hops

Musing: Wine top dog where hops grow

New hopyardLet’s start with good news from Yakima. Here’s one of several new hopyards we saw Sunday and Monday. You can see why farmers point out it takes more than a year to make a hop field productive. Hops are well up the strings in nearby fields.

A day and a half driving through one of the world’s premier hop-growing regions was a mixed bag. We saw plenty of hop memories — vacant buildings where hop merchants once did business, a hop kiln you can spot from the Interstate, and of course the American Hop Museum in Toppenish.

It was also evident that wine is a much stronger tourist attraction. Interstate exit signs advertise stops with wineries, and we’re talking scores of choices. The banners in downtown Yakima remind visitors this is Washington Wine Country. Many of the tasting rooms were jammed during the Memorial Day weekend, while we were the only visitors at the Hop Museum.

Daria and Sierra have both written about that experience, disappointing from the moment we walked through the door covered with plywood. It felt like the beginning of a museum when I visited in 1997, but nothing appears to have been done since. Including maintenance. It made me think I really need to take them the German Museum of Hops (Deutsches Hopfenmuseum) in Bavaria this fall so they’ll see a hop museum done right.

Quite simply, this one does not reflect the love of hops that American brewers expend in creating beers that celebrate American hops. Perhaps we need to put a tax on Simcoe and Amarillo hops to pay for some upkeep — and that way those hop varieties might merit a mention somewhere within its walls.

Former Grant's Brewpub

As appropriate as it turned out that America’s first brewpub, variously known as Grant’s Brewery Pub and Yakima Brewing and Malting, opened in hop country it should be sobering that starting in Yakima you can now visit scores of wineries before you find the first brewing operation (Snipes Mountain in Sunnyside). Grant’s, housed in the old downtown train station, still looks great from a distance. Hops are etched in the glass doors leading into the pub, along with the hours. But the only thing inside is the old wooden bar, and cobwebs hang around the windows.

Fortunately we headed from there to Moxee. Amarillo and Simcoe are grown here. Don’t you wonder what Bert Grant would have done with those hops? Here there are more hopyards than vineyards, but as across all the rolling hills of Yakima Valley more fruit trees than anything. Also plenty of sheep, goats, cattle — we later visited a cheese factory that can process a half million gallons of milk a day — and horses. (Apparently the Yakima Valley is a top pot producer as well.)

Yakima hop workers

Although it was Memorial Day, we spotted several crews at work in the hopyards, a quick reminder that hops are downright labor intensive as far as agricultural products go.

Worth appreciating.

A note from Yakima Sportsman’s Park: I plan to continue with Monday musings throughout our journey, but there are times I’ll be writing on Monday and not posting until I find the next Internet connection.

Colorado breweries fund organic hops research

New Belgium Brewing has awarded a $20,000 grant to a Colorado State graduate student to further her research on growing organic hops in Colorado.

Odell Brewing — located in Fort Collins like New Belgium and CSU — has been supporting Ali Hamm’s work for several years.

Hamm’s plan is to figure out what kinds of hops grow best under organic conditions in Colorado. “Nobody thinks about growing hops in Colorado – well, not until this year,” Hamm said.

New Belgium currently uses organic hops from New Zealand in its organic Mothership Wit, and obviously would like to be able to use some that aren’t shipped half way around the world.

Appellation hops: Czechs use Zatecky label

Zatecky hops protectionA press release from the Hop Growers Union of the Czech Republic indicates the European protected designation of origin “Zatecky Chmel” (Saaz hops) was used for the first time in the processing the 2007-2008 hop products of from Zatec.

Hops from 138 villages in the Czech Republic were labeled with the Zatecky mark. The majority of those were shipped to Japan. The label was first shown to the public last Sept. 1 during the Zatec hop festival.

The Hop Growers Unions submitted the application for the designation in 2004.

“The protected designation of origin ‘Zatecky Chmel’ is the first and still the only designation for hops within the EU and also one of the first such designations given to Czech agricultural or food product,” Hop Growers Union representative Mr. Zdenek Rosa said for a press release. “This also confirms the uniqueness and tradition of these hops.”

Added May 5: Evan Rail adds historical background. There was already a push for the use of “Žatecký chmel” as the correct term for Saaz hops way back in 1922, a move which caused quite a bit of controversy at the time.

Malt and hops supply updates

Sorry, I’m pleading impending deadlines and we’ve got this trip to start packing for so just the facts from presentations at the Craft Brewers Conference on the status of barley malt and hops supplies. (I know how you’ll miss my prose).

– The barley malt supply will remain tight until at least 2009. Price volatility is here to stay and higher prices (than historical benchmarks) can be expected.

– Prices for barley for malting are competitive with other crops farmers may choose to grow, but the risk is that if the barley is not selected for malting then it becomes feed barley and those prices suck.

– Malting plant capacity is finite. They are built for efficiency, so expansion is not an option. New plants are being built around the world, which requires a chunk of capital.

– Small, but no longer tiny. The smallest plant in the United States (which is smaller than anybody would build these days) has the capacity to handle 90,000 tons a year. Craft brewers’ barley consumption is growing by 20,000 tons a year. More tail than dog.

However, and a theme that ran through both barley and hops presentations, small-batch brewers have grown to a large enough collective size to get the attention of suppliers. We’re well past the time that Boulder Brewery had to lean on Coors in order to get Cascade and Halltertau hops or its malts. Taking us to . . .

– Base hops prices, particularly aroma hops, must go up. Not the crazy “spot” prices that some brewers have paid this year ($40-$45 a pound in Europe), but ongoing prices.

