Hop Notes 04: CBC 2023 Hop Report
Expert analysis to help you make better hop decisions.
Every year the American craft brewing community gathers for the aptly named Craft Brewers Conference (CBC). From a hop market perspective this is the big show where all the players from farmers, processors, and merchants sling the coolest swag, set out the biggest spread of samples, and tell their most important sales stories. Here’s my report on all the peacocking.
BrewExpo America®️ Trade Show Notes
New Zealand hops - new varieties and formats - were the darling of the show. New Zealand CGX™️ enriched pellets from Crosby Hops and Hop Revolution were the show-point at both booths. And New Zealand Cryo®️ enriched pellets from NZ Hops Ltd and Yakima Chief Hops were the big play from the biggest player in hops. NZH and YCH were even doing some live selection from the 2023 NZcrop at the conference.
The presence of hop extract companies was much bigger than in 2022.
Abstrax clearly made a big investment in this show with multiple high-impact locations spread around the venue including the “Skunkworks Lounge” highlighting beers with their various products and their recent partnership with Roy Farms which has given them access to Strata®️.
TNS had joined the “BSG Village” following their new distribution agreement with BSG.
Hopzoil™️ from Glacier Hop Ranch had a large booth and was showing off their Ahhhroma™️ hop oils.
Both Abstrax and TNS were pushing a variety of new products and new product lines. Live Resin and Cured Resin in both Whirlpool Hop Aroma™️ and Dry Hop Aroma™️ from Abstrax and HopBurst®️, HopSensation®️, HopShot®️ from TNS. And that isn’t all of them! Those legal superscripts underscore the amount of product experimentation in this space right now. This level of experimentation is fascinating, and probably necessary, but also builds the walls to brewer adoption a little higher.
For brewers, sorting through all these various products to learn what they are, how they work, and what value they have to you is a big undertaking.
Notably missing were any products from these two companies labelled with the names of the big HBC hop varieties.
Not to be outdone by these two, Haas introduced a new hop extract product HopKick™️ that they are positioning for hop waters and similar products, it featured in a very tasty hop water at their bar. Haas was also touting HBC 1019 HBC 1134, and McKenzie™️.
HBC 1134 was bred to be an American-grown answer to traditional lager flavors. Stop me if you’ve heard that selling point before. It is interesting to see one of the major hop suppliers go in on promoting an experimental hop for lager beers - is the year of the craft lager finally coming? Haas must think so. For what it’s worth the HBC 1134 lager beer was really nice.
At the Yakima Chief Hops booth I did not find any mention of their experimental hop extract products named YCH-701 and YCH-702, which I expected to see. When will YCH enter the extract space? Only time will tell.
And still no name for HBC 586. Maybe it doesn't grow well enough to support the demand that a name would generate? Maybe they don’t think the market is there? Maybe they feel like the costs outweigh the benefits of dropping a new name brand in a sea of new hops? I think for YCH the NZ Cryo®️ launch was the headliner.
Visiting with the fine folks from Hopfenverwertungsgenossenschaft (HVG), the largest German hop farmer marketing cooperative, is always a highlight of CBC for me.
They shared with me the importance of brewers testing and shifting to newer German hop genetics intended to help German farmers reduce their reliance on increasingly climate-change challenged land race varieties such as Perle, Hallertau, and Tradition. Try Amira, Diamant, or Aurum next time you’re cooking up a traditional lager and help your German hop farms out.
Hop farmers were everywhere! I feel like there were more hop farmers present than before. Farmers from across the PNW, MI and NY were represented. And of course international, I met farmers from GB, NZ, and Germany.
It’s exciting to see more farmers coming and representing themselves directly to brewers. Those relationships are key to brewers learning more about the product and the market.
Plus direct relationships offer farmers some independence from merchants to tell the farmer’s story or sell the farmer’s crop.
There are lots of hops. All sorts of varieties and formats and growing regions. And volume. Brewers have a big challenge to keep up with it all but the rewards are there in terms of flavor, creativity, quality, and cost management.
Seminars and Meetups
I attended two formal seminars and two “Meetups”.
The first seminar I attended was titled “Finding the Edges: The Intersection of Art and Science for Hop Picking Windows” and sponsored by CLS Farms. The presentation and audio recording of the talk is available at Hop Talk Live, CLS Farms’ blog page. Panelists were Tom Nielson of Sierra Nevada, Eric Desmarais co-owner of CLS Farms, Stephanie Conn of Hop Technic and Alexandra Nowell of CLS Farms.
Every seat had a placemat with places for 3 lots of El Dorado®️ and 3 lots of Amarillo®️ hops with each lot representing early, mid, or ‘peak’ harvest maturity for the two varieties. Smelling through these harvest windows side by side is a critical experience for understanding the importance of harvest timing on hop aroma character, and unless you’re farming or doing a lot of selection, you may not get that experience otherwise. Happy to see them bring this to the attendees.
