hops

You can read it right here, explanation marks and all: “Engineers have developed a ‘barista-type experience’ for beer drinkers where a barman can adjust a gadget fitted to a beer tap to adjust the ‘hoppiness’ level on demand.”

“Hoppier” works much like Randall the Enamel Animal, which Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery invented more than 10 years ago. Engineers at Cambridge Consultants might be putting a little more emphasis on pressure (“We knew, for example, that pressure is fundamental to extracting flavour in espresso machines – so part of our investigation was to see whether it does anything for beer.”), as the video illustrates.

Randall and a variety of devices other brewers built since (I’ve had Budweiser though a Randall-like filter, on more than one occasion in fact) prove that filtering beer through hop cones will create different aromas and flavors than are in the beer alone. Extracting essential oils may make the beer taste more “hop-like” and fresher or grassier. But it is a might bold to suggest the engineers “have ‘transformed’ the brewing and dry-hopping process, which usually tales two weeks, to enable consumers to change the flavour of beer in seconds.”

There’s more going on in the torpedoes used to make Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA, because dry hopping involves more than just extracting flavor from hops. They how, what and why are not perfectly understood. For instance, researchers in Germany just determined that the transfer rate of various compounds varies, which is not exactly a surprise. But it appears that this rate may also vary based on the variety of hop involved. Makes writing formulas difficult. Hop scientists often talk about the importance of synergy — put two compounds or more (hops contain more than 400) and they may create other compounds or the way each is perceived may be changed by the presence of others.

In addition, yeast becomes a key player in dry hopping, because of the biotransformations that occur when yeast and hop hang out together — another area where much more research is needed. Those aren’t going to occur in the seconds it takes beer to pass through the “Hoppier.” Sierra Nevada has studied this is much as any brewery on earth. The brewery uses two different methods to dry hop. One is to attach eight-pound bags of hops, which will be more than four times heavier after absorbing beer, to rings that have been welded to the sides of tanks. Beers will then soak for up to two weeks.

The other process uses the torpedoes (thus named because the tanks look like torpedoes turned on their sides), invented because Sierra Nevada was running out of real estate at its original brewery in Chico, Calif. Each one can hold up to 80 pounds of hops. It is purged with CO₂, then beer is circulated from the bottom of the cone to the bottom of the torpedo, up through the torpedo and back into the tank. The beer, freshly dosed with hop oils, passes through a tube within a tube (called a periscope) so that it returns higher into the tank. Otherwise, beer in the bottom of the tank may become saturated and won’t retain any more hop oil.

Brewmaster Steve Dresler said results vary dramatically based upon temperature and flow rates. Torpedo Extra IPA circulates for five days, beginning at 68º F (20° C) and finishing cold, extracting all the oils Sierra Nevada wants out of the hops much more quickly than with the passive bag system. However, the parameters are the same with bags. Dry hopping begins at 68º F, and yeast will still be active.

“We don’t get the same floral estery notes in some other beers if we use the torpedo process simply cold without yeast contact time,” Dresler said.

Edward Brunner at Cambridge Consultants may well be right when he says, Hoppier gives brands to stand out in the marketplace and “It’s a way of building on the current trend of personalisation to create new experiences and add value for the consumer.”

But it’s not necessarily a substitute for dry hopping.

*****

PS – Yes, the tagline “Beer brewed by engineers” should send a chill down your back.

A few years ago, Summit Brewing founder Mark Stutrud made a serious commitment to using locally grown barley (and a specific variety, Moravian 37) in Summit Pilsner. Listen to him talk in the video and you’ll think, yep, this is somebody who understands the importance of local.

So it is interesting to see him take a wait-and-see attitude toward using local hops.

“We’re keeping track of what’s going on in Minnesota, but a lot of folks who are starting hop farms in Minnesota don’t think of how they’re going to measure the quality of their harvest. Are they going to have a kiln? Will they pelletize or are they just going to grow the vines and say, ‘Come on over and pick them up?'”

The best the Hop Growers of America can figure Minnesota farmers planted about 20 acres of hops in 2014. But these are questions that need to be asked from the outset and often aren’t.

“I get these calls every day (from would be hop growers),” Sean McGree, hops manager at Brewers Supply Group, said the other day. “All they are worried about is getting their trellises in and hop going. They don’t realize that 60 percent of the quality that brewers see comes after the hops are picked.”

I’m more optimistic that farmers trying to revive hop growing in regions outside the American Northwest might succeed than I was three years ago, which is not to say I have any interest in investing in a hop farm. Picking and drying remains the next big challenge for many of them. But as Hop Head Farms in Michigan has shown it can be done.

The image at the top gives you an idea of one of the standards they will be expected to meet. There’s a lot more to know about what’s inside the package than the percentage of alpha acids, which many new farmers can’t even provide. Roy Farms goes beyond most, for instance including the picking and pelletizing dates as well as the crop year, but the other number to look at is the lot. Roy tracks each lot literally from the time the plants are trained to string in the spring until they are picked, processed and packaged. Ever wonder what pesticides might have been used on the hops in the glass of “wet hop” beer you had the other day at your local brewpub? Perhaps you should. (You’ll also notice that Roy Farms is as Salmon-Safe certified grower.)

This isn’t exactly related, but in doing some research for another article I was re-reading part of “Hop Culture in the United States” (1883). In it there is a report of the Chamber of Commerce for Middle Franconia in 1879:

“American Hops (we have to admit this, though unwillingly) are greatly preferred in England to ours, and have decidedly taken precedence of us in that market. Taking the excellent qualities of our produce into consideration, such a result would be quite inexplicable, if it were not that the system of German commerce, unfortunately, has itself to blame, in part for this defeat. American Hops, no matter whether of better or inferior quality, almost always appear in foreign markets in their original state, whereas, with us, parties are not ashamed to make up for exportation, hops of all countries and all qualities, mixed together, often marked with best brands on the outside of the bales, but containing the poorest kind of goods.”

