hops

Monday beer links: Hop inspections, beer lists, BCS & ‘Hard Times’

ABBREVIATED MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, 11.28.2016

Unhappy New York Hop Inspection: 1827 to 1835.
Alan McLeod trips happily from one discovery about hop inspecting to another. A couple of passages from the 1973 edition of Steiner’s Guide to American Hops add to the conversation.

(The annual sale of hops) was greatly stimulated by a law passed in Massachusetts in 1806 providing for compulsory inspection and grading of all hops packed for export. Strict standards were set for inspection and sternly enforced with the result that Massachusetts “first sort” brand became known as the finest hops in the United States. The effects of the law were salutary. European customers insisted upon hops which had passed the Massachusetts inspection, and in consequence, such approved hops commanded a premium price.” Production grew from annual sales of 304,377 pounds between 1806 to 1815 to 595,451 between 1825 and 1835. (From History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1863.)”

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No Amarillo, Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Citra, Galaxy, Mosaic or Simcoe allowed

This is simply a nifty little contest that Simply Hops, a division of the Barth-Haas Group, has put together. The premise is also pretty simple.

Question. What happens when you take away some of the main ingredients for making a big juicy IPA and then still demand that a big juicy IPA is brewed?

Answer. We find who the really talented brewers are.

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Monday beer links: Changing local culture, hops, in defense of pumpkin beers

MONDAY BEER & OTHER ALCOHOL LINKS, MUSING, 09.29.2016

Dah Dah Doo Dah Dah Dah Dah Dah Doo Dah La Ti Mi Fa La So Fa Mi.
At the moment last Monday I saw that John McPhee had written about taking his first drink, even if it wasn’t a beer, I knew what the first link would be here today. [Via The New Yorker]

Hopefully Just An Intermediate Stage.
While I think about what constitutes “beer news” (beyond the revelation they’ve named a hop after Ernest Salmon) I will offer a link to a blog Alan and the rest of you may not be reading (next). [Via A Good Beer Blog]

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Just in case Florida isn’t the next hop powerhouse

Conveniently enough yesterday @BeerAdvocate tweeted to a link to a story I wrote for the magazine not quite two years ago. It began, “The American hop market seldom finds a comfortable equilibrium for very long, simply because as essential as hops are in brewing beer, they serve almost no other commercial purpose.”

Business was booming then and it is booming now. Last week I revisited one of the reasons why, and Bryan Roth is posting about hops every day this week. In addition, last week Good Beer Hunting took notice of how acreage outside the Northwest is growing and All About Beer had a story about an attempt to grow hops in Florida.

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Not if an American brewer is adding the hops

Hallertau hop harvest

Reading this passage in “an alternative beer pilgrimage in Bavaria” I had to haul out my calculator (well, use the app on my phone), because nine million pints really does seem like a lot from one little patch of ground.

There are several moving parts, so I won’t share my math lest you can tell me what I did wrong. We are talking hectares (2.47 acres), metric tons (2,200 pounds), UK pints, hop varieties that yield different amounts per acre, and hop varieties with different percentages of alpha acids.

But it seems to me those would be nine million pretty un-hoppy pints. You’d definitely be at the left end of this chart showing the amount of iso-alpha acids if various beers (from Brauwelt, using numbers German hop broker Barth-Haas compiled about half a dozen years ago).

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