Hop Products Haven't Displaced Hops. Yet.
Beer is getting so complicated that even people who follow it very closely—writers, brewers themselves—can’t keep up. As hops increasingly come to dominate American brewing, hop growers and brokers spin out new products seemingly by the week. For a sampling, have a look at the various offerings from Steiner, Haas, and Yakima Chief. But hops are only the starting point. Brewers now turn to biochemistry to unlock flavors in the hops—or mimic hoppy flavors with other compounds. Yeast bred or modified to assist this chemistry proliferate, enzymes release aroma compounds, and companies even extract specific compounds to inject into beer. It’s a brave new world.
The flood of new products often precedes a real understanding of how they’ll work in the brewhouse, and what best practices are for each. Consequently, breweries become the laboratories for testing these products as they try to discover how to best use them—if they end up using them at all. As words like “thiolized yeast,” “terpenes,” and “glycosides” fly around, I found myself wondering how breweries are using all these new products. Are old-fashioned hops an anachronism breweries have mostly abandoned? Are we really going to come to a time when, as Josh Pfriem remarked recently, “beers [won’t] have any actual hop material in them”?
In this post, I’m going to reveal what several brewers told me, and it’s fascinating stuff. To set it up I want to make two comments. The first is simple: hops aren’t going anywhere. For a variety of reasons, hops still remain the most important ingredient brewers have in creating “hoppy” flavors. (Whew!) But these products do play a bigger and bigger role in beer, so it’s useful to understand them.
Second, it’s important to understand why a brewery would choose to use a new product or not. Breweries definitely think about flavor, but it’s not the only thing they consider. With every new process or ingredient, three factors come into play: 1) how does it impact the sensory side of beer (flavor, aroma, textures, etc)? 2) how much does it cost? And 3) how efficient is it? If a product is absolutely spectacular but is exorbitantly expensive, it may not work out. If it’s only okay on the sensory side but saves time or money, on the other hand, that may be worth considering. Finally, these factors are not uniform: depending on the brewery’s size, scale, and location, those calculations may differ. In other words, whether a product ultimately becomes a regular part of the brewing process rests on a balance of factors.
On the Normal End
Hop companies have used various techniques to distill or otherwise concentrate hops going back well into the 20th century. They were useful to breweries in an industrial mode, and it was a lot easier to tweak a concentrate than messing with whole hops. Ever wonder why High Life doesn’t taste lightstruck despite its clear bottle? Miller uses a concentrate that strips out the compound that causes it. For the most part, these products don’t fundamentally change the hop—they just make it easier and more efficient to use in the brewhouse.
The most common form are pelletized hops that have been enriched with extra doses of lupulin powder (sometimes referred to as “cryo”). The hop companies each have their own processes for producing these hops and their own names, but in general people in the industry refer to them as T-45s. This is a great description of how they’re made:
This process involves chilling the hop powder exiting the hammer mill with very cold air (-30 to -35˚C) to decrease the stickiness of the hop powder, followed by screening to separate lupulin glands (the golden goodies containing alpha-acids, beta-acids, and hop oils) from hop leaf and stem material. Some leaf material is blended back into the lupulin gland stream to aid in binding; this enriched mixture of lupulin glands and hop leaf flakes is compressed into T-45 pellets.
These are so common breweries don’t even routinely distinguish these from regular hops. Because T-45s are about twice as strong as regular hops, they double the punch—or halve the plant matter, depending on how you think of it. Brad Miles is one of the brewers I spoke to for this piece. He was the R&D brewer for Firestone Walker in Paso Robles until this year, when he departed to lead Arizona Wilderness. “Aroma-wise, you’re getting about two times the concentration,” he said. However, depending on the size of brewery and how cheaply they can buy hops, it may be more than twice expensive. They may be more effective in one part of the process as well. “I think most people thought we’d get more efficiency dry-hopping with them,” he said. “And definitely there are some things to be gained. But what we’ve seen both at Firestone Walker and here at Arizona Wilderness is that you get a better yield using those hot-side.”
Beyond hop pellets, there are various “flowable” products that are effectively liquid hops, and these have a similar function. Haas Incognito seems to be the popular product at the moment, but there are others as well.
The Thiol Frontier
Thiols are a family of sulfur-containing aroma compounds that can be unlocked during the biochemistry of fermentation. They are extremely potent, and can be detected in concentrations of parts per trillion, and they have those tropical flavors hop fans prize. Thiol precursors exist in both barley and hops, and they can be released during fermentation. A whole range of products have come onto the market that either embiggen the precursor load, or aid in the “biotransformation” that results. Some yeast companies have released gene-modified strains that are so effective at the latter that brewers can use them and completely skip the dry-hopping while still getting a huge dose of tropicality. But there’s a downside.
“As soon as you’re able to pick out what that thiolized yeast character is, you can pick it out of any beer. It almost doesn’t matter what hops you use, because it’s always going to have this same dominant aroma profile.”
“Thiolized yeast is super interesting, but it’s just one note,” Brad explained. This seems to be the biggest rap against the process. Thor Stoddard, Reuben’s R&D brewer, put it this way: “That thiol flavor is something I have been able to immediately pick out any time I have one of those beers. To me it’s an intense guava flavor to the point that it’s spicy.”
