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Editors’ Picks: Fresh Finds From CBC
As it always does, the recent Craft Brewers Conference offered glimpses of where brewing may be going, whatever your scale. From terpenes to Dynaboost to new yeast strains, here are a few finds from the trade-show floor have us excited about what’s next.
Abstrax Hop Terpenes and Extracts
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Hop extract and terpene technology continues to make leaps year after year, and Abstrax, which first made its name in the cannabis world, is helping to lead that charge. We’ve played with terpene additions and dosing in beers before, and we’ve tasted along as brewers have tested terpene blends—including hop-derived, cannabis-derived, and those derived from non-hop natural sources—in their own beers. Still, it’s always felt like a technology in progress. This year, the tech has taken bigger leaps. Abstrax is not only offering highly soluble and incredibly efficient terpene extracts—priced below actual hops for equivalent dosage—but they’re also offering opportunities for professional brewers to map out the flavors and aromas of their favorite selected hops and “bank” that profile, which could then be re-created via terpenes in the future. Wish you had some of last year’s Mosaic? Now you can order up a reasonable facsimile whenever you need it. Or, if you’d like to get more bang for the bucks you spend on hops, send your pellets their way, and they’ll get five times as much dosage in soluble extract as you’d get from dry hopping with the pellets themselves. We’re not ready to say this is the future of hoppy brewing, but the possibilities are intriguing, and every brewer should be paying attention.
YCH DynaBoost
Yakima Chief Hops’ 702 Trial now has its own brand name—DynaBoost—and this new product in the flowable, cold-side addition space provides a unique way to pack more hop saturation into dry-hopped beer. Dry hopping with pellets—even those that have been cryogenically concentrated—means physical matter in your beer that can drag hop compounds back out of solution. Flowable liquids such as DynaBoost have no such limitations, so if your goal is to melt faces with a dry-hop equivalent of 10-pounds-per-barrel in a triple IPA, they’re an efficient way to get there. More interesting, however, is how the processing can soften some of the harsher edges in hops themselves. We tried a test brew from San Diego’s North Park featuring Nelson Sauvin DynaBoost, and that West Coast lager expressed the softest character for that hop we’ve tasted, with all the gorgeous gooseberry and vinous notes but almost none of the sharper, white-floral edge.
Haas HopKick & Euphorics
Brewers have been telling us their Haas HopKick stories, as it’s a particularly effective way to make hop water. The soluble extracts definitely give Abstrax a run for their money in the quality department, and now Haas is leaning in and growing the range with Euphorics—blends of hops and botanicals that do a bang-up job of creating fruit flavors and aromas without the fruit itself. The flavors are uncanny, with a touch of herbal-hop depth and huge fruit notes that deliver as promised. If you’re looking for a single-hop variety, then HopKick may be your go-to. Or, if you’re looking for all the flavor in one existing blend, Euphorics has you covered with flavors such as Peachy Keen and Cosmic Guava.
Berkeley Yeast
It feels a bit like mad science at Berkeley Yeast, with a constant stream of genre-bending strain releases that may force you to rethink everything you thought you knew about how fermentations work. A Chico strain that produces stable haze? Check. A Chico that produces lactic acid, finishes at a palate-pleasing 3.5 pH, and is repitchable for a handful of generations? Check. Lager and ale strains that don’t produce acetolactate, the precursor to diacetyl? Check. The innovation gene at Berkeley is switched on, and we can’t wait to see what brewers do with more of these tools in their toolboxes.
Hopsteiner’s Focus on Sustainability
The carbon footprint of specific hop varieties may not be the sexiest subject in brewing, but the sustainability of hops agronomics is something that deserves more attention . Kudos to Hopsteiner for bringing focus to the issue, with bold graphics showing just how inefficient some older, beloved hops really are, and how much better some newer varieties are. Hops that yield more per acre, require far less fertilizer, produce more oil per cone, and need less irrigation are every bit as important to the future of beer as the hottest new aromas and flavors.
