hops

Another sign of beer change in Germany

Look closely at the label for TAPX “Mein Nelson Sauvin” from Private Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider & Sohn. Those are hops. And the hops that make TAPX something different aren’t from Germany, but from New Zealand.

In this video Schneider produced to promote the new beer, available in limited quantities in the U.S. (my local store got six of the 750ml bottles), brewmaster Han-Peter Drexler says what’s been mentioned here before. That the Reinheitsgebot needn’t limit German brewers and that change happens slowly when it comes to beer in Germany. If you haven’t clicked on the video yet, go ahead, and at least hang around to get a look at the open fermentation vessels at Schneider. In Brewing With Wheat I try to describe what it’s like to stand in the midst of those tanks.

On his left yeast climbs high in a tank full of wort on its way to being the strong wheat doppelbock called Aventinus. On his right fermentation only recently started on what will be a batch of Schneider Original. A small hole opens in the middle of the yeast blanket, briefly revealing the wort below before closing again. It is alive.

Now you can see for yourself.

As the beer’s name suggests, the hop star is Nelson Sauvin, a cultivar noteworthy because of compounds1 that give it exotic fruit-like and white wine-like flavors; a grapefruit and rhubarb aroma akin to sauvignon blanc wine.

In the video, Drexler is already talking about next year, the next beer. His boss, Georg Schneider IV, is a sixth generation owner and properly respectful of tradition. He’s also committed to change. “The German beer market is deadly boring,” he told Sylvia Kopp in 2008, for a story that appeared in All About Beer magazine. “It is all very much the same. The tendency towards sameness is encouraged, for example, by our domestic beer tests rating beer only by its typicality and flawlessness. Creativity is only acted on in the beer mix category.”

This was about the time his brewery did the collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery called Schneider & Brooklyner Hopfen-Weisse. Most of that first batch was shipped to the United States, with only 200 cases reserved for Germany. When we were in Kelheim that fall there was no Hopfen-Weisse to be found. Now when you visit the brewery restaurant you can order the beer. Small change, but a change.

“If you brew a beer that not everybody likes, you have the wonderful effect that people talk about it,” Schneider said in 2008. And Drexler added, “We’ve got to take people by the hand and lead them to new worlds of taste. Customers, as well as chefs, culinary staff and traders, are searching for innovations.”

The video concludes with Drexler laughing as he explains that TAPX creates a platform for something new every year. He obviously enjoys the thought. Perhaps not in 2012, but surely soon, he won’t have to look beyond Germany for a hop with aromas and flavors previously considered exotic and unhop-like (or should it be un-hop-like or unhoppy? – whatever tells you this isn’t what brewers meant by “hoppy” just a few years ago).

Brewers attending the giant industry trade show Brau Beviale 2011 in Nuremberg earlier this month got a chance to rub and sniff several new hop varieties being developed at the Hop Research Center in Hüll. These cultivars are just ready for their first brewing trials and have many more tests to pass in the field before they end up in any commercially brewed beer. They don’t even have names beyond their designation within the breeding program; for instance 2007/018/013 tastes of tangerine and 2009/001/718 of watermelon, with grapefruit-like notes and also the impression of honey.

It’s going to be hard for the German beer market to remain “deadly boring” with hops like these.

1 3-sulfanyl-4-methylpentan-1-ol and 3-sulfanyl-4-methylpentyl acetate for those of you scoring at home.

And then there was the Blatz ‘fresh hop’ beer

James Ottolini stirs fresh hops into mash/lauter tun used as hop back

As Ron Pattinson is fond of pointing out, there’s little if anything truly new in beer. Not even “fresh hop” beers.

This weekend in St. Louis, 15 or so breweries will serve various beers at the Schlafly Fresh Hop Festival. We’re not Portland or Seattle (see this account), but Schlafly (otherwise known as The Saint Louis Brewery) flies in the fresh hops and the other breweries in and about St. Louis make what they will with them.

