In a world where the IPA style represents over 80% of craft beer sold today, hops are a very important ingredient when it comes to making beer, both for its contributing taste as well as aroma. And, like the beer itself, the technology surrounding hops has come a long way, especially in the past 5 years.
With that in mind, we thought it would be good to talk about hops and how they relate to the beers brewed in the industry (and here at KBC).
What is a “hop” and what are the different types of hops or hop products that exist?
Hops have been a staple in beer production since the 12th Century. They not only add flavour and aroma to beer, but they also act as a preservative, extending the shelf life of beer to reach greater distances from the brewery of which it was made. Hops are the flower of a tall growing perennial plant, and the flower contains sacs of lupulin, essential oils responsible for the flavour, aroma, and bitterness we enjoy in our beers. Like any flower, they eventually wilt, dry out, and lose their aroma. For brewers this is a problem as we want consistent flavours from the hops year-round. Over the centuries, hops have gone through several iterations with the goal of preserving flavour as much as possible.
initially, the same type of kilns used for malting would be used to dry the flowers for long term storage. While this would lessen the impact compared to a freshly picked cone, it would dry them out to prevent them from rotting during longer term storage. However, these whole cones or loose-leaf flowers were cumbersome and difficult to use. They would take up a lot of space and float on top of the beer.
Cue the creation of the T-90 pellet - “T” referring to type, and “90” referring to the percentage of matter remaining from the original whole cone (ie. 1kg whole cone = 900g T-90 hop pellet). To make T90 pellets, the cones were ground down and pressed through a mould to convert them to pellet form. This not only made the hops easier to work with by taking up less space and being dense enough to sink into the beer and disperse, but it also improved the storage condition as these densely packed pellets had les exposure to oxygen; one of the great enemies of hops and beer alike. Eventually, these pellets were added pre-measured bags and purged with nitrogen to further increase their shelf life. T-90 hops are the staple form of hops used in the industry today
Taking this a step further is the T-45 pellet (ie. 1kg whole cone = 450g hop pellet). You may ask, “what happened to the other 55% of the hop cone?”. The idea of the T-45 pellet is that we want to retain the hop essential oils, without all the extra organic green material associated with it. To achieve this, the hops are frozen under extreme temperatures to solidify the lupulin sacs before grounding and pressing the hops. This process is so effective that they can remove over 90% of the organic vegetal material found in the hop and actually need to blend back in just enough to pelletize it as hop oil in this form is very difficult to use. It turns out 45% is the minimum amount in which there is enough organic hop matter to pelletize and maintain its shape.
Last are the hop flowables (aka liquids). Given the 45% limitation of pellets, a lot of products coming out today eschew organic material altogether and focus on extracting the concentrated hop oils found in the cone. There are several ways in which hop flowables are made, many of them proprietary, but they all essentially involve 2 main steps. Firstly, the hop oil are extracted, often using CO2 or some kind of distillation. Secondly, the extracted oils are then processed by binding the oils to some kind of carrier to help them dissolve into the beer, thereby make them usable by brewers. Without this second step the oils are so heavily concentrated that they nearly solidify at lower temperatures and therefore struggle to dissolve in water-based liquids like beer.
Why do all these products exist? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each product? and why not use just use the most concentrated products?
- T-90 Hops
- Benefits: These are the industry standard. Hops in this form are often the most cost-effective way to add hops to a beer. These give a great all-around flavour and aroma that most people are accustomed to.
- Drawbacks: T-90 pellets have a high amount of organic material and this can lead to extra loss during the brewing process (beer lost during the manufacturing process means the beer becomes more expensive to brew as the brewery has less to sell). Furthermore, it can affect the shelf life of the beer as organic material naturally degrades over time.
- T-45 Hops
- Benefits: With roughly half the organic material of T-90, this means lower loss during the brewing process and greater shelf stability of the final product. Higher concentrations mean less is needed to achieve a similar impact compared to T-90 pellets and so the knock-on effect extends to lower storage and shipping costs for breweries.
- Drawbacks: Despite less organic material, the T-45 pellet will still degrade (albeit at a slower pace) over time. In addition, when higher concentrations of T45 are put into a beer without T-90, it can often give the beer an unpleasant sharpness to the hop character, often described as “hop burn”. Lastly, the extra processing means these come at a much higher price so often the cost vs impact can be lower than T-90.
- Flowable Hops
- Benefits: No excess organic material, this means little to no loss and much greater stability in flavours. Able to use a higher amount of total hop oils giving beers greater impact without the downsides of T-90/T-45. Often more consistent in flavour year-to-year, as variability between hop lots is minimized.
