Understanding Hop Aromas and Flavors

We have a very special episode of the Beervana Podcast for you this week, and I want to tease it by quoting from a section of the interview. Patrick and I visited the labs and brewery of Tom Shellhammer, who is a professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University and one of the world's leading hops researchers. Before we did the interview, he took us around his labs, stopping at one point in front of stacks of small bottles containing aroma compounds found in hops. He uses these in classwork as a way of giving students a pure, condensed version of these aromas. We took a whiff of the "stone fruit" and "catty" bottles.

As we spoke about the catty scent, Tom referenced a class of compounds that have started to get more attention--thiols. These are sulfur-containing aroma compounds in hop oil that are responsible for both the deeply tropical aromas in many recent hop varieties, but also aromas some of us find objectionable (sweat, onion, garlic). Here's Tom, in a quick-and-dirty transcript from the podcast:

Thiols are a class of chemical compounds that have sulfur in them. So that sulfur part is what makes the compound a thiol. Not that all sulfur compounds are thiols, but a thiol has sulfur in it; that's the key component to that. Myrcene and linalool don't have sulfur in them. Myrcene is a hydrocarbon. [Describes the chemical structure.] Linalool is an oxygenated version of that, so it's got an oxygen component in it that does things to its functionality and its solubility. Hydrocarbons as a class tend to be more woodsy, herbal, and somewhat floral. They oxygenated versions of these things like linalool and geraniol tend to be floral and fruity. And then we move to this thiol class.

The hydrocarbons make up to 75 to 90% of the hop oil, the oxygenated fraction makes up almost the rest, and then less than 1% are these sulfur compounds. Tiny, tiny amount. But the thing about them that make them so important is the aroma-detection thresholds of these things are three to four, maybe five, orders of magnitude lower than these other compounds. With myrcene, you need about 300-500 parts per billion. Sounds like a small amount, but not quite a part per million. And the thiols, their aroma thresholds are parts per trillion. A little goes a long way with a thiol.

The thiol compounds can be stinky like onions and garlic but they can also be potent tropical fruity, citrusy, but also animal-y, stinky, sweaty/BO. 

One of the reasons some people absolutely love hops like Summit and Nelson Sauvin is because they're getting the fruit. But I am apparently hyper-sensitive to thiols, and I get the onion and sweat.

This podcast, I'm pleased to say, is filled with gems like this. (It's part one of our visit down there. Next week we go to the test brewery at OSU and join the head brewer there, Jeff Clawson. Hop talk continues as we sample beer students made in the brewery.)  Definitely give it a listen:


Finally, if this all seems irresistible to you (and how can it not??), Tom and Jeff Clawson are leading a two-day course in Portland for those of you who'd like access to some of the content he presents in his coursework, but who don't have the time or money to take a class in Corvallis.

Our Origins of Beer Flavors and Styles workshop is an experiential sensory course that will guide you through the brewing process from raw materials to finished beer. Through hands-on instruction, participants will learn how the main raw materials used in brewing process (malt, water, hops, and yeast) impact beer flavor and aroma. Participants will work through standards and exercises with the goal of highlighting how each of these materials impacts beer flavor. Guiding tastings, focused with a historical lens, will also walk participants through on how these raw materials have impacted beer styles historically overtime. Over this two-day course, participants will evaluate 8 beer styles and over 35 beers.

Friday, March 17 - Saturday, March 18, 2017

If memory serves, a part of the class will involve those little glass vials of hop aromas. Soon you, too, will be able to distinguish thiols, hydrocarbons, and oxygenated hydrocarbons from one another. Follow this link to register.

On the IPA Cutting Edge...

No brewery is doing more to push the evolution of IPAs forward than Breakside. (See here, here, and here for recent discussions.) Well, the evolution continues apace. In a recent blog post, head brewer Ben Edmunds writes about some of the things they've been working on recently:

Back to the Future IPA (aka BTTF) is the third release in our series of rotating draft-only IPAs for the year. BTTF is a departure from the previous two releases in the series: Tall Guy IPA and Rainbows & Unicorns. Those two are beers we’ve brewed a number of times and have more or less “set” recipes. By contrast, Back to the Future is a beer that always changes, both each year and– in this year’s incarnations– each batch.

Since I am a Serious Journalist (TM), I felt that just quoting extensively from that blog post was inadequate. For true value-added content, you need Ben to elaborate on some of the things he mentions in that post--and I'm just the journalist to cut-and-paste the replies he sent to me via email. All kidding aside, this is cool stuff and worth your attention. Even a beer so dominated by a single ingredient can be inflected by other ingredients and techniques. Ben discusses the way flaked grains, water treatments, new hop varieties, and yeast strains can transform an IPA. Read on...

Ben started by noting what the last iteration of Back to the Future experimented with:

Specifically, we used BTTF 2015 to explore some questions we had about the use of flaked grains in IPAs. We also trialed a much softer water profile than we normally use with our IPAs. As with any trial, there were parts of the 2015 version that we liked and learned from, and elements that we didn’t. The things that we liked are now incorporated into many of our other hoppy beers. Both Lunch Break and Tall Guy use a good portion of flaked barley in the malt bill, for example. The hops that we used BTTF 2015– Ella and Azacca– have both found a home in our hop schedules for several other beers, including Hop Delivery Mechanism and Imperial Red.

To which I asked about both the flaked grains and soft water.  Ben comments:

I think there is a lot of emphasis amongst brewers these days, especially East Coast brewers, on flaked grains. They tend to use a lot of wheat and oats. We'll use all three (as well as flaked corn and flaked rice, in other beers) in hoppy beers, but I think we tend to use flaked barley more than the other flaked grains because of its more neutral character. Flaked wheat and flaked oats are great but tend to be very characterful; flaked corn (which we use in our Coconut IPA) and flaked rice (Rainbows & Unicorns) are also great. They all help round out body with some light grain character that allows hops to shine.  

Softer water is still a subject of debate within Breakside. Generally, we have come to favor a slightly Burtonized water profile for most of our hoppy beers. When we first opened, I used a classic Burton ratio (10:1 sulfate-to-chloride) on most hoppy beers. Over time, we've backed off on that in an effort to allow the finish to come off a little softer and let the hop flavor linger into the aftertaste. Most of our core beers are still 5:1 sulfate-to-chloride or higher (Wanderlust, Breakside IPA, and IGA are all pretty Burtonized at 8:1), but many of the new recipes we've worked on go down to the 3:1 range. We have tried a few pub beers with a very soft water profile (no Burtonizing or a chloride-heavy profile), and that gets a little flabby for our own preferences. BTTF uses the 3:1 profile, which, in my mind, optimizes hop flavor and a refreshingly snappy finish.

Water is something I need to address seriously at some point. When I was speaking with Nick Arzner on Friday, he mentioned this issue as well. He'd just done a collaboration with Great Notion. He also mentioned that they go for heavy chloride in their water to soften the palates of their "New England" IPAs. This, Nick suggested, was one of the most important ways these beers were distinguished from West Coast IPAs. 

Ben continued in his blog post discussing the newer hops they've been using.

This year, we’ve revived BTTF in the same spirit, brewing it with combinations of hops that we think have a lot of promise and using this beer as an opportunity for us to explore some “new directions” in making IPAs. Distilling it down to 3 key areas, this year’s Back to the Future IPAs are exploring the following territory: Pairing a new and interesting hop (Topaz, Lemondrop, Idaho 7) with hops that are already beloved (Mosaic, Citra, and Ella). Each batch of this beer focuses on a different combination of those hops. The first batch, which is currently on the market, is heavy on Topaz and Mosaic. The second round of brews will be mainly Citra and Lemondrop. The final batches– the ones that will be hitting the market in August– will use Ella and Idaho 7.

I know that the brewers at Breakside have novel hopping regimes based on whether they think a hop is "punchy" (spiky, sharp flavors) or "soft." I asked him how these new hops behaved.

