Great to be back here with you gentle readers. Outside of the friendly confines of this little letter service I farm with my family. It was a busy growing season. The last farmers market is now behind me and Hop Notes is back on the menu.
I was lucky to take a week off the farm and spend it with the incredible Oregon hop farming community.
Thank you to Ben and Cindy of B&D Farms for the best hospitality in the business. Thank you to the other West Coast Hop Breeding farmer-owners; Cheyne Fobert, Jeff Bizon, Fred Geschwill and Pat Leavy. Thank you to Brian Zielinski of Scenic Valley Farms for your welcoming tours. Thank you to Christine and Blake at Crosby Hops and Michelle Palacios of Oregon Hops for engaging industry talk. And finally, a big thanks to my dear friends at Lupulin Brewing, Haggard Barrel, Shanleigh Thompson of ShanFerments and Rebecca Pellett of Charles Faram for taking time to visit Oregon hop country.
Two big picture questions for hops and beer.
1. When will Breeding Program Focus Shift?
The hop industry knows what flavors craft brewers and drinkers want. Juicy, bright, sweet, clean any assorted fruit or candy-like stuff. Vera? Dolcita? Erebus? Krush? Harlequin? Vista? They all land in the same ballpark.
The industry didn’t know that in the past. “Oils over Alpha”, Hop Quality Group’s famous tag line, was a necessary message for the hop industry in the past. No longer. We know! We know. No one is gonna name or advance lines of hops that don’t land in this ballpark.
If the industry knows that’s the target, what do breeding programs aim for now?
My expectation is agronomics.
Breeding programs will shift from searching for the next unicorn-rainbow-magic hop aroma to an efficiency of aroma hunt.
Farmers grow hops that don’t want to live if brewers buy them - see Cashmere. Even the golden girl, Citra®, is famously poor growing for all its flavor-dominance. Controlling costs, reducing impact, and remaining competitive demand varieties that are increasingly agronomically sound while still hitting the target for aroma.
We see that already in some experimentals from various private programs purporting to be (in my humble opinion extremely self-serving) replacements for Cascade or Centennial. Varieties that no doubt could have better agronomics. Just those better agronomics should come in the form of public releases.
No one is nuts enough to claim their new variety is the “next Citra®” - but honestly a more agronomically productive Citra® would be a major boon to the industry.
I know this shift of focus is already happening internally at most breeding programs. But recall it takes about 10 years for a new variety to get released. The varieties getting released now were crossed pre-2016!! Back then the industry was in a golden era hunting unicorn rainbow magic aromas and internalizing “Oils over Alphas". Not targeting agronomics as heavily as they are now and will be in the future.
2. What will the US Reinheitsgebot outlaw?
Famously the Germans have a law that regiments what ingredients can and cannot be used in a beer. The US will never have a literal law limiting beer ingredients in the same way. But what will the industry or craft beer drinkers accept?
The fast pace of new products and “innovation” in the beer ingredient space continues. When do we cross the could-do-it, but-didn’t-stop-to-think-if-they-should-do-it line?
This is more of a philosophical question, where is the line for our industry from like a social perspective? Is there anything we won’t accept?
Now I’m not taking about the lines some of us personally don’t to cross, but the lines that we, the grand we, are willing to. For example it was outlandish but is now commonly accepted to use literal breakfast cereal in a beer, or marshmallow fluff, or basically any silly nonsense.
I’m talking about IPAs without hops, not gruits, I mean IPA with extract from fruit or output from GMO modified yeast or a couple pumps of liquid flavors outta those coffee shop flavoring bottles. IPAs with no actual hops. IPAs that taste juicy and sweet and like hops but no actual hops. There are a already variety of products in market that make this no-hop IPA possible.
IPA is the defining style and still the engine powering craft beer. A no-hop IPA is a line further out than fruit loops in a cream ale.
I have my personal opinion and you have yours, that’s fine. I am asking what will we the industry or consumer accept as an “IPA” or a “Craft Beer”?
More hop content:
Hop Queries 9.05 is a banger. Stan covers the big news that Haas is taking over Hop Head Farms’ non-MI-hop business and answered some of my burning questions about Haas’ dual new product launches, PRYSMA and LupoCORE.
When Passion Becomes Craft is a recent episode in Roy Farms’ No Dirt, No Flowers Podcast and features lots of great history and story telling from Scott Dorsch of Odell Brewing.
It was a bad year to grow hops on an island. After the massive flooding that New Zealand farmers faced, UK farmers got hit with incredible heat and a lack of water in 2025.
Thanks for reading Hop Notes 26. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please consider subscribing or forwarding it to a friend.
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.