- Drawbacks: With hardly any organic material present, some hop products can lack depth compared to their pelletized counterparts. Moreover, these products are often very expensive, and although they can offset the increase in yield and lower storage and shipping costs, many of these products don’t keep when opened and so dosage rates are often tied to package size. Lastly, depending on the manufacturer’s processing type, using these products can turn your beer into happoshu because of what is added to make them flowable or dissolve more effectively.
In short, brewers will use a combination of these products to minimise the drawbacks while also getting the benefits that more modern hop products offer. Essentially, there is no “perfect solution” as using only one of these will limit what you are able to achieve as a brewer.
A closer look at hop flowables
Flowables have been around for quite some time, but older processes made these products less desirable for their aroma and flavour properties and more for their bitterness and stability properties. The earliest flowables were pre-isomerized kettle extract (PIKE for short). PIKE was great at being able to add a softer bitterness to the beer than T-90 pellets alone, while also reducing kettle loss from hop absorption. As technology for hop extraction improved, flowable hops began to be used for a number of things including; foam stability, bitterness adjustments, and eventually flavour and aroma contributions.
It is only recently that these flowable products have reached a level of quality where they can often be used to replace T-90/T-45 pellets in flavour and aroma contributions. Generic “fruity” hop extracts are now replaced with varietal (ex: Citra) specific hops and can often contribute sometimes superior aromas without sacrificing yield or shelf stability. This has allowed brewers to push hop impact well above what was previously considered as the drawbacks of using such aggressive hop loads could now be mitigated. There are now whole catalogues of these flowable hop products, all of them designed to target specific points during the manufacturing process to maximise their positive contribution.
The hop flowable problem
Hop flowables don’t come without their stigmas. I very much remember how the older products offered little in the way of aroma and flavour. In fact, they were honestly quite disgusting in flavour. Essentially, flowables are made by “extract”-ing the concentrated hop oil from the hop cone. Artificial flavour extracts have a (well deserved) bad reputation, as they are often using chemicals to replicate natural flavours. Because of this, the term “extract” is often off-putting to people, even if it is still using the natural product.
There is also the romanticism of brewing. Brewing is a very old and very historic profession. Often, brewers latch onto this view and are hesitant at adopting new methods that are not “the way brewing has always been done”. I personally think this is silly. If you look at how much grains destined for beer have changed – both in terms of cultivating it and then malting it – over time, and also how modern brewhouses have evolved to take advantage of the modified malt, it is nothing like the old days. Beer is now better and more stable for consumers. Even the breweries that have been around for 100s of years use these modern brewhouses and malt. Mind you, with hop flowables, I guess it looks very different, and I think this is what can scare some brewers away. In my case, I have always wanted to make the best beer I could with the tools available to me. It is always quality over everything else, and using some hop flowables may be a part of this.
Regulation is slow, and technology evolves fast. The hopposu dilemma.
Brewing science has evolved rapidly in the last 30 years, this is especially true in the craft beer scene. What this means is often regulations struggle to keep pace with the products being introduced to the market.
Most countries have laws to protect consumers and require companies to label their products accurately. In the case of beer, this means that if companies cut corners and use too many non-traditional ingredients, it needs to be called something else. In the case of America, beer would become “malt liquor” and in Japan it is known as happoshu. In this case, it is a very good thing to have. Especially when it protects the quality of a product for consumers. However, what happens when old regulation can’t keep up?
Hop flowables are made using a variety of processes, some of these processes will make an otherwise normal beer become happoshu the moment you use them. As previously mentioned, hop oil in its most concentrated form is difficult to dissolve in water/beer, this often means something is needed to help assist in its solubility. One of the most common ones used in some of the best quality flowables is a small amount of ethanol. Ethanol is already in the beer produced by fermentation, so it is an obvious candidate for this role. The problem is any amount of ethanol added outside fermentation will turn beer into happoshu.
Originally, the differentiation between happoshu and beer was enacted to prevent brewers from using ingredients (in this specific case, concentrated alcohol) to make their beer cheaper. However, in the case of hop flowables, this is often less than .001% of the volume of the beer, not even a measurable amount of alcohol change in the product. In this instance a step to improve the beer will make it labelled as a product historically known for being an inferior beer.
Fortunately, at KBC we have a license to produce beer and happoshu. We are able to leverage these licenses to allow us to produce the highest quality product possible regardless of labelling. We are always trying to push quality and flavour over everything else and using the best processes and ingredients we have available to us. whether this is can condition beers, or using a hop flowable to add some extra impact to an IPA.
