This is the map I got when I did a search for hops and hops products at the 2016 Craft Brewers Conference trade show (called BrewExpo America). The point is there’s a lot going in with hops and I have some catching up to do, starting now.
– Southern hemisphere shortages ahead? This from Hop Products Australia:
On 8 December 2015 two storm cells collided close to our Victorian farm, Rostrevor Hop Gardens in the Ovens Valley. The Gardens experienced 65mm of rain and hail in just 15 minutes accompanied by very strong gusts of wind which significantly damaged the southern half of the farm and resulted in many plants losing their growing tips.
Over the past six weeks we’ve invested thousands of hours in re-training lateral arms to re-establish apical growing tips, essential for progressing proper growth stages in the plants. It is now clear that while some bines recovered quite well, others failed to grow any higher than approximately half their normal height.
As such, we now estimate the crop from Rostrevor Hop Gardens will be approximately 40 per cent below expected yield in 2016.
The main varieties affected are Galaxy, Vic Secret, Ella and Topaz, although the true impact will not be known until harvest is completed at the end of March.
– Earlier this week Bryan Roth dug into the numbers related to the most popular varieties. The Hop Growers of America annual report also includes news that farmers outside the Northwest states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho planted hops on 1,253 acres in 2015.
That might not seem like much — the total is less than Simcoe grew in 2015 — but that number was less than 100 only a few years ago. That’s more hops than all of Australia or all of New Zealand. So maybe the headline here should be “Hops, hops, local hops.” This story indicates the number of acres may still be understated, at least in Michigan. “It’s been really ridiculous in the last 24 months,” said Brian Tennis, who started rrowing hops on one acre 10 years ago. “The face of Michigan hops changed overnight. It makes your head spin.”
– A relatively mild winter is not necessarily good for those new hop growing regions.
– A hop described as wild was named the overall winner of the British Hop Awards 2015. There’s a lot of interest these days, although more often in America, in finding some wonderful aromatic hop growing in the wild. This hop, called Sussex, was not found in the wild but on an anchor wire next to a field growing a farm trial of another hop. It is wild in the sense it was an unplanned product of open pollination and in the ten years since it was discovered has obviously developed into a pretty good hop. According to a press release about the competition, “Sussex has earthy, grassy and minty flavour notes.”
– This tweet by Paul Corbett indicates English farmers harvested about 20,000 pounds of Jester last year. For perspective, that’s little more than a tenth of Jarrylo grown in Washington last year. Wait, haven’t heard of Jarrylo? Then that’s comparable to the Citra you’d get from 13 acres in Washington — and Washington farmers grew 2,335 acres in Citra in 2015.
– Circling back to that map at the top. Per usual, CBC will include an opportunity to try several new varieties, some of them experimental, in beer. I’m already planning to visit hops growers from France (Booth 951), who are bringing one one hop, and from Germany (Booth 2016), who are bringing two experimentals.