Varieties

With picking now underway in the Pacific Northwest, there are three debutants at the harvest ball. What might Dolcita, Vera, and HQG4 add to your brewery’s portfolio?

It’s rough out there—even for young, freshly developed hop cultivars. Yet while many brewers are buying fewer hops these days, the Help Wanted sign is still out for new ones.

New varieties and products on the immediate horizon range from a defiantly intriguing public hop to compounds that might emulate “sticking your head in a bag of weed.” Will you apply the eye dropper, or the sledgehammer?

With hop harvest behind us, now is the time to find unique new varieties (before everybody else knows their names).

Hop growers face a tough decision every year: What do we plant? Claire Desmarais, sales and marketing manager for CLS Farms in Washington, explains how growers navigate the tricky supply and demand driven by brewers and drinkers.

From Anchovy to Vista, here are some interesting hop cultivars on the immediate horizon—plus a couple of experiments that may be the next to get names.

Some brewers are turning to heritage barley varieties for malts that can add new character to their beers—and attract new fans.

After years of research, brewer-led efforts to develop more exotic, expressive hop varieties that anyone can plant are beginning to sprout.

There are “cheater” hops and there are “cheaper” hops, but the latter can also offer the big exotic aromas and flavors that are popular today. Stan Hieronymus has specific suggestions for varieties and how they might be employed in the brewhouse.

In a new, exclusive feature for Brewing Industry Guide All-Access subscribers, Stan Hieronymus goes deep on the latest in hops news and knowledge. This month, he zooms in on a question: Which new, hot varieties have a shot at becoming the Next Big Thing?

What began as an online shop run from a garage joins the world's largest hops supplier.