was apparently onto something when he used his liquid nitrogen-shattering technique for fresh hops; apparently that's how the powder is extracted. I don't have a ton of info on these; except for fragmentary mention by a few breweries online, there doesn't seem to be any info out there. My tipster, who wanted to remain anonymous, did offer two intriguing rumors that I'll pass along in the absence of actual data. These are only rumors. 1) Lupulin powder is getting a ton of attention in New England (this is somewhat bolstered by the reference on Trillium's website). 2) The quality of aromatics, while intense, my be very short-lived. Like two weeks before a big fade kicks in--which is reminiscent of the evanescence of fresh hops if true.

Do ping me if you have info.

Source: Barley Brown's

FIRST TWO PHOTOS TAKEN BY KENT FALLS BREWING