hops

I often use this illustration when I am speaking to a group about hops and aroma. I also posted it here a few years ago. I call it “your brain on hops.”

Following up on last week’s post about Covid-19, loss of smell and catty IPAs there is this very long article from The New York Times Magazine. I don’t know how many words there are in the story, but it takes 50 minutes to listen to it.

It turns out that examining the impact of Covid-19 on aroma may help us understand both better. All the attention focused on anosmia, and parosmia, that results from Covid-19 has made more people appreciate the sense of smell. It has gone from a “bonus sense” to a dominant one.

Or as Brooke Jarvis writes: “Smell is a startling superpower. You can walk through someone’s front door and instantly know that she recently made popcorn. Drive down the street and somehow sense that the neighbors are barbecuing. Intuit, just as a side effect of breathing a bit of air, that this sweater has been worn but that one hasn’t, that it’s going to start raining soon, that the grass was trimmed a few hours back. If you weren’t used to it, it would seem like witchcraft.”

And I’ll be adapting these thoughts for my next presentation: “Genetics plus life experience, the natural attrition and regrowth of your epithelium (it may be that the more you smell an odor, the more receptors you develop that can perceive it), mean that 30 percent of your receptors may be different from those of the person next to you. Culture, too, plays a role: Whether you think lemon smells ‘clean’ or not may depend on whether you grew up associating it with cleaning products or with hot, overripe citrus groves.”

I’ve been busy with hop-related matters this week. As a consequence I’ve noticed more than one brewer listing “hand-selected hops” in their beers. “Nose-selected” sounds awfully strange, but it would be more accurate.

Because of Covid-19 I’ve dropped in on homebrew clubs meetings in every time zone in the country. And because of Covid-19 when I am (virtually) in Cincinnati or Kansas City or wherever and talk about anosmias I can almost see heads nodding beyond my computer screen.

(Should you not know, anosmia, that is loss of ability to smell, is a prominent sign of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The loss, in this case, may be total, but partial anosmias are not unusual in everyday life.)

This week, Wine Spectator columnist Robert Camuto wrote about “Getting Back My Nose After a COVID KO.” He lost his sense of smell for 14 days beginning Dec. 19 and figures he has about 20 percent back so far.

Looking for answers he turned to “What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life,” a book I found essential when writing about aroma in “For the Love of Hops” and one I recommend for anybody interested in unraveling the mysteries of our most complex sense.

Camuto eventually called author Avery Gilbert, who explained the upper nose has about 400 odor receptors. Covid-19 is believed to infect surrounding support cell tissue, shutting down the whole olfactory operation. As cells regenerate, smells return.

“It’s like when your Internet goes out and the router comes back on with those blinking lights,” Gilbert told him. “Like those lights, your receptors are coming back online, and which one comes on next is like pulling a number out of a lottery bucket.”

He suggested smell training to speed the recovery.

“Throughout the day, I spontaneously embark on smell-a-thons,” Camuto writes. “Last week, I was excited to pick up on the scents of the dried-out Christmas tree, lemon leaves (though not the lemon), WD-40, soap, wild thyme, burned match, buttery pastry and the anachronistic scent of a very old edition of Charles Dickens’ ‘The Old Curiosity Shop.’”

An aside. At the outset, Camuto writes, “Some odors I don’t miss at all. Like the cat box.” Curious to read from a wine writer, given that he probably knows Sauvignon Blanc well. And Sauvignon Blanc contains some of the same thiols, or sulfur compounds, as hops — such as Citra, Mosaic and Galaxy — popular in modern IPAs. Working in partnership with other compounds they help produce exotic aromas and flavors currently in style. In excess, and this may also happen in Sauvignon Blanc, they may smell catty. That’s the word you use in polite company instead of cat pee.

Call it destiny, but Bell’s Hopslam Ale arrived in Atlanta this week. This is a beer about which John Mallett, Bell’s Brewery vice president-operations, once said, “It smells like your cat ate your weed and then pissed in the Christmas tree.”

So my recommendation for your weekend pleasure is a copy of “What the Nose Knows” along with a glass of Hopslam.