You will be forgiven if you think we must be on Ales Through the Ages III or even IV by now.
The first one was in 2016. Read Martyn Cornell’s recap here.
The second was to be in 2018, but was canceled.
Then the second was to be last year, but the in-person conference was postponed until this year.
A shorter virtual conference was held instead.
So I’m not sure if we call this II or III, but it is happening Nov. 11-13 in Williamsburg. The agenda is here.
I might have been a bit optimistic when I provided a title for my presentation — Breaking the Lupulin Code. Scientists are still working on mapping hop genomes, complicated by the fact there isn’t just one and each of them is larger than the human genome. And then there’s the reality that hops may not follow Gregor Mendel’s principles of inheritence. But I’ll do my best to explain why Citra is so much different than her grandmother, Hallertau Mittelfrüh. And to answer Frank Clark’s question about what modern hops are most like those colonial brewers would have used.