Talking about the “wine-ifcation” of beer isn’t new at all. But I don’t think I’d seen “sommify” before Monday, and certainly not in connection to beer or hops.
“How hops got sommified” doesn’t dwell much on the how and instead focuses on if and why.
This is a fair question: “A lot of brewers have taken to labeling their beers with the hop varieties. I tend to wonder if this is actually more polarizing and intimidating for beer drinkers, especially as there are more and more varieties of hops . . . I’ll see a big beer list that’ll say, ‘This is our IPA with Cascade and some other random hop you have never heard of.’ I don’t know what to choose. Is beer going to, unfortunately, make a mistake with this obsession with hops? Or is this a good thing for beer?”
As a person who sometimes gets handed a beer and asked “Can you name the hops?” I understand what it feels like to, well, feel stupid. And I know it may not be healthy to be able to recite the parentage of Citra (50% Hallertau Mittelfrüh, 25% Fuggle, 20% Brewer’s Gold, 5% East Kent Golding and 3% unknown).
However, I am a fan of being informed. Listing all the raw materials that go into a particular beer — including varieties of barley, other grains, herbs, whatever — gives an interested drinker a better idea what to expect when they order a beer. And that list of ingredients may set any particular beer apart from a generic one (i.e. a commodity).
In the second part of the podcast, Ryan Hopkins, CEO at Yakima Chief Hops, talks about the business of growing and selling hops.
There are hundreds of varieties now, but what was true 150 years ago is true today; some cultivars are valued more highly than others. In the last part of the 19th century, hops grown on the European continent could be classified into 10 categories. Those from the towns of Saaz (in what is now the Czech Republic) and Spalt (Germany) constituted Class I and commanded the highest prices. Class IV included those from the regions of Hallertau, Auscha, Styria and portions of Wurtemmberg and Baden. Class IX (northern France, Belgium and Holland) and Class X (Russia) hops sold for between 10 and 15 percent of the most coveted cultivars. What a hop was called and where it was from was most often the same.
Less than 20 years ago many hop varieties sold for less than they cost to grow. In contrast, the hop business, and the IPA business, is booming today because when drinkers know the names of hops those hops are not a commodity.