I love hops. The sticky, green buds from the female hop plant may look like they would be at home rolled up in a Rizla paper, but they are actually used to give beer a lot of its bitterness, flavour and aroma. They also help to preserve the beer with their anti-bacterial properties, which is very good of them.
The choice of hops is critical when we create a beer, just as much as the choice of grape when making wine. Any brewer worthy of the title will spend a lot of time obsessing about hops, and I'm no exception.
We boil the hops during the brewing process. Boiled for a long time, they add lots of bitterness, but not much else. If we boil them for a shorter time then we extract loads of lovely flavour and aroma, but less bitterness. Because of this, we make a number of different hop additions, with different hops boiled for different durations to get the characteristics in the beer that we want. Hops lend a huge variety of flavours and aromas to beer, from piney, herbal or grassy notes through to floral, grapefruity, or even vinous qualities.
It's the numerous oils, resins and tannins contained in the flower cones of the hops which gives each type of hop it's distinctive characteristics. Scientists can (and do) spend lifetimes analyzing these components and how they interact with each other in the brewing process, but what really matters is the judgment and palette of the brewer using them. The best way to find out what a hop is like is to brew a beer using it, and see whether you like it or not. Brewing, after all, is half science and half cookery.
I use Pilgrim hops for bittering and flavour in our 3.6% beer 'Original'. Pilgrim has very high levels of an oil called Humulene, which imparts a lovely pungent quality, which I think complements the low abv of the beer really well. I use Styrian Goldings for aroma in this beer. These have a delicious piney/citrussy aroma, so I use loads of them!
I'm doing lots of mini test-brews at the moment using all kinds of weird and wonderful hops, so there's some interesting beers in the pipeline. Perhaps my favourite, unusual hop I've found so far is 'Nelson Sauvin' from New Zealand. It's supposed to have a wine-like aroma, but to my nose they smell like Ribena, and I love Ribena!
Speaking of hops being hard to get hold of, the price of hops has rocketed over the last few years and some varieties have become impossible to buy. This is due to a number of factors, but bad weather and increasing demand (the Chinese are getting into beer in a big way), seem to be the main causes. Some of the hops we use now cost almost £30 per kilo – a fair whack for a clump of vegetable matter! That makes them more expensive than fillet steak. (There's a thought - I wonder if anyone has ever tried meat-beer?!)
Because of these massive price hikes, brewers have been faced with some difficult choices; do we cut down on the use of the more costly hops and substitute with less desirable but cheaper ones, or do we absorb the cost increases and make the beer as we want it? I've chosen the latter (I chucked £300 worth of hops into my last brew, which would have cost me about £50 a couple of years ago), but if you've noticed that beers from some other breweries have changed over the last couple of years, you'll understand why.
Interestingly, as you might gather from the start of this article, the hop plant is actually a close relative of the cannabis plant. I have, ahem, heard that cannabis plants are often grown hydroponically indoors, in order to produce a consistent, high yielding and potent crop. A friend of mine recently speculated that it might be a nice idea to have a go at growing hops in the same way. A Blue Monkey side project may well be in the works...