Topaz is a lot like Galaxy but without the intense stone fruit character; it comes off as a little waxy/petrol the way many Southern Hemisphere hops do, but it has some nice underlying tropical notes. Lemondrop is very citric, as advertised-- kind of like a super Cascade. And Idaho 7 is reminiscent of a softer Centennial-- lots of lemongrass and Fruity Pebbles for me. Culmination uses it a lot in their Urizen Session IPA. I'd say that Topaz is very punchy, Idaho 7 pretty punchy, and Lemondrop soft. 

Finally, Ben talked about the interplay between yeast strains and hop expression. He writes that Breakside is "using a different yeast strain with this beer this year, and it seems to respond to American hops differently than our normal house ale strain." This is not just a matter of the way different flavors inflect each other, like blending colors. There's an actual biochemical process that happens in which hop compounds are transformed during fermentation--an issue I've written about recently. Ben expanded:

I think that the most interesting part of this whole experiment might be the use of a non-traditional "West Coast" yeast, much in the same way that the East Coast guys are favoring English yeasts for their IPAs. There's some real digging to be done about yeast selection and the future of American IPA.

So

A Deep Dive on the Claims About New England IPAs (Way Nerdy)

Last week, the ever-busy Jason Notte had a great piece on the rise of niche brewing. This is a point I regularly make to visitors coming to Beervana: one of the things that makes the city so interesting is the presence of breweries that don't make IPAs--like Occidental, Upright, and the Commons (among others). It's a city of diversity. For his piece, Notte chose Great Notion Brewing, which specializes in the fraught "New England IPA" category.

Miller and Dugan had spent years home-brewing and swapping beers with friends across the country before realizing that their brewery’s inspiration had to lie somewhere other than Portland. They were taken with the hazier, fruitier India Pale Ales being made by Northeast breweries including Maine Beer Co., The Alchemist and Tree House.

(To be fair, Great Notion is making a pretty broad line, and their puckery beers are for me their real calling card.)

All well and good. Let's not relitigate this particular debate. My bone of contention comes with a comment Great Notion's James Dugan makes--a pillar on which these types of beers seems to rest. The overwhelming trend in American beers now is toward saturated and intense hop flavors and aromas, not bitterness. Somehow the idea is that the New England IPAs have a greater abundance of these qualities due to their cloudiness. And here Dugan doubles down with some science:

People look at our beers and say: “You have too much yeast in suspension.” What it comes down to is educating people that there is some yeast in every beer — we don’t filter, we don’t fine, we don’t centrifuge — but we cold crash all of our beer, drop the yeast out and then do a heavy dry hopping. We dry hop about two and a half to three gallons per barrel. When you dry hop that heavily, you get hop polyphenols that are basically tannins that saturate beer with oils.

Without protein content from wheat or oats, those oils eventually drop out. What we’re finding to be the defining characteristic of our beers is this marriage of protein and hop oil saturation. What’s happening is that those two are binding. You have this hop oil stuck in suspension and when you pour it into a glass, you’re tasting the hop oil. 

This seemed ... dubious. I set about looking into the science, but unfortunately, the mechanism of hop flavor and aroma hasn't been studied much. For decades, all hop research was focused on IBUs and paid for by big breweries who were trying to get ever more bitterness out of ever fewer hops. The state of the aroma and flavor research is still in the gestation state. I spoke with researcher Tom Shellhammer at Oregon State last year about a project to understand the mechanism of dry-hopping. He described it for me:

“What it’s getting at is, if you’re going to use hops for dry-hopping and make a consistent product batch-to-batch, should you as a brewer hop based upon the mass of hops, or the oil content of the hops—or based on something else?”  

This illustrates how little we understand about these mechanisms. But we understand something. We know some of the constituents of hops, like oils and and acids and prenylated flavonoids (yes, I way out over my skis on that last one), and we have some sense of what they do and don't do. In particular, scientists have focused a lot of their attention on the terpenes like myrcene, linalool, geraniol, and so on that give hops their lovely citrus or floral kick. But we also know that hops are incredibly complex and not only are there many other compounds I haven't mentioned, but even the ones I have aren't inert. Some terpenes, for example are "biotransformed by yeast during the fermentation" into other terpenes. The question at hand is whether proteins enhance and preserve the behavior of hop flavor and aroma, as proponents of New England IPAs believe.

It doesn't really add up. There's no mechanism that I understand that would cause the polyphenols in hops to bond the oils to the proteins in grain. (It's not clear why the hops don't bond to the proteins of barley, which are also present in beer, except I suppose there is less of it.) Polyphenols affect the perceived smoothness or harshness of hop flavor, but they don't appear particularly relevant to that "juicy" quality prized by modern breweries. The thing you're worried about with hop oils is degredation from oxygenation, not dropping out of suspension. Terpenes in oils appear to be susceptible to this as well, and they are also volatile and can escape the liquid. There's really nothing we know that suggests wheat and oat haze is going to affect these hoppy properties.

I shot an email to Stan Hieronymus, the writer who literally wrote the book on hops, to find out if this sounded plausible to him. If he'd like to weigh in on this, I'll let him do so in his own words. The one thing he mentioned that seemed really important was this: we "have to get past thinking about oil and think about compounds," he said. Oils are part of the equation, but they're not the whole kielbasa.

For me, the proof is in the palate. I still haven't encountered anything different in these cloudy IPAs in terms of hop flavor and aroma than I do in typical (hazy but not milky) modern American IPAs. It's as easy to make a saturated IPA whether it looks like a milkshake or not.  Dugan--and others, apparently--have argued that there's some science going on in these beers that make them especially juicy. Could be! But point me to the studies that demonstrate it, please. Sciencey language doesn't quite cut it alone. (Otherwise hive mind would let me get away with a lot more BS.)

For now, I think these are standard modern American IPAs with a ton of haze. And a special prize to anyone who managed to read through this post to get to that rather modest conclusion.

Chafing Under the Tyranny of Mosaic Hops

If you pay much attention to the hops in you beer, you will probably have noticed that Mosaic is one of the most common varieties listed. This is pretty remarkable for a hop released only in 2012. There were nearly 1,800 acres under cultivation in Idaho and Washington in 2015, which puts it out in front of varieties like Crystal and Willamette--and it well more than doubled in acreage last year, so the growth curve is probably going to push it up into Citra territory in the next few years. The reason, of course, is because these are the words people use to describe it:

Specific aroma descriptors include blueberry, tangerine, papaya, rose, blossoms, and bubble gum.

And:

“I really like that you can create sweet, fruity aromas with Mosaic but still have a dry beer. It’s sort of like gewürztraminer in that way,” says Jesse Friedman, co-founder and brewmaster for Almanac Beer in San Francisco.... “It has a big, fruity punch to it,” he says. “It’s tropical, but has a fruit punch note. There’s a little bit of bubble gum in there, some blueberry, but it also has really nice earthy quality. It’s definitely distinct.”

That sounds absolutely delicious. I would love a hop that tasted alternately of rose blossoms, blueberry, or mango. You know what I get? Caraway seed. Mosaic has a very distinctive aroma compound that my palate reads as savory. It's not actually terrible, but there's a reason brewers haven't rushed to make caraway beers. Mosaic is the daughter of Simcoe, and I think that hop is to blame. I don't dislike Simcoe nearly as much, but in my mouth it comes across as far more aggressively piney--it's like pine tar--than it apparently does in others'. That's not precisely savory, but it's related, and is what I think gets carried through in Mosaic. (Maybe it's the thiols.)

As we get ever deeper into the world of designer hops, I think these kinds of mismatches are going to be more common. Some hops seem to read as "true" across palates. They're often the classics--Hallertau, Cascade, Saaz. But others have this Jekyll and Hyde quality. Sorachi Ace track as lemony to many palates, but come across like dill to others. Summits can be juicy and fruity, or taste like onions, garlic, or durian. Nelson Sauvin taste like sauvignon blanc grapes (hence the name), or musky and sweaty. In each case, the alternative flavor/aroma does not constitute a reasonable substitution. (It's interesting that most of the alternate flavors, including caraway in Mosaic, are savory notes.) If you're not tasting the qualities in these hops those who love them are, you probably dislike them.

