A rivalry is developing in the world of fresh hop beer. Proponent of one team believe the best character comes from use on the cold side, others on the hot side. It's time to get to the bottom of the debate.
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For hundreds of years, brewers have ranked hops based on their quality. This has led to a sense of nobility among a select class of landrace hops brewers prize the most. But are they noble because they’re old and tested, or because they taste and smell so good?
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While I was in Europe, Carlsberg announced it would finally stop using the antiquate Burton Union system used to make Marston’s Pedigree in Burton, England. The news was sad, but it came far later than I ever expected. A eulogy for a technology that was once state of the art.
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In the spring, Dan and others from the brewery head off to a forest just west of town. The trees must be a certain height to harvest, and they can’t pick too much of the new growth. “We bring a load of grain bags out with us—it’s beautiful,” he said. “I love it.” It takes more than one visit to collect 200 pounds of tips.
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Fresh hop season is underway, and it has so far proven to be unusual—and enlightening. Here are a few early lessons I’m taking away from the selection I’ve found.
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Perhaps you’ve seen “West Coast pilsner” on a taplist this summer. It is starting to look like a real style, and when made well, a total delight.
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There are a lot of new products and agents and ingredients on the market that help amplify or transmute or, in some cases, replace hops. But it turns out that good, old-fashioned hops remain the key ingredient in those IPAs we love.
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What is the state of the art in brewing West Coast IPAs? pFriem took that question as its brief and this week releases a new year-round beer that collects all the tricks, techniques, and ingredients that characterize the style. Here’s what they came up with.
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Skagit Valley Malting may be gone, but a new start-up from across the mountains gives hope to craft malt.
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Blind taste a dozen and a half mass market lagers, and you learn something about this much-maligned style. They don’t all taste the same, and in fact represent a surprisingly broad range. We made a few other discoveries along the way.
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The discovery of a new Maryland hop led me on a trail of discovery to the office of Dr. Nahla Bassil, at the National Clonal Germplasm Repository. What I discovered was incredibly fascinating, and went far beyond the scope of a single wild hop.
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After an encounter with a single-hop Talus beer, I have a better sense what this newish American hop tastes like, and I am in love. It’s tropical, but less mango and more mangosteen. In this post, I unpack its unusual but somehow familiar flavors.
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For such a simple little beer, helles lager is a challenge to make—or at least make very well. Josh pFriem has been honing his example for decades, and it gets its big debut this month as the latest six-pack offering from pFriem.
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Some clever breweries look back when they’re seeking to move forward, recognizing that history may contain a hidden gem that, dusted off and repurposed, might delight a modern audience. Here’s a technique that’s ripe for experimentation.
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Historically, hops have been divided by category—”bitter” versus “aroma” was the classic dichotomy. Because of the massive changes in beer and hop breeding, German researchers are suggesting expanding that group to four categories. But are categories really necessary?
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The Siebel Institute has just released a recipe celebrating their 150th anniversary that any brewer can make—including homebrewers. It looks like a fun beer.
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Nearly all the beer in the world is made in a professional brewery, or in small batches for home use. Once, brewing on a scale for non-commercial community consumption was much more common, and a few places still practice it.
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Over the weekend, I attended the farmhouse ale festival in Norway. In this post, I offer a visual presentation of Stig Seljeset’s process, from the wood-fired juniper infusion through pitching his own strain of kveik yeast.
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After revolutions in hop breeding and product development and micromalting, yeast is getting its moment in the sun. A proliferating number of yeast labs offer organic and genetically-modified strains that do things like ferment without diacetyl or finish in half the time.
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Trying to describe hop aromas, dizzying in their diversity, has long bedeviled writers and brewers. Global hops company BarthHaas has been developing a tool that may finally help solve the problem.
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