hops

You’d already know this if you subscribed to Hop Queries, my free monthly newsletter. From the October issue:

I have a new favorite answer to the question about why dry hopping is called dry hopping. The idea came up during a panel discussion at the Craft Brewers Conference earlier this year, but John Paul Maye of Hopsteiner crystalized it during a presentation at the recently concluded World Brewing Congress.

He pointed out that brewers in England had noticed that dry hopping beers ignited refermentation even before Brown and Morris published “On certain functions of hops used in the dry-hopping of beers” in 1893. Because refermentation lowered the final gravity the beers finished dryer, it lead some of them to begin calling the process “dry hopping.”

This is your brain on hops. I have no idea what a mouse’s brain would look like.

Welcome to my biannual reminder that less may be more, in this case referring to compounds that create beer aroma.

Some basics
Olfactory receptors are buried in the two patches of yellowish mucous membrane called the olfactory epithelium. Humans have about 20 million receptors, covering the epithelium of both our right and left nostrils. The first stop a collection of molecules otherwise known as an odor makes on the way to the brain, and to being identified as a particular aroma, is in the receptors. Once activated, neurons transmit signals to the olfactory bulb of the brain, which relays those signals to the olfactory cortex. Olfactory information is sent from there to a number of other brain areas, including higher cortical areas thought to be involved in odor discrimination and deep limbic areas. Odor sensation becomes olfactory perception.

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It was not long after John Henning at the U.S. Department of Agriculture explained the science behind terroir to me.

We were sitting in his office on the Oregon State University campus eight years ago and I had more questions to ask than we had time for. This one wasn’t even on my list. It was a frivolous passing thought.

“Is BB1 the most influential hop ever?”

He paused for a moment. I don’t recall his exact words and they aren’t in my notes. But he said that might just be true, because the release of Brewer’s Gold (a daughter of BB1*) set hop breeding in the direction it would take from early in the twentieth century into the twenty first century.

I think I’ve only asked a variation on that question one other time — in this case the more open ended, “What is the most important hop ever?” — and Jason Perrault of Select Botanicals and Perrault Farms said to give him a little time to think about it. I haven’t pressed him on it since, but now might be time.

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