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Today, craft beer vies for attention, interest, and drinking occasions with many other beverages: cocktails, imported beer, wine, seltzer, kombucha, cider, and RTDs, to name a few.
However, in the early decades of American craft beer—the 1980s and ’90s—consumers had fewer choices. “Beer” for most Americans meant domestic light lager—a commodity product differentiated by not much more than the vibe of a particular brand’s marketing. Most of the early craft breweries shunned lagers. What would be the point of a new, small brewery adding a few more drops to an already endless ocean of lager? Brewers of that time were well aware that there was a wonderful world of more compelling lager beer outside the United States, but most chose to draw a clear line between themselves and the dominant American macrobrewers ... by brewing ales.
Fast-forward to today: Domestic light lager is still very much alive but no longer supreme amongst the many beverage choices. To attract more consumers to craft beer—and to brew what many brewers themselves want to drink—more breweries are adding a lager or two to their beer lists. And while craft beer doesn’t like to be put in a box, you could say that these new craft lagers generally fall into two categories:
Traditional Lagers
These beers have similar qualities to European lagers, in which hops tend to carefully add bitterness and aroma to a foundation of malt and fermentation flavor. Hops for these beers tend to be European Noble varieties—usually leaning toward herbal, floral, grassy, spicy character—or American varieties that were bred to be substitutes for those traditional European varieties (such as Willamette, Sterling, Mt. Hood, Crystal, or Liberty).
New-School Lagers
These tend to be lagers brewed with moderate additions of the hop varieties popularized by IPAs. Until recently, these were the main alternative to brewing with the older Noble hop varieties—lagers with robustly flavored, New World IPA hops. These have gone by various style names such as IPL, cold IPA, or hoppy lager. Many of these beers are tasty. Yet even when used judiciously, high-alpha/high-resin hops with a vegetal-funk component tend to take most lagers hostage.
But Is There Another Path?
Indie Hops would like to suggest a third option: New World lagers brewed with hops that are “built” like traditional lager varieties—that is, with lower alpha and resin levels to allow malt and fermentation flavors to shine—yet with an updated palate of floral, fruit, and spice notes that provide an exciting finish to the beer, for a shared spotlight with the magic of malted barley, fermentation, and hops. Indie Hops varieties Lórien, Meridian, and another new cultivar with Hersbrucker pedigree (to be released later this year) are examples of this hop concept.
Left: Nature’s little packet of fun! Right: Sensory evaluation at Indie Hops HQ. Screening for unique, purposeful genotypes such as Strata, Meridian, Lórien, Luminosa, and … ?
Are Concentrated or Extracted Hop Products Useful in Lagers?
Of note lately are the dizzying number of processed hop products being marketed to brewers. Do traditional and “third option” hops need “correcting” with modern food technology procedures for use in lagers? Traditional hops have been loved and appreciated by generations of beer drinkers without the need to re-balance their qualities. After all, they were selected for this balance in the first place!
Let’s look at some of the arguments for both cryogenic concentrated pellets, which select and boost a subset of flavor compounds, and for hop aroma extracts, which isolate and recombine flavor compounds, as they relate to craft lagers:
- Reducing beer loss: N/A. Typically, lagers do not use hops at a rate at which beer loss through absorption is a significant problem.
- Boosting hop intensity: N/A. Lagers are typically more about harmonizing moderate hop-flavor intensity and bitterness with the malt and fermentation contributions to the finished beer, and not so much about maximizing hop intensity.
- Reducing vegetal flavors: N/A. Again, even craft lagers tend to use relatively low hop rates compared to IPAs, so there simply is not a lot of vegetative material in contact with the beer. And, interestingly, some classic European varieties are actually selected in part for the “grassy” character they provide. (Maybe this is actually where the term “lawnmower beer” came from? 😉).
So, besides those potential benefits not really being applicable to most lager, there is a clear downside. These products are a subset of the natural hop cone—so, good things are left behind! One case in point is that, ironically, some brewers are now brewing lagers with the lupulin-free, vegetative byproducts of cryogenically processed IPA hops. This is because there are desirable terpenoids (e.g., linalool) that occur mainly outside the lupulin glands. With respect to lager brewing, this byproduct is also lower in alpha acids and more resinous terpene hydrocarbons (e.g., myrcene). Traditional and “third option” hops accomplish these goals naturally, so when utilized as dried hop cones or T-99 pellets, the full goodness of nature’s wonder is delivered in high fidelity.
We’re not Luddites or blind traditionalists. Brewers will find interesting ways to use these “new tools in the tool box.” Yet nothing we’ve tasted in beer, so far, has challenged our perspective that great beer is made in hop yards and barley fields, not in a lab. The malthouse, brewhouse, and fermentor are the university where malt and hops go to realize their full potential. With fine craftsmanship along the way, the craft lager is a treasure to behold—a product of nature and skill that draws people. And it is perhaps craft beer’s most powerful offering to attract greater consumer share in an increasingly cluttered market.
Left: Dreaming of the day when every beer consumer appreciates a well-made craft lager as much as brewers do! Right: Nature at work.
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