Hopsteiner is pleased to announce the addition of a new hop farm, River Ranch. The new farm is located near our Mabton, Washington hop farm located in the Yakima Valley. The additional acreage will be used to expand our proprietary hop varieties such as Eureka!, Lemondrop and Calypso. In addition, the extra acreage will allow us to grow some of our new experimental hop varieties as well as traditional hop varieties. River Ranch will have a new hop kiln, baler, warehouse and a new hop combine to aid in the harvesting.

As in previous years we would like to demonstrate how the contribution of hop oils to beer can vary from one crop year to another. We have chosen linalool as a representative hop aroma substance as it correlates well with the sensory impression of hoppy aroma in beer.

The 2015 Hopsteiner Guidelines are ready and will be available at BrauBeviale 2015 in Nuremberg.

Crop 2015 estimates for Germany were finalized in the Hallertau growing area on 25 August 2015. We enclose a comparison of crop 2014 results with crop 2015 estimates for the world’s most important growing areas.

The licensing fee for the hop variety Polaris (DEPA) will be dropped with effect from crop 2015 onwards. Consequently, Polaris may now be considered as an alternative bittering variety. Therefore, at this year’s Hopsteiner Forum in July 2015 a selection of two Pils beers were presented to an audience of brewers and brewing scientists to show the impact on bitter quality by using either Polaris or Herkules (DEHS). Both varieties were exclusively used as a bittering dosage at the beginning of boiling. The analytical data of these two beers are shown in table 1.

Brewers who dry hop are trying to incorporate hop essential oils into their beer. However, little has been reported about non-volatile hop compounds that also dissolve into beer when one dry hops. In our June 2015 Newsletter we mentioned that after 5 days of dry-hopping Humulinones, a hop bitter acid about 65 % as bitter as isoalpha acids, readily dissolves into beer. In this Newsletter we report the concentration and utilization of Alpha Acids, Beta Acids, Humulinone, Hulupone, Xanthohumol, and Desmethylxanthohumol when a 51 IBU beer is dry-hopped with Cascade hop pellets for five days using a dose rate of 0, 0.5, 1.0 and 2 lbs of Cascade hop pellets per barrel of beer. Table one contains the complete analysis of the Cascade hop pellets analyzed the day of dry-hopping. Table 2 contains the anaylsis of the control beer along with the dry hopped beers.

Humulinones are similar in structure and about 65 % as bitter as iso-alpha acids – see Newsletter

The Hopsteiner Sensory Panel evaluates experimental varieties of interest in the same base beer as two different applications: a late hop addition and a dry hop addition at the beginning of secondary fermentation (hops are removed post-maturation). The raw hop, late hop beer and dry hop beer evaluation results for experimental variety 11405* are detailed below as an example of this process.