Breweries have experimented by blending batches of beer with thiolized yeast with non-thiolized beer, and this helps lower the amplitude. That’s not necessarily an efficient way to get to the final product, though, as Brad pointed out, especially if you’re working at a large brewery. One alternative is to use a regular yeast strain that naturally accomplishes this, as Reuben’s does. They use White Labs’ Tropicale, a blend of strains that biotransforms well. It offers a softer, more natural flavor profile, Thor believes.
Ben Emrich is an American brewing in Kobe, Japan at Open Air. His situation is fascinating because beer is so expensive, ingredients are hard to source, and laws prevent GMO products like thiolized yeasts. “We can’t order it here because of the GMO [issue], so there’s stuff floating around that a brewer brought in as a homebrew-sized batch and grew up. Then we just harvest and share it with each other, so I don’t know how many generations it’s on.” It may not provide a lot of flexibility, but for a situation like Ben’s where hops are very expensive, it may have a place.
A product that works on the supply-side is having a moment. Called Phantasm, it was created by Jos Ruffell, the founder of New Zealand’s Garage Project brewery. As he explains it:
“Phantasm is a natural thiol precursor product made from Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc grapes. They’re really high in desirable thiol Precursors, which we stabilise and concentrate across powder, and now, liquid products. Essentially we are giving brewers tools to load up thiol precursors in their wort stream, which will then unlock into free thiols during fermentation with the right yeast strains.”
Jos has a lot of info about Phantasm. In our exchange, he went deep into the science. One of the things he emphasized and which Brad also noted, was the best way to use Phantasm: using it in the whirlpool rather than in the fermenter. This gets it more fully integrated into the wort.
My sense in talking to brewers is that the effect isn’t as stark as with thiolized yeast. It’s a more muted effect, and it tends to produce white-wine flavors. For that reason, breweries seem tolike it in other styles as well, like lagers.
Of all the thiol-based ingredients brewers talked about, an enzyme made by Lallemand got the biggest rave I encountered. The product is called Aromazyme, and it breaks down glycosides, which frees flavor-packed terpenes (more below). Added during fermentation, “You get this huge hop flavor,” Thor told me. “For me it’s like this hop candy character. Which makes sense, because the glycosides are the hop sugars, right? You’re adding those dry hops and releasing sugars and it all ferments ahead of schedule. And it also helps with hop creep.” He found it works best when he does two dry-hop additions. The enzymes stay active and continue to break down gylcosides in the second infusion.
Terpenes
I’ve been curious about terpenes since I learned, a number of years ago now, that they were common additives in cannabis products. They’ve become so associated with cannabis sativa that internet searches would incline you to believe they’re only found in weed. In fact, they’re a constituent of essential oils and common in many plants and flowers—and I first learned about them because the aromatics we prize in hops come from them in the form of myrcene, humulene and so on.
In cannabis, these powerful hydrocarbons are stripped out of the plant and added back into products like vapes and gummies to give them intense flavors and aromas. Companies quickly expanded their portfolio of terpenes by harvesting different varieties from other plants, giving them a broad flavor palette to work with. It took longer than I expected, but companies finally started making terpenes for use in beer. I have long wondered—will they revolutionize IPAs the way they have cannabis products?
The short answer is probably not. “We find them to be a very artificial flavoring,” Thor told me. “It doesn’t really come off at hops.” This is the problem when you take any constituent from a whole and distill it down. Hops have so many compounds that may impact aroma that when you use just one, even if it’s the most potent one, it doesn’t taste natural.
Brad agreed that they taste “chemically,” adding, “You could tell it was processed. You need that grassy material and the backbone of the hoppiness to back up the extract.” Nevertheless, he thinks it may play a bit part in brewing—if not the central role it plays in cannabis. “I definitely think there are some synergistic relationships between a lot of those compounds, and a lot of stuff in hops that aren’t desirable, but in small amounts, it works.”
Hops are Still King
Brad’s experience with terpenes, and the brewers’ reflections on thiolized yeast both reinforce an attitude I have heard from every brewer I spoke to about hop products. They are a useful took and can help punch up a beer the way a stew benefits from a bit of spice, but they are no substitute for hops. Brewers are pragmatic, and they are always interested in trying new ingredients and techniques. To go back to the point about flavor, cost, and efficiency, they’re constantly looking to find a way to make the best beer they can as cheaply and efficiently as possible. If a product could get them there, they’d use it. But there’s more to the equation.
I’m going to turn to some comments Thor made in our conversation. I have a hunch he speaks for a lot of brewers here, but maybe I was just influenced by his eloquence. In any case, he gets the last word. He started by acknowledging the value of this new wave of innovation. “These products are just another tool in the tool kit to add some interesting character to them and to get them to pop more. That’s something we’re always looking for. We want that aroma wafting out of the glass so you can smell it a foot away from you.”
But when I asked him if he’s more excited about a new product or a new hop variety, he didn’t waffle. “I would say I would be more excited for new hop varieties to try out. These different hops produce very different flavors. I find it most interesting when, ‘Oh! There’s a new hop out and we get to try it. There are these five flavors associated with it that are different from any other hop out there.’ That to me is interesting.”
Brewers may be pragmatic in the brewhouse, but they didn’t get interested in beer because of a steely sense of detatchment. “Maybe I’m just a bit of a beer romantic and still love to use regular hops. It feels more authentic. You don’t have the sum of the parts being more than the original whole—at least not yet.”
We may get to the place where we can synthesize an IPA in a test tube with flavors and additives, but for the foreseeable future, brewers are going to stick with good, old-fashioned hops.