hops

Because we don’t all like the same flavors

Here’s another new hop to look for: Relax. It’s unusual because it contains 0.25% alpha acids, as in almost none. For sake of comparison, Czech Saaz hops have 3-6%, Cascade 4.5-7%, and German Herkules 12-17%. It was bred in Germany and those who have rubbed and sniffed the cones describe aromas like “green tea, celery, hay, and lemongrass.”

Until recently it belonged to a large tea company, but the company is not particularly happy with the variety and its future is uncertain (it is grown on only about five acres). The Barth-Hass Group recently included it in tasting during Brau Beviale, the massive brewing trade fair last November in Nuremberg, Germany. Here are the basics: the tasting featured six beers, one a control, made at the Reserach Brewery in Saint Johann. They were German lagers made with 100% pilsner malt and bittered with Herkules. A single variety (or blend) was added in the whirlpool and used for dry hopping. The bitterness varied in the final beers.

The favorite was a beer called Appassionato and made with a Barth-Haas blend and the second favorite one called Dolcezzo (meaning “sweetness”) and hopped with Amarillo. They are pictured in the top spider graph. The second graph is for Tranquillo, made with Relax.

Beer brewed with Amarillo hop

Beer brewed with Relax hop

The beer brewed and dry hopped with Relax (Tranquillo) ranked No. 4. But in the conclusion, Barth-Haas notes, “This beer showed a very different flavour profile compared to the others. The relatively high standard deviation shows that it polarised the tasters and was either ranked rather good (1 to 3) or rather bad (4 to 6). Male tasters preferred the Relax beer more than female tasters.”

When the Society for Hop Research in Germany made four new varieties available to farmers less than four years ago a similar tasting characterized Hallertau Blanc much the same &#151 as polarizing. That may be one reason the farmers were hesitant to plant it. Now demand among US brewers exceeds supply.1

Gone are the days when a new hop variety need to appeal to the largest possible audience, because, well, you know the rest.

*****

1 Obviously, these are still very new varieties. In 2014, 150 of the 1,192 German hop growers cultivated at least one of the three “flavor hops” released in 2012. Another 50 likely will this year. They harvested 100 metric tons (a metric tons is about 2,200 pounds) of Mandaria Bavaria, compared to 19 in 2013, 50 tons of Hüll Melon (7 in 2013), 40 of Hallertau Blanc (5), and 100 of Polaris (29). They expect Mandarina acreage will double in 2015 and that Hüll Melon and Hallertau Blanc will increase by about 60 percent.

Because process always matters in beer & brewing

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 01.05.15

Session 95: Those Unwritten Books And Happy Marriages…
This month’s Session resulted in a feast of links, nicely organized by host Alan McLeod. Excellent commentary included. [Via A Good Beer Blog]

Sierra Nevada’s New Hop Hunter IPA Is Like No Other Beer in Its Class.
Reducing this to very unsexy basics: Sierra Nevada Brewing will soon release an IPA made with concentrated essential oils gathered from unkilned hops using steam distillation. Writing for Esquire, Aaron Goldfarb flushes out the details and offers a tasting note: “Like most wet hop beers, Hop Hunter is extraordinarily floral and aromatic, like sticking your nose into a freshly-picked plant or flower bouquet. It’s not really bitter-tasting either, certainly not as bitter as your typical IPAs.”

Blatz Tempo I’d like to know more about the process, and if I did I would share it with you. It feels like there are implications beyond if Hop Hunter IPA is a “best of class” beer. I will be in full research mode late this month at the American Hop Convention in San Diego and will report back.

Almost 50 years ago, Blatz Brewing in Milwaukee sold its own version of a “fresh hop” beer called Tempo. At the time, Blatz president Frank Verbest said the brewery spent two years and hundreds of thousands of dollar coming up with the process to brew the beer, partnering with companies outside the brewing industry. He likened it to distilling crude oil into gasoline and other derivatives. (The online version of the Milwaukee Journal can be a little difficult to read — I quoted from it extensively three years ago.)

A few years later, Fortney Stark sued Blatz, claiming they had not honored a 1954 deal in which he turned over his secret process for this extracting process. His patent describes a process that most often uses methanol as an extractive. The extract was then “concentrated to any desired degree by evaporation or distillation to expel the solvent.” So a different process and — given the beer was advertised as “a new discovery that frees beer from bitterness’ — a different intent than Sierra Nevada has for this IPA. [Via Esquire and Jess Kidden]

Process or ingredients?
A couple of days after Christmas I visited Jester King Brewing outside of Austin to talk about, and taste, beers that reflect where they are brewed. One of the first things Jeff Stuffings asked me is if this indigenous-American book beer I’m working on will be focused more on ingredients or process. A fair question, since I wanted to talk about how they integrate locally cultivated ingredients in the beer, about their unique mixed-culture yeast, and about local water, among other things. However, the answer has to be both. It won’t do to simply list ingredients that brewers used 300 years ago or are including now. How they were or are prepared, when they were or are added, those things matter. Eight days later, quite interesting to read what Lars Marius Garshol has to write about the same situation in Norway. [Via Larsblog]

