Hops

Brewers looking for greater efficiencies and longer-lasting hop aroma, among other things, can find several avenues to explore in recently published studies.

Tough times are ahead for hop merchants and farmers coping with surplus stocks and stalling demand. After enjoying wider selection and lower prices in the short term, are brewers ready for what comes next?

There are hops in abundance, but beer sales are unpredictable—it’s no mystery why many small breweries are relying on the spot market. Yet many suppliers are aiming to lure brewers back to more flexible contracts that better suit today’s market.

Having a sensory panel to regularly evaluate your beer is good practice—but what about one to evaluate your hops? Brewers and hop-sensory experts share their best tips on starting up a specialized panel—and careful hop evaluation is something that even the smallest breweries can do.

Research into the aroma compounds that best survive the brewing process—and which hops are high in them—has changed how brewers add hops to their IPAs and other beers. As more research emerges, so do more opportunities to improve hop aroma.

With hop harvest behind us, now is the time to find unique new varieties (before everybody else knows their names).

While the numbers are far from final, there were modest steps toward rebalancing the market for U.S. aroma hops. Centennial and Simcoe had a rough year, while rain helped Germany and Czechia avoid a second consecutive disastrous harvest.

As hop growers and the brewing industry manage an ongoing hop surplus, farmers this year planted fewer acres. But will that mean fewer hops? Here, we sketch out the past 15 years of hop acreage, as well as hops kept in stock over that time.

Kevin Ashford, the award-winning brewmaster at Central California’s Figueroa Mountain, has some thoughts on the future of lager and New World hops. Are we already looking at the next pivotal moment in the evolution of craft beer?

Growers have reduced acreage, but that’s only part of a complex story. As the 2023 harvest approaches, balancing the market means reducing surpluses and figuring out how to do a better job of measuring true demand.