To get a feel for the trip to pick up the hops, read James Ottolini’s tweets. That’s him over the mash/lauter tun at the Schlafly Tap Room. To brew the fresh hop beer — the hops are Sorachi Ace — Brennan Greene and Stephen Hale turned the tun into a hop back. Ottolini, who oversees operations at Schlafly’s packaging brewery, Bottleworks, and various members of both brewery teams showed up the downtown brewhouse because, well, this was the first time they’ve tried this at Schafly and there’s always the chance something bad will happen and the story will become part of brewery lore. Brewers at Urban Chestnut Brewing (photo below, courtesy of Florian Kuplent) and Perennial Ales also used their tuns at hop backs while brewing beers to be served Saturday.

Mash/lauter tun at Urban Chestnut Brewing used as a hop back while brewing fresh hop beer

So there’s little efficient about the beers that will be served Saturday in St. Louis; not how they got here and not how they were made. Why bother? Been in a brewhouse when hops were added to the kettle? Smelled that aroma wafting into the air? Thought about where it is going? Away.

Same thing happens when hops are picked and dried (they must be dried relatively quickly, because otherwise they start to rot). Fresh. Green. That’s the smell of a hop kiln at harvest. More aroma lost forever.

Presumably these beers will deliver more of a grassy smack in the face — lemongrassy in the case of Sorachi Ace hops — than dried hops. They are more like grabbing a few cones right off the plant, rubbing them firmly between your palms and taking a deep whiff. A bold expression of the hop itself.

It’s worth remembering not everybody likes this, which must have been the motivation for a beer called Tempo that Blatz brewed more than 50 years ago. When Blatz president Frank Verbest announced the brewery would be testing the beer in 1955 he said that mildness and freedom from bitterness were what set Tempo apart.

Tempo wasn’t actually brewed with fresh hops, but instead an extract made from fresh hops. Otherwise, Blatz could have produced the beer only once a year. Verbest said the brewery spent two years and hundreds of thousands of dollar coming up with the process, partnering with companies outside the brewing industry. He likened it to distilling crude oil into gasoline and other derivatives. The efforts resulted in an extract which proved suitable for brewing beer without the bitterness common to hops, he said.

The Milwaukee Journal went into detail why Blatz pursued the project.

“The brewing industry, during the greatest boom in the country’s history is a sick business,” Verbest declared.

“Maybe Blatz has come up with the answer. This is the way we reason. Beer reached its peak in popularity during the period of unrestricted immigration just before World War I. Since the date the people have changed and their tastes have changed.

“For instance, the trend has been from bitter to sweet chocolate, from strong Turkish ciagrettes to mild Virginia ones, from strong cheeses to mild processed ones, from salty to mild butter.

“But while tastes have been changing, beer has remained the same. There has been a trend to use less hops, which give the sharper bitter taste to beer, but otherwise the change has been packaging.”

It’s not clear how long Tempo remained on the market. In 1958, a Milwaukee man sued Blatz, claiming they had not honored a 1954 deal in which he turned over his secret process for extracting the fresh hops. And in 1959, Pabst Brewing bought the Blatz label, along with Tempo and the rights to the process by which it was made. That deal was voided in 1969 because of anti-trust measures and G. Heileman Brewing acquired the Blatz brand. The Tempo name, related formulas, Tempo extract remaining in Pabst plants and Tempo bottles were all listed as assets.

It seems Tempo survived into the 1970s. However there turned out to be a better idea for fresh hopped beers.

Apparently wine can also be ‘dank’

Following up on last week’s discussion of “dank” and the need for meaningful beer descriptors.

  • Gourmet magazine “looks at marijuana’s culinary trip from wacky weed to haute herb.” We aren’t just talking about wine that smells like weed.

    In wine country, pot-infused wines are the open secrets that present themselves in unmarked bottles at the end of winemaker dinners and very VIP tours (it bears mentioning that most winemakers are cagey enough to keep the manufacture of such wines far from winery grounds). The wines range in style and intensity as broadly as “normal” wines and winemakers do. Some practitioners of the fruit-forward, higher-alcohol, New World style take a similarly aggressive approach to infusing wine. “I know a winemaker that takes a couple of barrels a year and puts a ton of weed in it and lets it steep, and that wine is just superpotent,” says a James Beard Award–winning chef, who also asked not to be named. Henry, though, makes more classically styled wines, and with that reserve comes a more subtle hand with the cannabis. Adjusted for volume, “special” wines can range from under a pound of marijuana per 59-gallon barrel to over 4 pounds per barrel. The result is a spectrum ranging from a gentle, almost absinthe-like effect to something verging on oenological anesthetic.