The upshot for me, as basically every brewer is rushing to get her hands on Mosaic, is that I wish there were more of us who got the caraway flavor. It might make them a more specialty hop--as Sorachi Ace and Summits have become. But my sense is that I'm a fairly rare outlier here. Ah well--I can always have a saison.

Marks of the Modern Era: Hop Breeding

Looking back on a decade of blogging, one of the biggest revolutions has been the emergence of hops as the central player in craft brewing--a phenomenon that stretches all across the globe.  This has been driven by a couple things. First and foremost--and the subject of a future post--the way in which beer styles have evolved to take advantage of the flavor and aroma of particularly New World hops (US, New Zealand, Australia). But a possibly overlooked dimension in all of this are the hops themselves.

Breeders have been busy for the past four decades adding to the world's inventory of hop varieties. The focus in the early decades was on alpha acids; every few years, breeders managed to goose the alpha acids in hops so that "high alpha hops" went from 8% up to the low teens. When they kept going, breeders invented a new category, "super high alpha," to describe them. Large industrial breweries were driving these innovations, because the higher the alpha acids, the fewer the hops they had to use in a batch of beer.

Craft brewing changed that calculus, as drinkers became attracted to the vivid, often exotic flavors of New World hops. There were a decent number of first-gen varieties to choose from, principally the classic "C-hops" (Cascade, Centennial, Chinook). As craft brewing turned more toward hoppy ales and brewers started focusing more on techniques to enhance these hops' flavor and aroma, breweries started to look for new varieties to give their beers distinctive flavors. Stan Hieronymus would probably be able to comment more knowledgeably on this than I, but it appeared that the development of Citra, led by the Widmer Brothers and Sierra Nevada, marked a turning point. 

Developing hops takes a long time and is expensive and laborious. Unusual, off-putting compounds in these new hybrid hops are not always evident until they've gone into a number of beers. (Summit has a compound that tastes of onions to a minority of drinkers, Sorachi Ace a dill note--flavors not generally admired by those who detect them.) Producing a winner like Citra means finding several also-rans. Nevertheless, the blend of incentives created by the new direction of craft brewing post-2005 has shifted hop breeding firmly in the direction of aroma varieties. 

After Citra, a succession of new hops has hit the market--Mosaic, Equinox, Meridian, El Dorado, Palisade--all bred to give breweries more options. This is only the start of things. Breweries have a huge interest in finding hop varieties that will (generally in combination with other hops) give them IPAs that taste like no others on the market. They're looking not only to newly-bred ones, but forgotten varieties (Comet has made a comeback), indigenous varieties, and uncommon foreign varieties. What follows is an incomplete list of hops you may see appearing in your local IPAs:

• Azacca 
• Brooklyn 
• Buzz Bullets
• Caliente
• Canadian Red Vine 
• Cashmere
• Eureka 
• Enigma  
• Fantasia
• Jarrylo 
• Jester
• Lemonaughty 
• Minstrel
• Neomexicanus (Amalia, Latir, Tierra, Chama, Mintras) 
• Pekko
• Summer
• Sussex 
• Tahoma
• TNT
• Vic Secret
• Waimea

What's been really amazing is how these effects are translating to new varieties in Germany (Mandarina Bavaria, Huell Melon), the Czech Republic (Kazbek, Vital, Bohemie), and the UK (Sussex, Sovereign, Endeavour)--all places where classic varieties had previously been sacrosanct. The British strains seem to be the most New-world of the bunch, and Americans may soon be turning to the new varieties there to trick out their hoppy ales.

When I started this blog, it was possible to keep track of all the hops used in commercial brewing. As a homebrewer, I was able to brew with most of them and learn how they behaved and tasted. Now it seems like every week I encounter a beer made with some new hop. The very popular ones, like Mosaic and El Dorado, find their way into enough beers that we can hope to identify them. But Tahoma? Minstrel? TNT? It's getting harder and harder. I suspect this will slow down at some point, but it's the new normal for now. And it's been quite a transformation.

Get Your Holy Hops While the Gettin's Good

Source: Holy Hops

This is the best story in homebrewing since October 14, 1978: native, American neomexicanus hops grown at the the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico went on sale today to homebrewers.  They have precious little stocks, and therefore the hops are mighty expensive.  Nevertheless, this is an extremely cool prospect for nerds like me (I wisely ordered my 3.5 ounces of Latir before writing this post) for whom the idea of indigenous hops--even ones grown thousands of miles away--are irresistible.  It's a bit of a pig in a poke, flavor-wise, but here's what's on offer:

• Amalia (4.5% alpha acids).  "Citrusy, tangerine, slightly minty"
• Latir (7.2% aa).  "Spicy, herbal, flowery"
• Tierra (5.7% aa). "Minty, citrusy, very slightly grassy"
• Chama (7.3% aa). "Citrusy, herbal, fruity"
• Mintras (4.1% aa). "Herbal, minty"

If anyone does pick up some of these hops and wishes to do some bottle-trading down the line, I'd be happy to participate.  I'll be doing a relatively low-alcohol (~5%) neutral pale ale or lager with my Latir, hoping that the hops have a chance to express themselves in that format. 

A Hoppy Ale to Rule Them All

A couple-three weeks back, Zymurgy magazine released its annual poll of readers' favorite commercial beers.  Homebrewers do not in any way represent the average beer drinker, but they have been, since the 1970s, on the cutting edge of American brewing.  They were the first to use American hops, it was from their ranks that the first craft brewers emerged, and they have long been the leading practitioners of techniques now standard in professional brewing.  (I mentioned their latest innovation recently.) 

Where beer culture emerges, it does so buoyed by the enthusiasm of the most avid fans.  Look to their preferences if you want to see the state of the country.  The following list will therefore in no way surprise you.  It contains a surfeit of hoppy ales, a few dark ales, and a very thin smattering of outliers.  (Depending on how you classify things, 35 of the fifty listed beers were hoppy ales; another nine were dark ales.  Five were flavored, four were barrel-aged.  The first beer that is not either a hoppy or dark ale comes in at 25--Boulevard Tank 7.)  The top ten:

1. Russian River Pliny the Elder (hoppy ale)
2. Bell’s Two Hearted Ale (hoppy ale)
3. Ballast Point Sculpin IPA (hoppy ale)
4. Bell’s Hopslam (hoppy ale)
5. The Alchemist Heady Topper (hoppy ale)
6. Lagunitas Sucks (hoppy ale)
7. Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA (hoppy ale)
8. Stone Enjoy By IPA (hoppy ale)
9. Founders Breakfast Stout (dark ale) (flavored)
10. Goose Island Bourbon County Stout (dark ale) (barrel-aged)

I wondered how this stacked up to past years as a way to chart the changing preferences among the uber geeks.  Zymurgy has only been doing this for 11 years, unfortunately enough, yet even that span of time is instructive.  The American Homebrewers Association director, Gary Glass, sent me the 2003 list--actually a top-12.  Have a look:

1. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (hoppy ale)
2. Anchor Steam (steam beer)
3. Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale (hoppy ale)
4. Anchor Liberty Ale (hoppy ale)
5. Stone Arrogant Bastard Ale (hoppy ale)
6. Alaskan Smoked Porter (dark ale) (flavored)
7. Brewery Ommegang Abbey Ale (dubbel) (flavored)
8. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot (hoppy ale)
9T. Anchor Old Foghorn (hoppy ale)
9T. Great Lakes Edmond Fitzgerald Porter (dark ale)
9T. New Belgium Fat Tire (amber ale)
9T. Samuel Adams Boston Lager (Vienna lager)

Only half of those beers are hoppy ales.  It includes six different styles, including a lager and lager-like beer (there are no lagers on the current list of 50).  Vestiges of the early days of craft brewing--one is an amber ale and two are old-school barley wines--have now fallen out of favor (zippo of both on 2014's top-50 charts).  Eight--two-thirds--of those beers no longer make the homebrewers' top fifty (Anchor Steam, Anchor Liberty, Alaskan Smoked Porter, Ommegang Abbey, Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, Anchor Old Foghorn, New Belgium Fat Tire, and Boston Lager).

