The Hops You Chose For Your IPAs
Last week I posed a question to Twitter: “For all the IPAs you plan to make for the rest of your life, you may use only five hop varieties to do so. Which hops would you chose?” I received 82 replies and I was finding it interesting enough that I went ahead and dumped it in an Excel sheet. Responses came predominantly from homebrewers and fans, but there were quite a few professional brewers in there; I couldn’t see a particularly large difference, except that homebrewers tended to be more loyal to older varieties. Would you care to guess which was the most popular hop?
Citra by a country mile. If you look at the hop acreage stats, that will come as no surprise. But given the diversity of response, it was pretty amazing that two-thirds of you would choose Citra. Mosaic was a clear number two (52%)—and again, I can’t imagine there’s a single raised eyebrow out there. Simcoe was third and not far behind Mosaic (44%) and you might be slightly surprised there, but it corresponds pretty well to hop acreage stats as well.
You all had a very distinct set of faves—with surprises in what you chose and what you didn’t choose. I had an “other” category for the oddballs you threw at me (Saaz? Really? For IPA?), so I didn’t take scrupulous notes on all your answers—but I’d guess fifty hops at a minimum were cited. Despite that big number, the ten hops you most favored accounted for 69% of all the hops cited in your responses. (There were 396 in all, and not everyone cited five varieties.) It’s pretty clear which hops people choose to make their IPAs. Here’s your top ten:
From there we have a long tail of hops with decreasing support. Those that had enough support to register included EK Golding (15%), Sabro (11%), Moteuka (11%), Fuggles (10%), Strata (10%), Azacca (9%), Vic Secret (7%), El Dorado (6%), Idaho 7 (5%), Ekuanot (5%), and Nugget (4%).
What’s surprising is how durable some of the older American varieties are (Simcoe, Centennial, Cascade, Columbus, and Chinook) and how some of the new, supposedly hot varieties weren’t registering much excitement (Sabro, Strata, Eldorado, Idaho 7). And while I think it’s a selection bias—I have a lot of British cask followers on Twitter—Fuggle and EK Goldings did surprisingly well. Both had more than all those nouveau hops save Sabro, which edged Fuggles. I guess that goes to show that if you breed* a truly exceptional hop, it has staying power!
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*Take note of Stan Hieronymus’s delightfully pedantic clarification in comments.