Next there is this account:

“A brewer in England, a short time ago, bought a bale of hops in Nuremberg, and thought he got the genuine Bavarian article. But when he opened the bale, a slip of paper with the name of a hop-growers in Eastern Prussia on it, was found. The hops had been sold in Allenstein, Eastern Prussia, and from there found their way to Nuremberg. Being of good quality, the Englishman sent the grower, in Prussian, an order for more hops. A still more striking instance of such dealings happened in Wurtemberg, Prussia. A brewer, of that place, was prejudiced against the hops of his own country. He refused to buy hops in the Allenstein market. He wanted the genuine article from Southern Germany. He bought all he needed at Furth. But what did he find one day in a bale of Bavarian hops? A business card with the name of his next neighbor, a hop grower, whose hops he had declined to buy at any price. Unwittingly, he had taken them many a time at a fair premium, when they were sent by some Bavarian hop dealer.”

Kind of funny, but not really.

Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico will soon offer neomexicanus (almost native American) hops for sale. These will only be available in quantities suitable for brewing at home, as opposed to commercially (except at nano size), and as whole cones rather than pellets. Barring complications, orders may be placed at the Holy Hops website beginning Saturday.

They were grown on the monastery grounds and harvested by the monks, with help from some friends.

Monks picking hops in fall of 2011.

The monks acquired several varieties of hops from Todd Bates, who bred them on his property between Embudo and Taos, N.M. They don’t include Medusa, the only hop in Harvest Wild Hop IPA, which Sierra Nevada Brewing will release in December. The brewery provides a preview at its website: “These bizarre, multi-headed, native U.S. cones have a flavor like nothing we’ve tasted, and for the first time, we’re showcasing their unusual melon, apricot and citrus aromas and flavors in our beer. Neomexicanus is the literal wild card in our five-bottle Harvest series which features single hop, fresh hop, wet hop, and wild hop beers.”

So a quick primer is in order. The genus Humulus likely originated in Mongolia at least six million years ago. A European type diverged from that Asian group more than one million years ago; a North American group migrated from the Asian continent approximately 500,000 years later. Five botanical varieties of lupulus exist: cordifolius (found in Eastern Asia, Japan), lupuloides (Eastern and north-central North America), lupulus (Europe, Asia, Africa; later introduced to North America), neomexicanus (Western North America), and pubescens (primarily Midwestern United States).

Varieties European brewers identified early on as outstanding, such as Saaz and Spalt, were Humuplus lupulus. When the first settlers arrived in North American they brewed beer with hops (Humulus lupuloides) they found growing wild, but also used hops (lupulus) they brought from Europe. Not surprisingly, native and imported hops cross-bred naturally. As recently as 1971, Cluster — one of the hops that resulted — accounted for nearly 80 percent of U.S. hop acreage. Today almost all the varieties grown in the United States contain a mixture of North American and European genetic material.

An article last summer in Smithsonian magazine generated sudden interest in neomexicanus and Sierra Nevada’s beer is certain to increase it. Eric Desmarais at CLS Farms in the Yakima Valley first planted two varieties he acquired from Bates in 2011 (quick promo: details in “For the Love of Hops”). This year he harvested nine acres of a hop first called Multi-Head and then trademarked as Medusa, with virtually all of the crop bound for Sierra Nevada or Crazy Mountain Brewing in Colorado. Desmarais figures Brewers Supply Group, the broker that handles most of his hops, could have sold 10 times what he had available. He plans to expand acreage next year, but expects Medusa to remain a niche variety. He has another acre of experimentals from crosses Bates made.

The hop yard at Christ in the Desert shortly after the 2010 harvest.

The monks have five varieties for sale — Amalia, Chama, Latir, Mintras, and Tierra. Their alpha acids range from 4.1% to 7.3% and in most cases the beta acids are slightly higher. Amalia contains about 1 mL of total (or essential) oil per 100g. Of that almost 80% is myrcene, with 4.8% caryophyllene, 1.5% humulene, less than .01% farnesene, .7% linalool, 1.5% geraniol, and .7% pinene. Complete information will be available at Holy Hops.

The hop dryers at Christ in the Desert.

CLS Farms in the Yakima Valley posted this picture of Medusa hop cones fresh off the bine earlier this week.

This is the variety featured in Smithsonian magazine in July, and the one that will be the only hop in Sierra Nevada’s Harvest Wild Hop IPA later this year. I’ll be talking about native American hops, and how they may differ from hops simply found growing in the wild, among other things next Thursday evening at the Keg Ran Out Club’s World Brewers Forum at the Denver Marriott City Center.

This event raises money for the Children’s Hospital of Denver is always fun. Eric Nichols of Beryl’s Beer Co. and Shawn O’Sullivan of 21st Amendment are up first. Shawn promises to tell war stories. I’ll stick to hops, probably rambling on about recent research related to dry hopping and about why the Cascade grown here doesn’t taste like the Cascade grown there.

A tip for those heading the Great American Beer Festival before the World Brewers Forum: swing by Crazy Mountain Brewing (K20) for their Neomexicanus Native Pale and at Abbey Brewing (I4) ask for the reserve versions of Monk’s Dubbel and Tripel ales. Those Monks’ beers are brewed with neomexicanus varieties grown on the Monastery of Christ in the Desert property near Abiquiu, New Mexico.