  • And from Huff Post, “10 Esoteric Wine Descriptors (and What They Really Mean!)” Because you want to make sure you fit in when you describe what’s in your glass as “broad/fleshy” or “racy.”

    • Maybe we need a hop flavor/aroma wheel

    It was probably a half dozen years ago and our daughter, Sierra, was maybe 8 years old when she first heard a brewer and I talk about if one of his dry hopped beers seemed a bit “catty.”

    She looked puzzled. Daria explained we were talking about an aroma associated with a litter box. She giggled, clearly not understanding this was a serious discussion.

    Yesterday Pete Brown wrote about “dank” — a descriptor which comes with its own interesting sidebar. But that aside, Pete’s post and the comments that followed illustrate the challenge of describing what we smell and taste.

    There’s no arguing that hops such as Citra and Eldorado contribute aromas hops previously have not. But it’s not clear if some aromas considered “bad” a few years ago are now acceptable. At least for the niche within a niche that constitutes those who enjoy hop-centric beers. And descriptions of flavors not acceptable in England in the 1930s that simply refer to “rank American type” or “Manitoba” don’t provide much help. On the one hand, brewers didn’t care for American Pacific Coast hops because of their “peculiar aroma.” On the other, they found drinkers liked an “American tang” in moderation.

    It would have been nice had there by a beer flavor wheel (at the top) or a beer aroma wheel (bottom – click on either to enlarge). The former is better established, but both are works in progress. Use them as you will, but feel free to digress, as @olllllo did here: “David Schollmeyer’s Bucket Hugger is on @Papagobrewing and is a licorice mule with velvet socks.”

    Beer Flavor Wheel

    Beer Aroma Wheel

    Breeding hops suddenly hip

    Peter DarbyThe lead story in the latest issue of All About Beer magazine is titled “Hop Forward: Breeding Tomorrow’s Hops Today.” The current Brew Your Own magazine has an article on “Aroma Hop Breeding.” Earlier this year, Beer Advocate magazine put “The Future of Hops” on its cover.

    And yesterday, Tony Magee at Lagunitas tweeted: “Who would u guess 2 be the most important person n US craft brewing? A brewer..? Think again. He’s a Hop grower named Jason Perrault! Word.”

    Perrault is the face of Hop Breeding Company, which owns the patent on popular hop varieties such as Citra, Simcoe and the hop-to-be-named-later-currently-known-as-369.

    But change is ongoing outside the United States as well (and Brian Yaeger’s story in AABM includes that). Breeders, growers, brokers who sell hops and brewers are having conversations they didn’t before. Sometimes even consumers. “As a breeder and a grower it is fun to talk to drinkers about varieties,” Perrault said last week, following with a story about sitting in a bar and hearing a customer ask the bartender if he had any beer brewed with Simcoe hops.

    So meet Peter Darby, who breeds hops in England. That’s him at the top. When the hop breeding program that operated at Wye College for 100 years (1906-2006) closed the National Hop Association of England set up Wye Hops, just outside of Canterbury. There he continues the work started by E.S. Salmon, then carried on by Ray Neve (starting in 1953) and himself (1984).

    Heirloom hops kept at Wye HopsWye Hops is actually located on China Farm, one of several operated by Tony Redsell, probably England’s best known hop grower.

    Thus shortly before harvest began in August both hops in the Wye “library” (some listed on the right) and those being trialed were surrounded by hops that soon would be ready for beer.

    On one side of the path a field full of Northdown hops — with Northdown Hill in the distance, as a matter of fact — and on the other a test field with hundreds of crosses, maybe even the next “great hop.”

    “On this side consistency,” Darby said, gesturing with his left hand. “On the other diversity.”

    He was talking about genetic diversity, but he still sounded a lot like a modern day brewer to me.