Eleven years doesn't seem like a long time in the scope of things, but we can see the distant past reflected in 2003's list.  It was still loaded with beers from the founders--half came from Anchor and Sierra Nevada, and throw in Sam Adams for good measure.  Even Fat Tire, which didn't go back to the beginning, represented one of the founding styles (amber ale).  What's really shocking is that there's only one IPA (though it's smuggled in under a different name).  You could slide Anchor Liberty uneasily into that camp, but it's no one's version of a modern IPA, no matter what the old-timers try to tell you.  Sierra Celebration, at 6.8% and 62 IBUs of c-hops, definitely is. It's America's first American IPA, and still loved by beer drinkers--it's number 15 on the 2014 list.

Pliny the Elder has won the reader poll six years running, which shows how hops came to dominate craft beer.  There's a way in which it seems like we've always loved hoppy beers, but the 2003 list is proof that hops are a fairly recent phenomenon.  What convinces me that this isn't another trend destined to be replaced is the overwhelming dominance that vein of styles has in the beer geek's imagination.  When you look at the 2003 list, you can see different camps represented.  There are the homebrewers who liked balanced session beers.  There are those who liked exotic flavored beers.  And there are those who liked hops.  When you look at the current list, you see homebrewers who like hops and stouts, full stop.  They're not evolving toward diversity--they're coming to agreement on what good beer is.  Just like the English, Irish, Belgian, German, and Czech drinkers have done. 

If I had to bet on what the list will look like in 11 more years, I'd put all my money on hops.  It has become our national tradition.

The Coming Hops Crisis?

Via 47 Hops comes this potentially alarming report (.pdf) about the supply and cost of hops in the near future (quotes come from both sources):

Rapid growth of the American craft brewing industry presents a challenge unlike any the American hop industry has previously faced. The State o f the U.S. Hop Industry and of the hop market is stable. However, that stability will not be long lived. The industry is moving perilously toward a wall of production capacity. The craft industry expanded at 15% in 2012. If growth in the U.S. craft brewing industry continues between 10 – 15 % per year in 20 13, and if the varieties in demand do not change to include those from other countries or those harvested earlier or later, fierce competition for limited production and higher prices are inevitable. This does not take into consideration the return of the multinational mega - brewers en masse into the alpha market, something we anticipate will also happen within the next 2 - 3 years. Since 2008, they have been using up inventory purchased in 08 while buying at reduced volumes. When they reenter the market, their needs will compete for scarce acreage and capacity.

47 Hops estimates the US industry as a whole needs to invest between $500 million and $1 billion in the next 5 years if craft beer growth stays somewhere between 10-20% per year.  Banks want their money back in roughly 5 years +/- a year or two.  Current prices are simply not high enough to pay for the continued growth of the industry.  To reach that level of return plus a reasonable 15-20% return on investment for the grower, prices will need to roughly double from where they are today.  [My bold]

If you want to spend some time reading through the material, there's a lot more there--both hard data and some extrapolation.  (47 Hops is a hop dealer and they seem inevitably to come to a conclusion that supports their business model--get a contract now!--but I don't know that it makes the analysis wrong.)  Something to put in the back of your mind.

Organic Hops Segment Growing, But ...

Post has been updated; see below. 

This item caught my eye (hat tip, Beerpulse)

But according to The American Organic Hop Grower Association, the total pounds of organic hops produced by their member growers tripled last year, growing from 70,000 pounds in 2011 to 218,000 pounds in 2012. What’s even more impressive? A full 10 percent of the hops grown in the U.S. are now certified organic (around double that of the average crop).

That's astounding.  Too astounding.  I visited the Willamette Valley a couple years ago, and organics were nowhere.   So I did a bit of checking.  In 2012, the US produced 61.2 million pounds of hops.  I'm no math whiz, but my back-of-the-envelope calculation puts 10% of that total at a shade over six million pounds.  At 218 thou, organics make up .36% (a third of one percent) of the market.  Perhaps they meant to say 10% of new hops?  Dunno, but whatever it is, it's not ten percent.

Update. Patrick Smith, of Loftus Ranches, clears up the confusion. (Check the comments for his correction on a raft of other glaring gaffes in the Yahoo piece.)

The Yahoo! report misinterpreted the data point. The correct interpretation is that 10% of US hop farms (by number, not volume) are growing certified organic hops on some portion of their acreage. The correct data point was intended to show that hop growers are responding to the market and getting into, or expanding, organic hop acreage. The average crop in the US has ~5% of its farms growing some organic production. Hops are now double that.

Americans Are Not Doing It Wrong

George Howell in Dunbar.

After a tour of the gorgeous Belhaven brewery in Dunbar, Scotland, brewer George Howell took me and my peripatetic friend to the pub for beers.  At one point, extolling the simple virtues of session ales from the United Kingdom, Howell pointed out that "when you're out with the lads and you have ten or twelve pints" you want a low alcohol beer.  Ten or twelve pints?  That's nearly two gallons of beer!  Patrick and I snuck goggle-eyed peeks at each other.  I assume Howell's session was several hours long, but still, ten pints of even 3.5% beer and I'm under the table trying to find where I left my mind.

I bring this up because Martyn Cornell has an interesting cross-cultural post about a trend Brian Yaeger mentions here--India session ales (ISA).  The post is thoughtful and well-documented in the typically Cornellian way, and the upshot is that the style may have much to recommend it, but it's not for session drinking.  He used Dogfish Head DNA as an example:

While it was less hoppy than 60-minute IPA, at 32 IBUs rather than 60 (and lower in strength, at 4.5 per cent ABV), there was still masses of floral flavour and aroma from both the Dogfish Head addition and the dry-hopping with Simcoe hops the beer had been given in Bedford, so that this was very clearly an American IPA, not a British one. I enjoyed my pint. But I only wanted the one. Palate overload set in after just that single glass. And that means that, regardless of its strength, DNA New World IPA cannot possibly be a session beer.

Matthias Trum in Bamberg

We'll come back around to ISAs in a moment.  But let me tell you about rauchbier.  When I was in Bamberg, Schlenkerla's Matthias Trum explained that you had to drink his rauchbiers up to at least the second and preferably the third half-liter:

"Only as you go through your first two or three pints does the smokiness step back in perception and then the malty notes come out, the bitterness, the smoothness.  So the second Schlenkerla is for you a different beverage than the first one.  And yet the third one is different than the second one.  From the third one on, you have the system running, so to say."

Many people hate rauchbiers and don't want even a mouthful, but in Bamberg they pour them down their throats like water.  (I happily joined them.)

Belgium is a little different, because the variety is such that at a cafe, you are likely not to be drinking a single beer in your session.  You may start off with a gueuze and then head to something lighter with food, and finish up with more alcoholic drinks.  In the US, "Belgian" is an adjective some drinkers deploy only in the negative, to describe any beer that has an abundance of yeast character.  A session of these beers is anathema to them.

I might be able to drink ten of these.

The point of all this is that ISAs are an American thing.  I don't have any doubt that most Brits would find them--and our far more common session ales, IPAs--too assertive for a long session.  Increasingly, American craft beer fans don't.  When I go out with friends, mostly they throw back hoppy beers.  Like rauchbiers, the intense sensations wash over your palate and do overwhelm it; thereafter you adjust, and the other elements of the beer comes out.  For an American, drinking a pint of IPA is just the foreplay for more IPAs--at that point, you can't really go down the ladder, anyway.

But that's what Americans like.  (Or those in the still-small minority who drink craft beer.)  I get that there's a certain amount of disdain around the world for our out-of-balance beers (I'm not a fan of ISAs because they tend to be more out of balance than IPAs).  There's an implicit judgment--not in Martyn's post but elsewhere--about foolish upstarts who don't know what they're doing.  Actually, we do. A love of hops represents the evolution of preference, of local taste.  I wouldn't expect Bambergers to jump on our bandwagon, nor Londoners.  But that doesn't mean we're doing it wrong.

