Breeding new hops varieties is a time-consuming process, and a typical year might see a few varieties (at most) reach commercial markets. But 2014 was a bumper year for the bitter flower, with no fewer than thirteen new hops varieties making their debut at the 2014 Craft Brewers Conference.
Gene Probasco, who started the first private hops-breeding program in the United States at John I. Haas in Washington’s Yakima Valley, learned something long ago that speaks to the challenge brewers face today when evaluating a widening range of hops varieties: It is not enough simply to rub and sniff hops flowers to learn what they will smell and taste like in beer. As part of a project for a brewery client that began in 1990, Probasco created about 150 potential cultivars, and the client produced single-hopped beers with each of them. He tasted more than 100. “It was a real eye opener. Some of the beers were just bad,” says Probasco, who is in charge of farm and agronomic services as well as breeding at Haas. “Some of them were very, very good. Some varieties had a nice smell, but they made bad-tasting beer. There weren’t many that smelled bad, but some of those made good beer.”
When private and public breeding programs combined to release one or two new varieties a year, it was relatively easy for brewers to get to know them. “You actually have to brew with hops to figure them out,” says Vinnie Cilurzo at Santa Rosa, California’s Russian River Brewing Company. Making batches of beer with a single hop “rarely yields a beer that could be an actual ongoing recipe, but it does teach you which components of the hop work and which do not work.”