The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a fine, but imperfect, story about five Wisconsin breweries partnering to create beer made with unkilned Wisconsin hops. The story hit a rough patch of air about half way in.
The advantage of using wet hops is that it produces a fresher, more authentic taste, said Jon Reynolds, managing director of the Midwest Hops and Barley Co-op, a growers organization based in Onalaska.
“People always ask, ‘What was beer like 100 years ago?’ ” said Russ Klisch, Lakefront Brewery owner. “Well, that’s probably what it was like.”
OK, trouble also appeared a little bit earlier, something in the second paragraph about the beers being “more flavorful.” Hey, I like the aromas and flavors that result when brewers use hops directly from the bine. There’s I reason a found time to attend the Hood River Hops Festival in September.
But I wouldn’t necessarily call the beers more flavorful, and I certainly don’t know what the bleep a “more authentic taste” might be.
I do know that using unkilned hops would not be the way to replicate the taste of beers 100 years ago. One hundred years ago, brewers used whole leaf hops (some, such as Sierra Nevada and Deschutes do today) that looked much like unkilned hops, but they were kilned and sometimes treated in such a way they lost many of their desirable attributes.1
One hundred years ago, Wisconsin brewers produced 5 million barrels of beer. One hundred years ago, the Wisconsin hop industry — which flourished briefly in the 1870s — was long gone.
That Wisconsin brewers are using Wisconsin hops is a pretty good story, and they way they are using them is equally interesting. No need to gussy things up with questionable claims and impossible to define words like “authentic.” (Yes, the C word also appears, but let’s not revisit that discussion.)
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1 They differ in other ways as well, but you’ll have to buy the book.
Never get something like facts get in the way of a pretty looking pile of nonsense. Gotta love them crafties…
Reminds me of the nonsense in the Spanish beer world “unfiltered beers are alive, therefore they evolve”…
Surely you mean “sometimes treated in such a way they lost many of the attributes desirable to us today.”
Were the Wisconsin-ite hopsters relocated NYers pausing for a generation to farm before pushing on to the Pacific?
Alan – They lost attributes desirable even then, such as essential oils that create odor compounds that result in pleasant aromas. Also alpha, so that brewers needed to use more to maintain the same levels of bitterness (boosting the cost of production).
Are you suggesting that they were unable to brew the beers they wanted because of an inability to create pleasant aromas or bitterness or they did so with less efficiency?
I’ve read nothing that would indicate that brewers thought they couldn’t make recipe adjustments that would allow them to make beer (relatively) consistent through the brewing year.
Of course, beers of 100 years ago focused on different, and sometime less abundant, hop aromas. Much of the beauty of the land race hops from the continent results from how they age (in the bale, prior to brewing) – before they become too old.
According to the turn-of-the-20th century brewing records of Albany’s Amsdell Brothers, they used what they referred to as both “old” and “new” hops (along with hop extract). Ron Pattinson and I have discussed this and we figure that “new” meant those hops from the previous years harvest, while “old” meant, well, just that two and perhaps three year old hops. That being said, all hops were dried. 19th and early 20th-century, fresh and unrefrigerated hops would have rotted by the time they got to the breweries.
Looking at antique brewing records you can see that the hopping rate was often fairly high. This isn’t because people 150 years ago loved super bitter and hoppy beer, it’s because—as you mention Stan—old, dried hops were not as potent as their better-preserved modern equivalent. Breweries were not going to discard hops that they determined to still be useable because of their age—they just used more of them and augmented their beer with some “new” hops and later hop extract, as well.
The question of whether fresh hops were ever used before the 1990s seems to fall into that category of “beyond facts” that so much of beer lore finds itself. (Unless you know more than I do, Stan, which as always, is likely.) It seems almost inconceivable that a brewer somewhere, sometime in the past 600 years didn’t throw a load of fresh hops in a beer. But if he didn’t record it, we’re left to speculate. To call it a fact without the evidence is to conflate data and likelihoods.
Jeff – It seems quite possible that brewers occasionally used fresh picked hops even farther back than that. Also, brewers in the Americas early on, who at first used native wild hops.
My only statement – perhaps I could have put it better – is that brewers in Wisconsin could not have 100 years ago, because farmers weren’t growing hops.
Data!
So, is your argument is that beer of 100 years ago was commonly “wet” hopped because there is no evidence to the contrary?