Like a Comet

There's a man who lives in Dayton, Ohio.  He homebrews.  He blogs.  Recently he was inspired by my post riffing on Wahl and Henius's description of funny old American beers, particularly an odd duck called American Weissbier, and so he brewed it.  In the extremely near future I shall discuss that beer, but today I'll mention the other beer he sent--a single hop IPA made with Comet hops.  It's a variety I mistook for one of the many new ones.  Turns out that's exactly wrong; it's more like an heirloom:

Although not very popular, Comet was one of the first uses of a North American wild hop for a new U.S. cultivar. Comet was an offspring of a wild male hop that was collected from Logan Canyon, Utah, and crossed with an English hop, Sunshine.

The USDA adds (this now slightly out-of-date) information:

Seedling selection of cross 6185 made in 1961 at Corvallis, Oregon. Relatively high alpha acids content; Wild American aroma that is objectionable to some brewers, highly resistant (perhaps immune) to Prunus Necrotic Ringspot virus infection, yellowish green leaf color early in the season. Released as high alpha hop primarily for production in Washington and Idaho. Acreage expanded to 635 acres in 1980 (1% of US production), but declined after 1981 following the release of super alpha hops. Comet today is no longer grown commercially.

Ah, but it is grown commercially!  I was about 17% into my beer last night when I began learning this info, fascinated as I was by the striking characteristics of the Comets.  To my palate, they are quite rough--when I saw the information about wild stock, I totally believed it.  There's a very slight touch of lemon, but it tends more toward rind than fruit, and it's supported by other beguiling elements such as cat, soap, and weeds.  The finish is especially rugged, with a long, raspy weedy bitterness.  I was drinking the beer with friends and was surprised to hear universal acclaim--though everyone described it in really different terms. Based on the hubbub on the intertubes, I take it that a large group of other people have taken a fancy to it as well, which makes me think that maybe its time has come around again.

At What We're Drinking, the Ohio homebrewer describes the hop this way.  (He used it in a saison as well as this IPA):

There is a slight earthy gaminess behind the citrus and tropical fruit that may throw off some people, but it still finishes clean and bright. While I want to say I prefer the Saison to the IPA, I can’t honestly admit that: each beer plays to different strengths in regards to this hop. The Saison foregrounds the earthy components of the hop (and it is a bit longer in the tooth), while the IPA highlights the complex citrus and tropical fruit aspects of it. Either way, I’m hooked: Comet is the hop de jour at this house.

I think there's something about American palates that like this hoppy rusticity.  We like our beers big and bitter, often hazy, and a bit of roughness adds to the experience.  It's a very American hop, and the wildness does accentuate some of these rawboned qualities.  My palate tends toward the delicate and I like the classics--German hops, EKG, Saaz, and Cascades.  Of the new varieties, I like the ones that are almost sweet with tropical fruit.  (Base Camp has a single-hop Meridian IPA that sends thrills up my spine with its fruit salad flavors.)  But Comets are a bit of native Americana, and possibly a great alternative to Clusters if you're making some of the old classics.  Not my cup of tea, but a hop to consider for your next 19th Century lager.

Hops Are Not a Problem

Yesterday Portlander Adrienne So penned a provocative piece in Slate called Against Hoppy Beer.  It created a predictable amount of hubbub on the intertubes and didn't seem to warrant a post from me, so I Facebooked it, whereupon a debate broke out.  The issue is nicely summed up by a slugline to the Slate piece is "the craft beer industry’s love affair with hops is alienating people who don’t like bitter brews."  Well, is it? So, arguing for the prosecution, offers this evidence:

Thanks in part to Grossman’s pioneering influence, the pale ale, and its hoppier sister, the India pale ale, grew massively in popularity. (Today they’re the third-best- and best-selling craft beer styles in the country, respectively.) This was a positive development, but some breweries went overboard. By the 1990s craft breweries like Rogue, Lagunitas, Stone, and Dogfish Head were all engaged in a hop arms race, bouncing ideas and techniques off one another to produce increasingly aggressive, hop-forward beers....

Most beer judges agree that even with an experienced palate, most human beings can’t detect any differences above 60 IBUs. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, one of the hoppiest beers of its time, clocks in at 37 IBUs. Some of today's India pale ales, like Lagunitas’ Hop Stoopid, measure around 100 IBUs. Russian River’s Pliny the Younger, one of the most sought-after beers in the world, has three times as many hops as the brewery’s standard IPA; the hops are added on eight separate occasions during the brewing process.

With respect to Adrienne (and Alan, who defended the position on Facebook): hogwash.  This is one of those cases of the beer geek mistaking the bubble for the world.  Most of the best-selling beers in the "craft" segment are all modest beers: Boston Lager, SN Pale, Fat Tire, Blue Moon (which to the average consumer is a craft brand), Widmer Hefeweizen.  Those beers alone account for something like four million barrels of production--something on the order of a fifth to a quarter of the entire segment, depending on how you characterize it.  Add to that the ton of wheats that sell like hotcakes (Oberon, Gumballhead, 312, Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat) and you're taking another big chunk of the market.  To think that the craft market is awash in only the Plinys and Lagunitases, you have to live in ... Portland.

Three other quick points and then I'll knock it off:

• Bitterness is relative.  Adrienne begins by using mass market lagers as her baseline and notes that SN Pale was "one of the hoppiest beers of its time."  But that's only because at the time there were no other types of beer in the US.  A 37 BU beer isn't going to shock residents of Britain or even Germany.  That it shocked Americans was a testament to our debased state at the time, not Pale's hoppiness.  What humans consider normal changes over time.  Sometimes we like beers quite hoppy, sometimes we don't.  There is no Platonic ideal for the "right" amount of hoppiness, so it's impossible to norm it out.  (So's story begins with a Kentuckian shocked at 30 BU Hopworks Velvet English.  Ask yourself: who's out of step with hopping levels in this story?  If your baseline is Bud Light, 30 IBUs are shocking--but there's no world in which Bud Light should be the baseline for anything.)  Also, as a technical point, 60 BUs is nowhere near the threshold of human perception, and there's the further issue of the density of the beer.  A 60 BU barley wine is no hop titan.
• Hoppiness isn't just bitterness.  Hop flavor and aroma can be intense, and when we say "hoppy," sometimes we don't mean bitter.  I wouldn't be surprised if the Kentuckian in the story was just shocked at the type of beer he was served.  Americans are making more richly layered, hop-forward--but not necessarily bitter--beers.  Recently I've heard young beer fans describe IPAs and pales not as bitter, but "sweet"--so rich are they in the fruit flavors of modern hops.  We have to define our terms.
• Regions have different styles.  You could easily go to Brussels, order up that unpronounceable "gueuze" thing and declare it "too tart."  You could go to India and declare the food "too spicy."  These are preferences, not, again, some kind of measure against a Platonic ideal.  The United States appears to be developing a taste for hops, and I believe we may one day find ourselves with a hop-centric brewing tradition.  It's way too early to make that case now.  The opposite is true.  We are the most style-promiscuous country in the world, probably in the history of the world.  

 If you look around you and all you see are ultra hoppy triple IPAs and imperialized whatevers, you're very deep in the beer geek bubble.  In most of America, a surfeit of hops is not yet the central problem confronting beer culture.

The Curious Case of the US "Tettnanger"

Thank heavens for the human brain.  Confronted with an assault of millions of random data fragments, it pulls together relevant bits to make meaning.  In the case of hops, my faulty old software managed to cobble together something interesting from two bits of data:

1. Assembling my annual list of hops, I was impressed by how many recent(ish) strains have Tettnanger in their lineage.  
2. I got to spend some time with Stan "Mr Hops" Hieronymus this week, wherein we discussed hop parentage, and wherein I happened to mention this Tettnanger issue.  And Stan revealed a fascinating truth: most of those children were birthed not by Tettnang Tettnanger, the German original, but by US Tettnangers which are in fact ... Fuggles.

Here's how the USDA addresses the hop's lineage:

CULTIVAR: US Tettnanger. (supposedly Tettnanger, but quality differs significantly. Trade experts judge it to be a Fuggle

PEDIGREE: Uncertain; this hop supposedly came from the heat treated USDA 61021 (Swiss Tettnanger) from Prosser, WA but may have become mixed with Fuggle (USDA 48209)

And Fuggles are the parent hop to much of what we hold dear in American hopping, beginning with Cascade and Willamette.  I expect we'll learn much more from Stan when his book For the Love of Hops comes out in a couple months.