“The cost of aroma hops have not been reflective if the cost of growing,” said Mike Roy of Roy Farms in Yakima Valley. He suggests that $4 per pound for Cascade hops would sustain long term growth. Hallertau would be more like $10-$11 “if the varieties are going to stay in the ground.”

A new balance will be struck. For instance, German growers might replace some aroma fields with high alpha fields. But then industrial brewers, who this year were desperately buying up any alpha they could find, would focus on the new hop (one called Hercules) and leave aroma hops alone. That would leave make more aroma hops available for brewers who use those hops for aroma. Make sense?

– German hop supplies are almost fully sold for 2008-2010, that is “under contract.” Growers generally contract only 80%-90% of what they expect to yield. Some brewers already have contracts through 2018.

– Contracts allow farmers to commit to expansion. They figure a new yard costs $14,000-plus an acre. But that’s not all that’s involved. A drying facility that can handle 1,000 acres costs $3 million. A picker for with a capacity to serve 3,000 acres costs $1.6 million. Selling hops below production costs, as farmers did for years, won’t fund such expenditures.

– Best estimates are that 6,000 to 8,000 new acres will go into the ground this year in the Northwest, a significant increase from the current 33,000. If 7,000 are planted then about 1,000 of those will be aroma hops.

– More transparency, or communication, may help avert future crises. World hop acreage has been shrinking for years, so perhaps brewers shouldn’t have been caught so off guard. Ralph Olson of Hopunion, who moderated the hops panel, said he remembered when old-line breweries such as Pabst, Ranier and Olympia kept a 6-to-12 month inventory of hops.

And German hop farmers were surprised by demand, particularly from craft brewers, for aroma hops. The Brewers Association has commission a Pipeline Committee to facilitate better communication between suppliers and brewers.

– Bottom Line. Several readers here ask if beer prices will do down once hop and barley prices ease. I can’t see that. Any break brewers get from ingredients will simply help offset rising costs elsewhere — energy prices, stainless steel, glass, etc.

I heard plenty of reports that sales in the first quarter 2008 sales were just as robust as 2007, even after price increases kicked in. But, as one brewer said, “It’s next year I’m worried about.”

Thomas Raiser of Barth & Sohn in Germany made an important point: “You’ve been fortunate to be buying hops (for years) at below the cost of production.”

He was talking to the brewers assembled, but the message for beer drinkers is the same.

A hops question: Do you taste beer like a man?

Today a tree: the Simcoe hop. Tomorrow the forest: the rest of the hops in the world.

And not just because it seems that how you describe the aroma of Simcoe determines if you drink/smell beer like a man or like a woman.

Weyerbacher Double SimcoeSimcoe was only released to the brewing world in 2000 and really is a tree in the forest. Only three Northwest hop yards grew the variety in 2007.

But it’s become a signature hop for many IPAs and Double IPAs, including Double Simcoe IPA from Weyerbacher in Pennsylvania. As noted yesterday, some West Coast brewers refer to its distinctive presence as “dank.”

In a presentation Friday about “dissecting hop aroma in beer” Tom Nielsen of Sierra Nevada talked about gender and age differences in what people perceive when they smell particular varieties of hops. He mentioned a new hop called Citra (nope, I hadn’t heard of it either) and that men describe it as “tropical fruit” while women find it “catty.”

In the course of the following few hours this came up in conversation with several brewers. But we talked in terms of Simcoe, a hop we all know. Venture too far above threshold (we’re learning this varies widely) and you’ve got a beer that will be described as “catty” in polite company, as “cat pee” after a few pints or, credit Natalie Cilurzo for this, “savignon blanc.”

A little goes a long way, but when used well it brightens a beer that is already supposed to be hoppy.

Whether it is because beer touches my feminine side, because I hate cats or because I’ve tasted so many beers hopped with Simcoe I long ago began greeting new ones with skepticism. And the thought of a “Double Simcoe IPA” (two litter boxes in one beer?) tested my typically optimistic nature.

But, bottom line, a good beer. It sounds like the most back-handed of comments to begin, “It doesn’t smell like cat piss,” but that was a my first thought. I like my Double IPAs a little leaner and with a harder (OK, harsher) hop edge, however I thought whatever I spent for the pint (this was in Manhattan, where I always try to forget what I just paid) was well worth it.

There would be no point in discussing this were the rumors — repeated often during the last few months — true that farmers were about to abandon Simcoe. It turns out to be more susceptible to disease than first thought, and the yield per acre doesn’t justify the risk.

However, while one of three fields where Simcoe was grown in 2007 was ripped out this year (taken over by a cattle farm), three more went in. By 2009 they should be yield a decent crop and the next year will be even better.

Weyerbacher founder Dan Weirback meanwhile has been scrambling. He recently came up with — physically in the brewery, not just promised — 3,000 pounds of Simcoe on top of what he already had. That means he has enough to brew Double Simcoe for nine more months and can expect more will be available by then. “We would have run out (of Simcoe) in late summer,” he said.

Double Simcoe IPA accounts for a modest 10% of Weyerbacher sales. Given the hassles, the fact Weirback passed on only the increased cost of ingredients (in the process lowering his margins) this year, and that overall sales were up 34% last year so he’s got plenty to keep him busy . . . it might not seem like such a big deal were he to let this beer slip into history.

But his customers love it. It speaks to the spirit of his brewery. I’m glad it’s not going away.

That from a man who doesn’t much care for cats.