hops

Session 77 – IPA: Why it’s a big deal

The SessionToday the topic for The Session is “IPA: What’s the Big Deal?” What follows is based mostly on what’s occurring in the United States, although IPA Madness doesn’t stop at the U.S. borders, which you’ll see by visiting today’s posts (look for the links at the bottom of the announcement).

Nearly eighteen years ago, beer author-brewer-consumer Randy Mosher presented a travelogue of a recent trip to the world’s largest hops growing regions to listeners at Oldenberg Beer Camp in Kentucky. At one point he tilted his head back as if he were taking a big drink, reaching his hands into the air and grabbing fistfuls of imagined hops, then bringing them back down to his mouth.

“Americans have been starved for hops so long,” he said, “that right now we’re just shoving them down our throats.”

The implication was this would pass. It has not. I’ve cited this from Hop Culture in the United States before, but 140 years later it is still relevant:

“The brewing industry is not exempt from the influence of fashion. A careful survey of the types and descriptions of beers in vogue at different times will show that fashion has had something to do with our trade,” the author wrote. He described changes in beer dating to back before hops became an essential ingredient, and considered what might be next in England. “We will not further refer to the threatened introduction of lager beer into this country, than to say fashion takes strange freaks, and it will be well for brewers to be prepared for all eventualities.”

At the beginning of 2008 pale ale was the best selling craft beer style in supermarkets, followed by amber ale, amber lager, wheat beers, and then IPA. Yes, wheat beers, then IPA.

In the four years between the end of 2007 and end of 2011 sales of IPA increased 260 percent and it became the No. 1 craft style. The next year sales increased 40 percent again. This gets harder to measure, because now we have Black IPAs, White IPAs, Belgian IPAs, Session IPAs, and Cider IPAs.

And late Thursday, Harry Schuhmacher passed long the boldest of predictions.

All this reflects still growing interest in aromas and flavors being discovered in hops — or more accurately, created during the brewing process. IPA has become a synomym for hops. When Mosher made his 1995 Hop Tour these are a few of the varieties that weren’t yet commercially available: Amarillo, Apollo, Bravo, Calypso, Citra, Galaxy, Mandarina Bavaria, Mosaic, Motueka, Nelson Sauvin, Riwaka, Saphir, and Simcoe. For starters.

More than once last week at the National Homebrewers Conference I was asked what the next hot aroma/flavor would be? My best guess is more variations on this theme. No doubt there will be new varieties released, maybe touting a little more gooseberry, a lot more blueberry, a subtle melon, more lime, even coconut. But, and I hope I am not just being pie-in-the-sky optimistic, brewers also have an opportunity to blend varieties already in hand — often rich in compounds that breeders and farmers worked to keep out of hops as recently as 40 years ago — to create something new.

As Alex Barth, president of hop merchant John I. Haas has pointed out, “This love craft brewers have for hops refocuses attention on the plant.” IPA deserves some of the credit. It hardly seems likely it will fall out of fashion soon, but that’s no reason to be pissed off about the attention it is getting.

Two examples. The popularity of Union Jack India Pale Ale has helped fund expansion at Firestone Walker, which is why you can get Pivo Hoppy Pils, dry hopped with generous portions of Saphir. Likewise at Marble Brewery in New Mexico. Its IPA drives growth, so beers like Marble Pilsner — brimming with perfumey Old World Hersbrucker hops — end up getting packaged. These are good things.

I seem to have wandered off topic. Hops will do that. Lord know what I’ll write about on IPA Day. Maybe coffee-infused wood-aged extreme saison IPAs.

New Zealand hop production below expectations

Looks like New Zealand hops, which include several particularly popular varieties, won’t be any easier to get this year. The industry’s 2013 crop report (remember it is fall there and hops have already been harvested) indicates production fell about 30 metric tons, or 4%, below expectations. The two most widely grown varieties, Wakatu and Nelson Sauvin, were “the most highly impacted by the unseasonal conditions.”

“The result was a little disappointing, especially in what is a buoyant market but the reality is things could have been much worse when you consider just how persistently dry the summer was,” said Doug Donelan, CEO of New Zealand Hops.