Hop Varieties Reference Guide

As has become the tradition around fresh hop season, I'm printing out a guide to the hop varieties you're likely to encounter in your travels.  There are a few things you should be aware of:

• Fresh hops behave differently than dried hops.  The flavors and aromas described here refer to the dried hop standard--what you get with a wet hop only your nose and mouth can tell you.
• Hop strains don't all taste the same.  Saaz grown in Yakima do not taste like Saaz grown in the Czech Republic.  Even strains grown in Yakima and the Willamette Valley taste different--never mind newer plantings that are springing up across the country.  The flavors and aromas listed below are general characteristics, not gospel.
• Some hops were developed by hop companies and are therefore proprietary strains.  This doesn't affect their quality at all, but it's an interesting feature in the hop-growing landscape.  As hop fever becomes the norm in the US, companies are racing to produce ever more exotic and tasty varieties (many of which find their way into test batches at places like Widmer and Russian River).  I've marked the proprietary strains in blue.
• If you read carefully, you'll notice that sometimes hops are described as being crossed with "unnamed" hops, which is just what it sounds like.  They have designations like USDA 65009-64034M (that's one of Crystal's parents).  It's different from "unknown" hop, which is more like it sounds--there is a lot of unknown parentage out there.
• In December, Stan Hieronymus's treatise For the Love of Hops will be out and no doubt demonstrate how crude my guides have been.  But since it's not December yet, enjoy!

Ezra has a full list of the beers/hops you'll find tomorrow in Hood River.

_____________

Aurora

• History. A high-alpha hop sometimes called the "super Styrian," though it is actually a cross between Northern Brewer and an unknown Slovenian hop.  Developed in the 1970s.
• Flavor/Aroma. Descriptions vary widely from spicy and earthy to tropical/pineapple. (alpha acid: 10-12% / beta acid: 4-5%. Total oils 1.1 - 1.8 ml.)

Amarillo

• History. Amarillo was discovered growing on Virgil Gamache Farms as a wild hop cross and is a proprietary strain owned by Yakima Chief.
• Flavor/Aroma. Described as a “super Cascade” with pronounced citrus (orange) and tropical fruit character (it can get seriously juicy). High in beta acids and a good aroma hop. (alpha acid: 8-11% / beta acid: 6-7%. Total oils 1.5-1.9 ml.)

Bravo

• History. A super-high alpha hop with principally Zeus and Nugget parentage released by SS Steiner in 2006.
• Flavor/Aroma. A pungent high-alpha hop that tends toward the earthy/spicy side of things (sometimes even minty)--similar to Chinook, but smoother. (alpha acid: 14-17% / beta acid: 3-5%. Total oils 1.6 - 2.4 ml.)

Brewer’s Gold

• History. A British bittering hop developed in 1919. Both Brewer's Gold and Bullion are seedlings found wild in Manitoba. It's an English/wild Canadian cross. Many modern high alpha hops were developed from Brewer's Gold.
• Flavor/Aroma. It has a resiny, spicy aroma/flavor with hints of black currant which some folks find objectionable. (alpha acid: 8-10% / beta acid: 3.5-4.5%. Total oils 1.6-1.9 ml.)

Bullion

• History. There are actually two lineages of Bullion.  The first was an English hop developed in 1919 where an unknown English hop was crossed with a wild hop gathered in Manitoba.  The second was a revival of the original in WA in the 1970s through heat treatment and meristem tip culture.
• Flavor/Aroma. A pungent and earthy/spicy hop with black currant notes.  (alpha acid: 7-13% / beta acid: 4-9%. Total oils 1.1 - 2.7 ml.) 

Cascade

• History. The first commercial hop from the USDA-ARS breeding program, it was bred in 1956 but not released for cultivation until 1972. It was obtained by crossing an English Fuggle with a male plant, which originated from the Russian variety Serebrianka with a Fuggle male plant.
• Flavor/Aroma. The most-used Northwest hop, with a lovely bright citrus and floral quality. (alpha acid: 4.5-7% / beta acid: 4.5-7%. Total oils 0.6-0.9 ml.)

Centennial

• History. Centennial is an aroma-type cultivar, bred in 1974 and released in 1990. The genetic composition is 3/4 Brewers Gold, 3/32 Fuggle, 1/16 East Kent Golding, 1/32 Bavarian and 1/16 unknown. Akin to a high-alpha Cascade.
• Flavor/Aroma. One of the classic "C" hops, along with Cascade, Chinook, and Columbus. Character is not as citrusy and fruity as Cascade and more "dank."  Some even use it for aroma as well as bittering. Clean Bitterness with floral notes. (alpha acid: 9.5-11.5% / beta acid: 3.5-4.5%. Total oils 1.5-2.5 ml.)

Citra

• History. Another of the recent proprietary strains, Citra is a relatively high-alpha dual-use hop that can be used either for bittering or aroma. Purported parentage includes Hallertauer, American Tettnanger, and East Kent Goldings.
• Flavor/Aroma. Lots of American citrus character, but tending toward mango and guava. (alpha acid: 11 - 13% / beta acid: 3.5 - 4.5%. Total oils 2.2-2.8 ml.)

Chinook

• History. Chinook hops were developed in the early 1970s in Washington state by the USDA; a cross of Petham Golding and Brewer's Gold.
• Flavor/Aroma. An herbal, smoky/earthy character that can overwhelm beers with a grating quality.  In late additions, is far cleaner and greener. (alpha acid: 12-14% / beta acid: 3-4%. Total oils 0.7-1.2 ml.) 

Columbia

• History. A sister to Willamette developed at OSU in the 1970s, it is, like Willamette, a Fuggle descendent.  It missed stardom when A-B chose Willamette instead.  Now enjoying a revival.
• Flavor/Aroma. Very much in the Willamette/Fuggle lineage--woody and earthy, with a lemon twist.  (alpha acid: 7-11% / beta acid: 3-5.5%. Total oils .5 - 1.6 ml.)

Columbus/Tomahawk/Zeus ("CTZ")

• History. The breeding nursery from which these varieties were bred contained 20-30 female plants from which seeds were gathered. Exact parentage is unknown.
• Flavor/Aroma. Hops have a very distinctive skunky/marijuana flavor and a sticky, resinous flavor. (alpha acid: 14.5 - 16.5% / beta acid: 4-5%. Total oils 2-3 ml.)

Crystal

• History. Crystal was released 1993, developed in Corvallis a decade earlier, a cross of Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, Cascade, and an unnamed hop.
• Flavor/Aroma. A spicy, sharp, clean flavor, citric in high concentration. It is not complex like Cascade but offers a clear note when used with other hops. (alpha acid: 4-6% / beta acid: 5-6.7%. Total oils 0.8-2.1 ml.)

First Gold

• History. A dwarf hop developed in England derived from a dwarf male and a Whitbread Golding variety.
• Flavor/Aroma. Similar to Goldings--spicy and earthy. (alpha acid: 6.5-8.5% / beta acid: 3-4%. Total oils, 0.7-1.5 ml)

Hallertauer

• History. Traditional German hop from Hallertau region. One of the classic “noble hops” originating in Germany’s most famous hop-growing region. Many cultivars.
• Flavor/Aroma. Pleasant herbal character with an excellent bittering and flavoring profile. US Hallertau exhibits a mild, slightly flowery and somewhat spicy traditional German hop aroma, but "wilder."  (alpha acid: 3.5-5.5% / beta acid: 3.5-5.5%. Total oils 1.5-2.0 ml.)

Liberty

• History. A cross of the Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, with characteristics similar to those of Mt. Hood, released in the mid-80s around the time of Mt. Hood's release.
• Flavor/Aroma. Mild and spicy, closely akin to Mt. Hood and Hallertauer. (alpha acid: 3.5-4.5% / beta acid: 3-3.5%. Total oils 1.0-1.8 ml.)

