Does It Matter How We Classify Hops?

Back at the dawn of the craft era—and probably going back a lot earlier—brewers categorized hops by whether they were better for bittering a beer or flavoring and scenting it. Brewers could use pretty crude hops for bittering, but they reserved their best lots for “finishing” the beer. (American hops were reliably high in bittering potential as well as dirt cheap, so brewers here and elsewhere would use them to bitter the beer, then top off their beers with a nice dose from Hallertau or Kent.) You used the really nice hops, which didn’t have great bittering potential, along with the gnarly ones that were high in alpha acids (the bittering compound). So, two varieties: bittering and aroma.

Americans changed all that when we started using hops with extremely high proportions of alpha acids not for bittering, but to scent and flavor our beers. Some of the highest-alpha hops remained in the “bittering” camp, but everything else was up for grabs. All of this started happening within the past 15 years or so, which in the thousand-year history of brewing with hops makes it very recent. Brewers and hop-growers have tried to accommodate this by adding a third category. In the US, hops are categorized as alpha (as opposed to bittering), aroma slash dual-purpose. Germans have opted for bitter, aroma, and flavor. In the latest issue of Hopfen, the German hop industry magazine, an article* introduces a fourth category: fine aroma.

It … is problematic.

To begin with, it doesn’t really acknowledge non-German hops. It also appears to be a more cultural frame than anything else. Here’s how they describe fine aroma hops:

“Fine aroma hops as a group would encompass all the landraces, such as Hallertau Mittelfrüher, Hersburcker, Saazer, Spalter, Tettnanger, Strisselspalter, Lubliner, as well as related varieties such as Saphir and Spalter Select. These varieties are used for brewing superbly well-balanced bottom-fermented styles like lagers and pilsners.”

You see the problem. This is not only highly specific to German brewing (with what I assume the authors think of as an extremely generous nod to the lager-brewering traditions of the immediately neighboring countries), but it recycles the indefensible old “noble hop” framework in which the very best hops were always judged to be—coincidentally!—those grown in Germany. Home-region boosterism is nothing new in brewing, and indeed it’s one of the most important engines of local culture, but it makes a poor foundation on which to build a universal conceptual framework.

As I read the piece, I wondered about how American hops might fit into the fourfold scheme. Could American hops be shoehorned into the “fine aroma” bucket—as, say, excellent cold-side hops? They could, for sure. But it would make the categories basically meaningless. You’d have Saaz and Citra in the same bucket; brewers looking to newer or unfamiliar hops in the category would be required to dig deeper to learn which styles they were best used. And if you have to dig around, what’s the point of a category in the first place.

All of which makes me wonder why we care about hop categories anymore. As the authors of this paper note, the original aroma/bitter categories dated to a time when just six varieties were grown in Germany. As the authors reveal, it works well enough for lagers, but good luck trying it with other styles. Even in the US, the distinction between alpha hops and everything else is at best academic at this point. If you’re still making beer styles that depend on a big bitter charge, you know which hops work. In Germany, Herkules and Magnum do the heavy lifting. In the US, it’s CTZ.

Meanwhile, the number of hops spins out of control. Germany grows 41 commercial varieties alone. Have a look at this list and see if you distinguish which are actual German varieties and which ones I made up: Monroe, Relax, Akoya, Solero, Tango, Rottenburger, Xantia, and Record [owing to my ignorance of the language “other” now deleted].** The United States has so many I can’t count them, and now other countries have robust breeding programs introducing new varieties every year. Hopslist tracks over 250. These hops are used in the dozens of beer styles, in different parts of the process, to create different effects. And that doesn’t even address hop products. Categories would be great—but is such a thing possible? It doesn’t seem like it, and I wonder why we bother with them at all. Maybe it’s time to give up that concept altogether.

I don’t work in the industry, and there’s a very good chance I’m missing something, though. As a homebrewer, I know that I never consider the arbitrary category assigned to a hop. If it’s a new hop, I look at the alpha acid percentage to know how to treat it if I’m putting it in hot or boiling wort. But then I look at the description, how the grower/broker thinks it should be used, and its heritage. Then I start experimenting. When I talk to professional brewers who are working with a new hop, they are experimenting as well. When a new hop comes out, breweries use it in very different ways until they find how it works. That info then slowly trickles out and the hop’s use becomes more or less fixed. All hops produce bitterness, aromas, and flavor. The real question is how a brewer harnesses those qualities.

Curious how you all think about this. Would “fine aroma” be a useful category, or is the whole thing a little unnecessary now?

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* “Distinguishing hop varieties as either aroma or bitter hops – is this still relevant?” Gahr, Forster, Schüll, and Lehmair (2022)
** Trick question—every one is a hop grown in Germany in 2022.