Brewing a Hop Bomb

As simple as it sounds, many brewers who are brewing super hoppy beers are using lots and lots of hops! And I do mean lots of hops. Back in the 1980s, few beers in the world contained more than 1 pound of hops per US beer barrel (this is equivalent to 2.6 ounces/5 gallon batch, 3.9 grams/liter, or 0.4 kg /hl). This metric refers to the total weight of hops added to beer during the process. A respectively hopped Pilsner has about ½ pound/BBL (2 g/L) when low-alpha, noble hops are exclusively used in the brewhouse. Today, it is possible to buy beers that are hopped in the 3–5 pound/BBL (12–20 g/L) range. Looking for obscenely hoppy beer? Check out brewers boasting hopping rates in the 10 lbs./BBL (40 g/L) range.

Personally, I think this gratuitous use of hops is like driving a gas guzzler from the ‘60s that uses gas like water, but to each their own. If you want tons of hop aroma and flavor in your beer, sometimes you need to use a ton of hops! But why is it that some brewers are better at this game than others?

One of the real tricks to brewing terrific hop bombs is by starting off with the best hops. Seriously, if you want to grill the best steak at home you need to start with a terrific piece of meat. Brewing the best hoppy beer is not different, except the market is different. The fact is that most homebrewers and small-scale commercial brewers don’t go to the hop market to pick out the hops that will be used in their beer. You may go to a homebrew store or order hops from a supplier known for great products, but this is not the same as picking out your hops at the hop market. Commercial brewers who have hop contracts with hop growers and/or hop merchants can, in fact, go to the hop market during harvest to select lots of hops for their contracts. And homebrewers who live near hopyards, whether the hopyard is in your backyard or within a reasonable road trip from home, can also travel to the hop market.

Going to the hop market is not like going to the local gourmet grocery store because you typically don’t leave with a bag of hops. The purpose of hop selection, which is really what happens at the hop market, is choosing lots of harvested hops (a lot refers to bales of hops harvested from an area, so a sample from one bale is used to represent the lot) before they are processed. In the days when all breweries used cone hops, a trip to the market could end with a bale of hops in the back of the pick-up. But today most brewers use pellet hops, and the selected hops are pelletized by hop processors following selection. The real take-home here is that brewers who select hops have a leg up on brewing hoppy beers because not all hops are created equally. I will get back to hop oils and products like Cryo hops in a moment, but let’s move onto brewing process.

The trend with these hop bombs has been adding hops at multiple points in the brewing process, with a real focus on adding hops later in the game. Rewind the clock 20 years and you land in a world where few craft brewers were dry hopping or whirlpool hopping. And the brewers who did use these methods were looking for a bump in aroma to let folks smell hops in beer. No one was really thinking of brewing beers that smelled like hop juice. Words like Torpedo, hop bursting, biotransformation, and Randall had no hopcentric meaning to brewers. Today, there are few hop heads who don’t know what these terms mean.

OK, so how does this help you? For starters, seek out the best hops you can find. This may involve posing all sorts of questions to your local homebrew supplier, seeking hops from local breweries who have the inside track on certain varieties, or getting to know some hop farmers. The next thing you need to do is add hops early and often. Mash down that hop pedal and start adding!

Hop character can be layered into beer by adding hops to the kettle, whirlpool, late in fermentation, at the end of fermentation, and to the serving vessel. But there are two major problems with this strategy. The first is crazy beer losses associated with the beer sponges that brewers call hops. Add enough hops to beer, and there is no beer left to drink. While this is a slight exaggeration, some commercial breweries have staggeringly expensive, hop-associated, beer losses that approach 30%. The other commercial problem is that hops are expensive, and if hopping rates are pushed into the 5–10 pound/BBL (20–40 g/L) range the selling price of the beer must reflect this massive increase to the cost of raw materials. These are very real challenges to the business of brewing, so creative solutions continue to follow the trend in hoppy beers.

This is where ingredient and process technology enters into the conversation. Hopping method can reduce the hopping rate required to achieve a given level of hoppiness. Commercial breweries have a major leg up on homebrewers because large kettles, whirlpools, and fermenters have a smaller surface-to-volume ratio, thereby minimizing aroma loss at surfaces. Aside from that difference, specialized hop backs, dry hopping vessels, and new hopping methods like late fermentation hopping have all improved hop aroma yield in beers. The ingredient improvements are also quite real. New hop oils, Cryo hops, greater availability of Type 45 (and other) pellets, and enzyme treatments aimed at biochemically changing the volatility of hop oils are some examples of advancements in the ingredient world.

I want to end this answer with a few tips suggested by craft brewer extraordinaire and BYO reviewer, Mitch Steele, whose reviews of my columns are always much appreciated. So here are some great concluding points from Mitch:

• Do consider multiple dry hop additions, but remove the first addition before adding the second. Independent of the number of additions, remove hop material after two days contact time. This will maximize extraction of the good oils you want and minimize the addition of vegetative and/or stem flavors.
• Minimize oxygen pickup when dry hopping. Nothing pulls out hop aromatics faster from your beer than exposure to oxygen. Admittedly, this is very hard in a homebrew set up, and if trying to do multiple dry hops, but it is something to work hard to accomplish.
• Hop oils are a nice way to augment hop flavor and aromatic intensity. I don’t like using them in place of pellet hops, but adding a small amount along with the pellets can help increase flavor intensity and how long the hop flavors last in the beer.

Response by Ashton Lewis.