Magnum

• History. Bred in 1980 at the German Hop Research Institute, Magnum is a cross between American Galena and an unidentified German hop.
• Flavor/Aroma. Mild and spicy, closely akin to Mt. Hood and Hallertauer. (alpha acid: 10-13% / beta acid: 5-7%. Total oils 2.0-3.0 ml.) 

Meridian

• History. A newly discovered hop originally mistaken for Columbia.  (Great story here.) 
• Flavor/Aroma. Highly aromatic, fruity and lemony.   (no stats yet available on this new strain.)

Mt. Hood

• History. An Oregon State University product, Mt Hood was developed in 1985, a yet another cross with Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, Early Green, and an unknown hop.
• Flavor/Aroma. Mt. Hood is an aromatic variety with marked similarities to the German Hallertauer and Hersbrucker varieties. It has a refined, mild, pleasant and clean, somewhat pungent resiny/spicy aroma and provides clean bittering. A good choice for lagers. (alpha acid: 4-6% / beta acid: 5-7.5%. Total oils 1.0-1.3 ml.)

Mt. Rainier

• History. Also an Oregon State University product, Mt Rainiers were bred from a variety of plants, including Galena, Hallertauer, Golden Cluster, Fuggles, and Landhopfen (Polish). It was released commercially in 2008 or '09.
• Flavor/Aroma. An interesting hop that contributes a minty or anise note. (alpha acid: 7 -9.5% / beta acid: around 7%. Total oils- NA.)

Nugget

• History. Nugget is a bittering-type cultivar, bred in 1970 from the USDA 65009 female plant and USDA 63015M. The lineage of Nugget is a majority (5/8) Brewers Gold, with Early Green, Canterbury Golding, Bavarian and an unknow hopn.
• Flavor/Aroma. A sharply bitter hop with a pungent, heavy herbal aroma. (alpha acid: 12-14% / beta acid: 4-6%. Total oils 1.7-2.3 ml.)

Perle

• History. Bred in Germany in 1978 from English Northern Brewer stock and an unnamed German hop.
• Flavor/Aroma. Combines qualities of spicy English hops and rich, floral German hops. Excellent, clean bittering and aroma. (alpha acid: 6-8% / beta acid: 3 - 4%. Total oils 1 - 1.5 ml.)

Santiam

• History. A triploid hop resulting from a cross between 1/3 German Tettnanger, 1/3 Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, and an American hop (possibly Cascade). The first seedless Tettnang-type hop. An OSU hop released in 1998.
• Flavor/Aroma. Noble hop character, herbal, floral, but with a little American zest and wildness. (alpha acid: 5.5-7% / beta acid: 7-8.5%. Total oils 1.3 - 1.7 ml.)

Simcoe

• History. A propriety strain bred by Yakima Chief.
• Flavor/Aroma. Simcoe occupies that space between pine and grapefruit, and can swing either direction.  (alpha acid: 12-14% / beta acid: 4-5%. To2.0-2.5tal oils ml.)

Sterling

• History. Sterling is an aroma cultivar, made in 1990 with parentage of half Saaz and a quarter Cascade parentage with an unknown German aroma hop, Brewers Gold, and Early Green.
• Flavor/Aroma. Similar to Saaz in aroma and flavor. Aromas are zesty, earthy, and spicy.  (alpha acid: 4.5-5% / beta acid: 5-6%. Total oils 0.6-1.0 ml.)

Summit

• History. Summit is a recently-released super-high-alpha hop variety. It is a dwarf variety that can be grown on a low- or regular-trellis system. Because the low trellis is not machine harvestable, these hops are picked by hand in the field.
• Flavor/Aroma. Strongly pronounced orange/ tangerine aroma and flavor, though it can taste oniony to some palates. (alpha acid: 17-19% / beta acid: 4% - 6%. Total oils 1.5 - 2.5 ml.)

Tardif De Bourgogne

• History.  Unknown Alsatian French lineage--possibly a landrace species dating back to at least the 1970s.
• Flavor/Aroma. No information. (alpha acid: 3-5.5% / beta acid: 3-5.5%. Total oils .5 - .7 ml.)

Tettnanger

• History.  One of the classic noble variety of hops, originally a landrace species from the Tettnang hop-growing region in Germany.  The parent hop of a family of related species as well as numerous more recent crosses.  
• Flavor/Aroma. Classically smooth hop with delicate floral and spice notes.  (alpha acid: 3-6% / beta acid: 3-5%. Total oils .4 - 1.1 ml.) 

Willamette

• History. An older US-bred hop with Fuggles parentage.
• Flavor/Aroma. A classic earthy/spicy hop with great versatility. (alpha acid: 4-6% / beta acid: 3.5% - 4.5%. Total oils 1 - 1.5 ml.)

_____________
Information assembled from the following sources:  SS Steiner,  Yakima Chief, Freshops,  Global Hops, USA Hops, IndieHops

The Original Hop Revolution

One of the more interesting chapters in brewing history is the ver-r-r-y slow shift from sweet ales spiced with gruit to hopped beers.  The first time anyone mentioned using hops in beer was 822, when the abbot of a French monastery wrote about it.  It would be something on the order of three hundred years before hopped beer enjoyed any kind of popularity, though.

It's not hard to see why it would have taken so long.  For one, hopped beer is hard to make.  In order to get the full benefit, brewers have to boil the hopped wort for an hour or more.  Gruit beer may not even have been boiled; why would brewers have gone to the trouble to collect and burn wood when they could extract the flavor from spices without a long boil?  (Brewing, a domestic chore until the monks took it up in the seventh century, was little-documented.)  When brewers started working with hops, they wouldn't have understood this feature, and it would have posed technical challenges.  Perhaps more importantly, the flavor of gruit beer and hopped beer is quite different.  It's clear this was the main barrier.  An acquired taste, people initially rejected the new product wherever it was introduced.  In Britain, the last frontier, locals managed to stave off the stuff until the 1500s. 

The reason hops won out was not aesthetic, it was biological.  The Hanseatic towns of Bremen and Hamburg were the first to perfect hopped beer, and they had a huge market advantage: their beer kept.  They could brew it, ship it to Amsterdam, and even then it would outlast beer brewed locally.  Until the introduction of hops, beer had a shelf life of days before it would curdle into vinegar.  Hopped beer was still saturated with wild yeasts, but fewer, and the hops delayed the souring process.  Hops made it possible to ship beer and turned it into a regional commodity--and therefore a commercial one.

I recount all of this history because a thought occurred to me that I wanted to bounce off you--for you are collectively smarter than I.  Breweries long avoided brewing in summer because the wild yeasts were too virulent to make decent beer.  Until as late as the 19th century, lots of breweries quit making beer in the summer because of this.  Of course, beer was hopped, so it would keep long enough that people could drink beer throughout the summer.  Here's the question, though: before hops, there's no way beer would have kept throughout the summer.  Wouldn't brewing have been a strictly seasonal pursuit?  If so, it's no wonder it remained a domestic chore, not a viable commercial activity.  Am I missing something?

Hop Varieties Cheat Sheet

Fresh hop season is upon us again, and sadly, the good folks in Hood River have scheduled the premier festival this Sunday--when I'll be returning from the GABF. But in the very likely case you won't be in Denver, you should shoot down the Gorge. (Full details here.)

As a public service, I'm reprinting my hops varieties chart for you to consult during the Fest. No real research has been done into the flavor and aroma these hops contribute when wet, or how their constituents (oils and acids) vary when wet ... or really much of anything. But we can at least compare the wet versions to the dry versions, and so here are the details on standard hops.

Amarillo

• History. Amarillo was discovered growing on Virgil Gamache Farms as a wild hop cross.
• Flavor/Aroma. Described as a “Super Cascade” with pronounced citrus (orange) and tropical fruit character. High in beta acids and a good aroma hop. (alpha acid: 8-11% / beta acid: 6-7%. Total oils 1.5-1.9 ml.)

Bravo

• History. A super-high alpha hop with principally Zeus and Nugget parentage released by SS Steiner in 2006.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. Not much available on this new hop, which is described in generic terms as "fruity" and "floral." (alpha acid: 14-17%% / beta acid: 3-5%. Total oils 1.6 - 2.4 ml.)