In Belgium, Battle Builds Between Brewers and ‘Beer Architects’.
The Wall Street Journal catches up with something Joe Stange wrote for Belgian Beer & Food last spring, but that one is not online. Imagine the conversations we’ve been having here for a very long time in the U.S. taking place in Flemish and French. [Via Wall Street Journal]

Breweries that Closed.
Even in Beervana, breweries fail. From Bryan Yaeger: “Ostensibly this is a story about breweries you’ve likely never tasted beer from or possibly heard of–such as Bull Ridge or Blue House–but what good is reading an obit for someone you’ve never met or read about unless you can put their life in context? So before we start to eulogize the not-really-dearly departed, let’s consider this a living wake.” [Via The New School]

Guide to opening a hipster cafe.
h/T to Max Bahnson for pointing to this and suggesting, via Twitter, “Replace a few words with “Craft Beer” and you’ve got the perfect guide to opening a Beer Bar.” [Via Imbur]

Beer, agriculture & lifestyles

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 12.22.14

Random fact not worth a blog post (and that felt too irrelevant to tweet): A comment attempt that ended up in the spam folder (bless Akismet) last week was 33,501 words long. Should have saved it for 28 February.

5 Reasons NOT to Become a Hop Farmer in 2015.
@47Hops has tweeted this link relentlessly and several other tweeters have picked up on it. In the comments (where there’s some excellent reading) blog author Douglas MacKinnon says that on Facebook he received “negative comments about this article saying I’m a greedy dealer trying to keep the market to myself” and based on the tone alone you can see why. It portrays the hundreds of farmers in the country newly interested in growing hops in a rather singular way. I have not been shy here or on Twitter or on Facebook about suggesting people giving hops a whirl should know what they are up against. But many of them do have a clue. Recently and in the coming months there have been or will be educational conferences about everything releated to growing hops in several different states east of the Mississippi. Maybe as important, I remember that less than 40 years ago it was idiotic to start a new, obviously small, brewery. [Via 47 Hops]

Are You Ready for Lifestyle Beer?
All’s Fair.
– Jeff Alworth writes “The rise of lifestyle brewing — less a new thing than the end state of a very old trend — is yet the latest development in that constant tension between hype and authenticity.”
– Dave Bailey writes “at a time when there seems to be many people claiming that we should all shout universally that all beer is good, it seems to me that at least one brewery is ready to fight gloves off. I for one welcome this.”
[Via All About Beer and HardKnott Dave’s]

Why J D Wetherspoon’s is fast becoming my favourite craft beer bar.
“I never thought I’d see the day.” [Via Pete Brown]

Heineken’s Charlene de Carvalho: A self-made heiress.
The mysterious banker behind the world’s best-known beer.
What happens when you are 47 years old and inherit the Heineken fortune and control of a brewing empire that you had almost nothing to do with up until your father died? (The article includes the story about when Freddy Heineken was kidnapped. He said he captors tortured him. “They made me drink Carlsberg.” [Via Fortune ]

Baderbrau rebirth culminates with South Loop brewery.
So what’s next, somebody opens a brewery called Cartwright Brewing in Oregon? How about a Newman Brewing in New York? Nostalgia for failed startups of the 1980s feels a bit strange. [Via Chicago Tribune]

Lo Hai Qu on Wine Magazines.
Per usual, the HoseMaster takes no prisoners. Would I find somebody skewering beer magazines as amusing (given that I work for several of them)? Would you? Because “when it comes down to it, wine magazines are just like the men that read them—fun for a night, but then easily disposable.” [Via HoseMaster of Wine]

My kinda holiday greetings card

Season's greetings from the Hop Research Center in Germany

I promise not to make a habit of posting beer-related, particularly hop-related, holiday greetings (although I always look forward to the card from Bohemia Hop).

However, this one just arrived from Hüll via email and will keep me smiling all day.

Session #94: Just another cog in the industrial beer complex

The SessionThe topic for The Session #94 today is: “Your role in the beer ‘scene’. What it is.”

Host Adrian Dingle provided this guidance: “So, where do you see yourself? Are you simply a cog in the commercial machine if you work for a brewery, store or distributor? Are you nothing more than an interested consumer? Are you JUST a consumer? Are you a beer evangelist? Are you a wannabe, beer ‘professional’? Are you a beer writer? All of the above? Some of the above? None of the above? Where do you fit, and how do you see your own role in the beer landscape?”

Since he first posted the topic, I’ve been trying to decide if I should call myself a “cog” even though I don’t draw a paycheck from any brewery. By writing about beer I publicize beer. And all publicity is good publicity, right? So there you have it. Enough about me. More interesting is what I get to see and write about. Here’s what I saw this morning:

Davo McWilliams

That’s Davo McWilliams pouring a bunch of hops into a brew kettle at the Anheuser-Busch Research Pilot Brewery in St. Louis, and RBP brewmaster Roderick Read in the background. McWilliams won the right to have his IPA recipe brewed at the pilot brewery when a panel of A-B judges liked it best in a competition last month held in conjunction with the Ballpark Village Brew Fest in downtown St. Louis.

The beer will be served next month in the Budweiser Brew House at Ballpark Village. Right now it’s still wort and, like the story, a work in progress