The Terpene Frontier—and its Dangers
Years ago, the cannabis industry began extracting terpenes from their buds for use in edibles and other products. Terpenes are a class of aromatic compounds that give plants their distinctive scents. (“Terpenoid” refers to a larger group and is probably more accurate—but terpene is the more common shorthand.) They’re very important in cannabis, and of course also in that plant’s cousin, hops.
This week, one of those cannabis-terpene companies, Abstrax, announced it was offering extracts for four hop varieties, Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, and Willamette. Hop extracts have been around a long time, but this marks the first time the chemists who reshaped cannabis have come over to beer. And because cannabis companies are happy to compose flavors with pure extracts, Abstrax cuts everything else out. (Current hop extracts contain hop acids and oils, not just terpenes.) Abstrax is offering pure, liquid terpenes,* and it will definitely create another wave of experimentation and change the flavor of beer.
It is in one way no big deal: terpene extraction is another evolution in hop product development, and joins GMO yeast, cryo hops, and similar products. It’s not even new in brewing. Breweries like Lagunitas and Two Roads have been experimenting with terpenes for a while. Homebrewers can buy terpenes. And it’s not even obvious that drinkers will love overly terpened IPAs. Until brewers dial them in, they may not taste hoppy but “like-hops” in that way candy tastes “like fruit.”
With craft flatlining and FMBs booming, it’s not the hop terpenes that trouble me. It’s the non-hop terpenes that do. Stripping scents down to their chemical level breaks them down into aroma pixels that can be rearranged to paint any picture. People who eat gummies or drink hard seltzer aren’t looking for the base flavors and aromas—there aren’t any. These have always been test-tube consumables, and that’s what people expect. Blue raspberry flavor? Awesome!
Beer is a different beast. While flavorings are probably as old as the flavor of naked malt, beer does contain base flavors and aromas. These comes from ingredients, malting processes, recipe, and brewing techniques. The flavors they produce are the touchstones to a beer’s nature. Whether it’s a pale lager or a black stout or even a wild ale, we recognize it as beer. The reason Abstrax has released hop extracts is a nod to that reality; they believe that getting terpene extracts into beer starts with flavors that taste like beer. Yet even within the beer world, that tether back to base flavors has been severed with culinary beers and is on the way with milkshake IPAs. Which means the real market Abstrax may find in beer are extracts that taste like donuts or chocolate-mint ice cream or peanut butter and jelly.
I don’t worry that beer-flavored beer is endangered by this. Smoothie sours are a fun little boomlet but they are absolutely never going to replace lagers and IPAs. My concern is how all these flavorings will change the perception of beer. Say what you will about the marketing of the word “craft,” but it was incredibly valuable in re-centering customer impression from the commodity qualities of beer—its ubiquity, availability, and convenience—to the talent it takes to develop a good recipe and the skill to make it in the brewhouse. It was a “cræft” argument about what beer is, and that idea helped win mouths and hearts that powered the country’s 9,000-brewery revival. There was a lot wrong about the phrase “craft beer,” but on balance it was an incredibly helpful term.
But craft depends on the brewer. Recall that the definition of cræft is that the knowledge of a skill resides in the body and mind of the craftsperson, not a machine. The more beer is celebrated for its chemistry, their harder it is to admire its craft. When the flavoring comes from a bottle, it changes the way we think about a food or drink’s flavor. People love Doritos, but they know they are a product of clever chemists, not bakers.
There’s a real danger that the constant chemical invention that makes beers taste more vivid is also changing the way we think about them. We know that a chemist can manipulate molecules to recreate flavors with a magician’s skill, but the reason we once liked beer was because we admired how a brewer could make it taste. If that changes, people, perhaps just on the margins at first, will think of beer more as a tasty commodity, but not something really very interesting. More people coming to beer in their twenties might regard it as nothing more than every other hard lemonade and canned cocktail out there. People embraced beer because they were enamored of the way it was made, not just the way it tasted. Take that out of the equation and something serious changes about people’s relationship to beer. As a fan of the brewer’s craft, I worry about that.
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* Here’s the entire ingredient list for the Cascade extract: “Beta Myrcene, Beta Caryophyllene, Farnesene, Delta 3-Carene, Ocimene, 4-Terpineol, Alpha-Bisabolol, Alpha-Pinene, Bergamotene, Camphene, D-Fenchone, D-Limonene, Gamma-Terpinene, Geranyl acetate, Linalool, p-Cymene, Terpineol, Terpinolene.”