From taproom to retail | With over 8000 craft and independent breweries now in the US, and macro brewers attempting to protect their market share, the growth in competing beer brands has exceeded the growth in consumer dollars available to purchase them. Resulting financial pressures, exacerbated by the effects of COVID-19 and the waning novelty of craft beers, have forced many microbreweries to shut down. However, more retailers now offer craft beers to their customers alongside macro brews, giving savvy microbreweries an opportunity to move into retail sales. The process that produced a hundred barrels will require a radical upgrade to produce thousands of barrels, including new methods of moving bulk ingredients to and from each step of the brewing process.

The new -omics technologies | Over the last few decades, we have all experienced the benefits of increased computer power, either in our daily lives or at work. The sheer volume of data that can be generated has also required increased storage capacity and new cloud-based applications. Blessing or curse, the reality is: we rely on these on a daily basis. Even in the malting and brewing industries, we are facing ever-increasing amounts of data, requests for more data, and faster access. The growth in data is down to a number of technologies such as metabolomics and proteomics which can provide data on hundreds to thousands of compounds. This review is a helicopter view of these two technologies being used to profile raw materials, brewing, and beer quality in extraordinary detail.

Quality assurance | Dry hopping has become an essential technique in beer brewing, designed to create the aroma of a beer and to produce pronounced, typical beer styles. This excerpt from an extensive research project provides some insight into the chemical-physical changes associated with dry hopping.

On 17 December 2021, the 11th Hop Special will be published in BrewingScience. Manuscripts can be submitted as of now, editorial deadline is 17 September 2021.

Beer color equations | This is the second article in a three-part series about the challenges of specifying beer color at the recipe design stage, as well as measuring it after the beer has been brewed. It examines the most common equations currently in use by brewers around the world for specifying beer color before the brewing process begins.

In 2021, Bohemia Hop is celebrating its 30th anniversary. The company was first registered in the Commercial Register on March 25, 1991. It followed up on the activities in the international trade of Czech hops from previous decades

Energy savings | From today’s perspective, some of the individual stages in the beer production process are extremely energy intensive. Lots of breweries thus aim to save energy by integrating innovative technologies and concepts without having to suffer any loss of quality. Pulsed electric field technology provides a number of different approaches here.

Analysis of bitter substances | In beer production, the development of modern analyses provides possibilities of extending the analytical spectrum. It is possible to investigate the detailed path of individual compounds from raw materials to the finished beer, using mass spectroscopy. The hard resin fraction of hops that mainly consists of polar i.e. easily water soluble bitter substances is ascribed a special role in terms of dry hopping. This makes efficient transfer of these substances from hops to beer possible. The present contribution describes the compounds involved, as well as the flavour contribution they make to beer bitterness.

Natural solution | IFast NV, a biotech company dedicated to the organoleptic and functional properties of food and drinks, has developed an innovative hop-based technology that provides a natural solution to the light taste in beer, also known as lightstruck, and which does not affect the organoleptic (bitter) properties of the beer.

Australian crop report | Hop Products Australia (HPA), Australian representative of the Barth Haas group, have completed the 2021 hop harvest. They picked 675 hectares across their three farms, which resulted in 1,526 metric tonnes of hops. This was a 44 hectare (6.9 %) net increase and a 25 metric tonne (1.6 %) decrease year-on-year across the six proprietary varieties Eclipse®, Ella™, Enigma®, Galaxy®, Topaz™ and Vic Secret™ as well as Cascade.

Normal level | The acreage of spring barley in Europe is estimated to be smaller than last year. Particularly in important growing countries, it has been reduced significantly in some cases. Thus, after the exceptional year 2020, a “normal” cultivation in line with previous years can be assumed again.