During the 2025 harvest in New Zealand, on every day of the picking windows for Motueka, Nelson Sauvin, and Riwaka, workers at Freestyle Hops grabbed samples from the bines.
Freestyle sent those samples to the University of Auckland, which has pioneered precise testing of thiols and terpenes in wine and now is doing the same testing for hops and beer. The goal: to understand how odor compounds change day-to-day before the hops are picked.