John Hickenlooper and Russell Scherer—one now a U.S. senator, the other the namesake of the Brewers Association’s annual innovation award—founded Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing in 1988. During their first year, they used only five hop varieties: Cascade, Halltertauer Mittelfrüh, Tettnang—most likely U.S.-grown—Willamette, and Bullion.
“Sounds about right,” says Steve Bradt, who in 1989 started brewing at Free State in Lawrence, Kansas—it was the state’s first legal brewery in more than a century. He says he remembers using Cascade, Fuggles, Hersbrucker, Northern Brewer, Perle, and Willamette during those first few years. “Then that new and exciting Centennial came out,” he says. So, Free State brewed an IPA.
Back then, the lack of options made managing a hop portfolio relatively simple. Things are a bit different today. The USDA released Vera in June last year, and since then—as of this writing—stakeholders have commercialized seven more new varieties. Brewers who are already using a dozen or more—sometimes many more—varieties in a year might wonder just how many new varieties they need.
“Four or five years ago, in December or January, I’d go into a brewery [and] they wanted to know about whatever was new,” says Bradt, who’s been Hopsteiner’s Central and Mid-Atlantic sales rep since 2020. Now, when he arrives at a brewery in January, he says he hears, “I can’t afford to make a mistake. I am taking this time to refine these things in my recipes.”
The larger question isn’t how many new varieties a brewery needs, but how many varieties in total—and how much of any particular one. There isn’t a magic formula for managing a hop portfolio. However, brewers can learn something from how others are approaching the challenge.