Brewer’s Gold

• History. A British bittering hop developed in 1919. Both Brewer's Gold and Bullion are seedlings found wild in Manitoba. It's an English/wild Canadian cross. Many modern high alpha hops were developed from Brewer's Gold.
• Flavor/Aroma. It has a resiny, spicy aroma/flavor with hints of black currant and a pungent English character. (alpha acid: 8-10% / beta acid: 3.5-4.5%. Total oils 1.6-1.9 ml.)

Cascade

• History. The first commercial hop from the USDA-ARS breeding program, it was bred in 1956 but not released for cultivation until 1972. It was obtained by crossing an English Fuggle with a male plant, which originated from the Russian variety Serebrianka with a Fuggle male plant.
• Flavor/Aroma. The most-used Northwest hop, with a lovely mild citrus and floral quality. (alpha acid: 4.5-7% / beta acid: 4.5-7%. Total oils 0.6-0.9 ml.)

Centennial

• History. Centennial is an aroma-type cultivar, bred in 1974 and released in 1990. The genetic composition is 3/4 Brewers Gold, 3/32 Fuggle, 1/16 East Kent Golding, 1/32 Bavarian and 1/16 unknown. Akin to a high-alpha Cascade.
• Flavor/Aroma. One of the classic "C" hops, along with Cascade, Chinook, and Columbus. Character is not as citrusy and fruity as Cascade; considered to have medium intensity. Some even use it for aroma as well as bittering. Clean Bitterness with floral notes. (alpha acid: 9.5-11.5% / beta acid: 3.5-4.5%. Total oils 1.5-2.5 ml.)

Citra

• History. Another of the recent proprietary strains, Citra is a relatively high-alpha dual-use hop that can be used either for bittering or aroma. Purported parentage includes Hallertauer, American Tettnanger, and East Kent Goldings.
• Flavor/Aroma. Lots of American citrus character, but tending toward tropical fruit. (alpha acid: 11 - 13% / beta acid: 3.5 - 4.5%. Total oils 2.2-2.8 ml.)

Chinook

• History. Chinook hops were developed in the early 1980s in Washington state by the USDA as a variant of the Goldings Hop.
• Flavor/Aroma. An herbal, smoky/earthy character. (alpha acid: 12-14% / beta acid: 3-4%. Total oils 0.7-1.2 ml.)

Columbus/Tomahawk/Zeus ("CTZ")

• History. The breeding nursery from which these varieties were bred contained 20-30 female plants from which seeds were gathered. Exact parentage is unknown.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. Hops have a very distinctive skunky/marijuana flavor and a sticky, resinous flavor. (alpha acid: 14.5 - 16.5% / beta acid: 4-5%. Total oils 2-3 ml.)

Crystal

• History. Crystal was released 1993, developed in Corvallis a decade earlier. Crystal is a half-sister of Mt. Hood and Liberty.
• Flavor/Aroma. A spicy, sharp, clean flavor. It is not complex like Cascade but offers a clear note when used with other hops. (alpha acid: 4-6% / beta acid: 5-6.7%. Total oils 0.8-2.1 ml.)

First Gold

• History. A dwarf hop developed in England derived from a dwarf male and a Whitbread Golding variety.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. Similar to Goldings--spicy and earthy. (alpha acid: 6.5-8.5% / beta acid: 3-4%. Total oils, 0.7-1.5 ml)

Hallertauer

• History. Traditional German hop from Hallertau region. One of the classic “noble hops” originating in Germany’s most famous hop-growing region. Many cultivars.
• Flavor/Aroma. Pleasant herbal character with an excellent bittering and flavoring profile. US Hallertau exhibits a mild, slightly flowery and somewhat spicy traditional German hop aroma. (alpha acid: 3.5-5.5% / beta acid: 3.5-5.5%. Total oils 1.5-2.0 ml.)

Liberty

• History. Another cross of the Hallertauer Mittelfrüher, with characteristics similar to those of Mt. Hood, released in the mid-80s around the time of Mt. Hoods' release.
• Flavor/Aroma. Mild and spicy, closely akin to Mt. Hood and Hallertauer. (alpha acid: 3.5-4.5% / beta acid: 3-3.5%. Total oils 1.0-1.8 ml.)

Mt. Hood

• History. An Oregon State University product, Mt Hood was developed in 1985. It is a half-sister to Ultra, Liberty and Crystal. Mt. Hood is an aromatic variety with marked similarities to the German Hallertauer and Hersbrucker varieties.
• Flavor/Aroma. It has a refined, mild, pleasant and clean, somewhat pungent resiny/spicy aroma and provides clean bittering. A good choice for lagers. (alpha acid: 4-6% / beta acid: 5-7.5%. Total oils 1.0-1.3 ml.)

Mt. Rainier

• History. Also an Oregon State University product, Mt Rainiers were bred from a variety of plants, including Galena, Hallertauer, Golden Cluster, Fuggles, and Landhopen (?). It was released commercially in 2008 or '09.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. An interesting hop that contributes a minty or anise note. (alpha acid: 7 -9.5% / beta acid: around 7%. Total oils- NA.)

Nugget

• History. Nugget is a bittering-type cultivar, bred in 1970 from the USDA 65009 female plant and USDA 63015M. The lineage of Nugget is 5/8 Brewers Gold, 1/8 Early Green, 1/16 Canterbury Golding, 1/32 Bavarian and 5/32 unknown.
• Flavor/Aroma. A sharply bitter hop with a pungent, heavy herbal aroma.. (alpha acid: 12-14% / beta acid: 4-6%. Total oils 1.7-2.3 ml.)

Perle

• History. Bred in Germany in 1978 from English Northern Brewer stock.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. Combines qualities of spicy English hops and rich, floral German hops. Excellent, clean bittering and aroma. (alpha acid: 6-8% / beta acid: 3 - 4%. Total oils 1 - 1.5 ml.)

Santiam

• History. A triploid hop resulting from a cross between 1/3 German Tettnanger, 1/3 Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, and an American hop (possibly Cascade). The first seedless Tettnang-type hop. An OSU hop released in 1998.
• Flavor/Aroma. Noble hop character, herbal, floral, but with a little American character. (alpha acid: 5.5-7% / beta acid: 7-8.5%. Total oils 1.3 - 1.7 ml.)

Simcoe

• History. A propriety strain bred by Yakima Chief.
• Flavor/Aroma. Simcoe is best characterized as having a pronounced pine or woody aroma. The cultivar was bred by Yakima Chief in the USA. It is sometimes described as being “like Cascade, but more bitter - and with pine.” (alpha acid: 12-14% / beta acid: 4-5%. To2.0-2.5tal oils ml.)

Sterling

• History. Sterling is an aroma cultivar, made in 1990 with parentage of 1/2 Saaz, 1/4 Cascade, 1/8 unknown German aroma hop, 1/16 Brewers Gold, 1/32 Early Green, and 1/32 unknown.
• Flavor/Aroma. Similar to Saaz in aroma and flavor. Aromas are fine, rustic, earthy, and spicy. Used in this year’s Full Sail LTD 03. (alpha acid: 4.5-5% / beta acid: 5-6%. Total oils 0.6-1.0 ml.)

Summit

• History. Summit is a recently-released super-high-alpha hop variety. It is a dwarf variety grown on a low trellis system. Because the low trellis is not machine harvestable, these hops are picked by hand in the field.
• Flavor/Aroma. Strongly pronounced orange/ tangerine aroma and flavor. A favorite hop of Rob Widmer and used in recent releases (W ’07, Drifter). (alpha acid: 17-19% / beta acid: 4% - 6%. Total oils 1.5 - 2.5 ml.)

Willamette

• History. An older US-bred hop with Fuggles parentage.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. A classic earthy/spicy hop with great versatility. (alpha acid: 4-6% / beta acid: 3.5% - 4.5%. Total oils 1 - 1.5 ml.)

_____________
Information assembled from the following sources: Beer Advocate, Brew 365, Hopsteiner, Yakima Chief, Winning Homebrew , Global Hops