Farmers harvested about 600,000 pounds of Wakatu, 216,000 pounds of Nelson Sauvin, and 119,000 of Motueka, another emerging variety. Production of other high demand/low volume varieties such as Riwaka (13,000 pounds, most of which will stay in New Zealand) was considerably less.

For purposes of comparison, American farmers harvested more than 5 million pounds of Cascade hops in 2012, more than a million of Cluster, and even 722,000 of Citra, a variety farmers are expanding acreage of as fast as they can.

[The full report, courtesy of Charles Faram & Co.]

Hop aroma/flavor: A spectrum

Hop Products Australia Flavour Spectrum

[Click on chart to visit site, enlarge]

HPA (previously known as Hop Products Australia) has unveiled another way to look at hop flavor (or flavour in Australian), which of course includes aroma: the Hop Flavour Spectrum.

The emphasis is on the end result, that is a drinker’s sensory experience.

It’s not an exact science. This Hop Flavour Spectrum is not based on data generated from a comparative tasting of experimental beers, nor is it based on analytical and technical descriptions, the hops chemical profile or growing conditions.

It comes from our experience. In our view we have found chemical analysis alone provides limited understanding or direction of how the hop will impact beer flavour. How and when hops are used in the brewing process ultimately impacts on the dominant flavour profile.

Read that again. It’s not an exact science. That’s a good thing. How and when hops are used in the brewing process ultimately impacts on the dominant flavour profile. Definitely.

No surprise, the chart features hops grown in Australia, including the currently fashionable variety Galaxy. I particularly like this sentence: “A protagonist in her own right, Galaxy is not to be mistaken for Citra.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

Jean-Pierre Van Roy adds hops at CantillonThe editors at Slate used this photo to illustrate a provocative story headlined “Against Hoppy Beer: The craft beer industry’s love affair with hops is alienating people who don’t like bitter brews.” 1 In the picture, Jean-Pierre Van Roy is adding hops to a brew kettle at the Cantillon brewery in Brussels. The choice is amusing because Van Roy has aged the hops so they are not bitter.2

Back to the story. It’s good to call for balance in beer, and too bitter is too bitter. Although perhaps there could have been a little more, well, balance. Maybe more about why there’s more to “hoppy” than bitterness. I suggest you go look for yourself.

And consider the nut graph.

That’s when I realized that I had a problem. In fact, everyone I know in the craft beer industry has a problem: We’re so addicted to hops that we don’t even notice them anymore.

She’s not drinking with the same people I am.3

*****

1 If you email the story the recipient gets this headline: Hops Enthusiasts Are Ruining Craft Beer for the Rest of Us. And if you save it the bookmark reads says: Hoppy beer is awful — or at least, its bitterness is ruining craft beer’s reputation. Somebody just couldn’t decide which snarky headline was best.

2 There are several practical reasons for this, and a conversation about them is exactly like the others the author pleads for at the end of her story.

3 Of course, I don’t consider myself a member of the craft beer industry. Observer, yes. Member, no. But I do drink with card carrying members.

Hop aroma impact

Bert Grant smells fresh Cascade hopsUK hop merchant Charles Faram & Co. includes an interesting twist in providing basic information about the hops its sells.

Of course, its chart lists alpha acids and has a few descriptors (“molasses, chocolate, spicy” or “herbal, pineapple, resinous”) but there is also a column for “flavour intensity.” Those numbers are quite subjective. But, just as the colored meters DRAFT magazine featured about six months ago, they are useful as long as you also accept not everybody’s sense of smell is the same.

Also remember intensity is not necessarily the same thing as impact.

For instance, the Faram chart lists Galaxy as an 8, but it surely has as much pop as 9-rated hops like Citra, Amarillo, and Cascade> More than Admiral.

It seems painfully obvious, but how brewers use the hops and how much they use, well, that’s important.

Drink a Marble Brewery Pilsner made with Hersbrucker (6) or a Firestone Walker Brewing Pils with Spalter Select (5) and Saphir (5) for proof.

*****

That’s the late, great Bert Grant at the top. Those as Cascade hops in his hands.