Side note: in the US the most common metric for hop maturity is dry-matter in the flowers represented as a percentage like “22%”. As hops mature the dry matter increases, so 22% is earlier pick than 26%. Tom taught us all that in Japan they use “DAF” or Days After Flowering. Kinda cool.
But it isn’t just noses that can tell a difference in harvest timing.
Tom shared data showing how thiol concentrations change over the harvest period. The key takeaways being that 3S4MP (guava) looks to increase later in the harvest period while 4MMP (catty) seems to stay constant.
Tom also shared a compilation of data from the Sierra Nevada lab and others digging deeper into geraniol chemistry and the journey that geraniol goes on though biotransformation and brewing. Depending on the brewing process geraniol in hops can morph into aromatic citranellol and eventually the very potent rose-oxide chemicals. The amount and exact make up of a hop lot’s particular geraniol content is a starting-line of sorts to the potential expressions in your final beer. Exciting insight and more research on this is coming in October.
The other seminar I attended, “Use of Advanced Hop Products for Sustainability, Beer Stream Diversification, and Consistency” was another panel style deal featuring Dr. Pattie Aron of Kalsec, Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing, Alec Mull of Founders Brewing Co, and Colin Wilson of Totally Natural Solutions. Panelists shared about the surprisingly long history of hop extraction, the benefits of these products for modern brewers (Alec had a nice quote; “The more hops you put into a beer the more opportunity you have to use advanced hop products.”), and the shifting attitude of craft brewers who are starting to embrace this segment.
The innocuously named “Quality Meetup” and “Supply Chain Meetup” events were the most exciting for me. (Maybe next time these events will get more catchy names on the schedule so that more conference goers will join in!) These meetups were hosted by the Hop Quality Group (HQG) and offered the opportunity to taste 12 experimental hop varieties from the public HQG breeding program.
The Supply Chain Meetup featured 8 beers brewed by Firestone Walker with 8 different advanced line hops from the public HQG breeding program.
The 8 varieties randomized in these beer samples were: 04-002, -006, 24-001, 24-002, -008, 27-001, -039, -028.
Stand outs for me were pink, purple and orange labelled beers from the advanced lines.
The Quality Meet Up featured 4 beers, 2 from Deschutes and 2 from Single Hill, with 4 different elite line hops from the public HQG breeding program.
The 4 hops were HQG999, HQG023, HQG2010, HQG401.
From this line up, I liked the beers with HQG999 and HQG2010 the most.
Take Home Message: the Future of Hop Bills
My biggest takeaway from this year’s CBC is that the future of hop bills is going to be much more complex than they are now. I'm seeing future hop bills being built not just by variety, but also by format.
The additional layer of format adds immense depth to brewer decision making. Brewers will be stretched to build ever more robust and complex hop bills mixing different varieties, types of pellets and versions of extracts. Like a producer at a music studio’s mixing board shifting dials and knobs and sliders to bring their intended flavor and aroma expression to life.
I imagine that future arriving in three stages. Right now I think the industry is somewhere around stage ~1.5, many brewers are exploring but few have optimized and certainly there is much more exploring and optimization to be done before the usage of advanced hop products arrives at stage 3.
Stage 1: Engaging with this future will start out optional for brewers and the most creative, in-tune, and/or experimental brewers will begin to explore. It isn’t too hard to find a beer or a brewery using some types of advanced hop products these days but still it is an early adopter’s space.
Stage 2: Early adopters will start discovering how to optimize the mix of varieties and formats to deliver great and desirable flavor and aroma in the most efficient, cheapest, and/or most sustainable ways. These practices will emanate out to other brewers like the way enriched hop pellet usage techniques filtered out, ie the rule of thumb: “don’t use enriched pellets for more than 50% of your hop bill”, and then slowly grow into industry consciousness.
Stage 3: Once the practices to achieve that optimum usage reach the mainstream it will become a competitive requirement for brewers everywhere to learn how to build these “new hop bills”. Brewers who don’t make the adaption to future hop bills will watch their neighbors produce great beer at lower costs, with less waste, and a stronger sustainability story and the brewers who haven’t innovated will feel the hit. We’ll know we’ve reached step 3 when it becomes customary to discuss hopping rates by “lb equivalents per bbl” instead of “lbs per bbl.”
More hop content:
The Oregon Hop Commission is now on Instagram. I love seeing this trend of more communication from hop farms. You can follow them here.
Some hops get better over time in the bag? “Changes in Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) Oil Content and Composition during Long-Term Storage under Different Conditions” is a free to read study by Drs Rutnik, Ocvirk, and Kosir. The report is available here.
I have never seen a cooler hop insider shirt. I present to you the Three “Wolf” Moon shirt. Designed by a fellow hop nerd in Montana.
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That’s all for now. If you have topics you’d like to read about in Hop Notes my inbox is open 24/7: ericsannerud@gmail.com.