Episode Details

Over the past two decades, the amount of hops sitting in cold-storage warehouses has more than doubled. While the volume of those stocks is inching back down from its peak in 2022—and while it’s important that the industry has a buffer against climate challenges and bad harvests—a fundamental question remains: Just how useful are those hops two, three, or four years after harvest?

Through a series of research projects and resulting papers, professor Tom Shellhammer and postdoctoral researcher Cécile Chenot of Oregon State University have been working to understand how age impacts hops, and how factors such as temperature, oxygen, and even hop variety drive not just changes in chemical analysis over time, but also have a real sensory impact in finished beer. The results? Surprising, to say the least.

In this episode, Shellhammer and Chenot discuss:

• the myth that fresh is best, and that brewers should use a last-in, first-out approach to hop lots
• pinpointing the chemical markers in hops that actually convey in finished beer
• quantifying the range of variability in hops due to fixed factors such as soil, and to changing factors such as water stress or insect and disease pressure
• how terpenoids degrade at a different rate than thiols in stored hops
• matching analytical chemistry to sensory analysis for a real-world test of the impact of aging
• the vintage effect on thiols in hop lots
• how robust varieties such as Citra and Strata age relative to more delicate varieties
• the impact of oxygen and temperature on hop aging and compound degradation
• variability in packaging integrity within bags of the same hop lot
  

And more.

This episode is brought to you by:

G&D Chillers
G&D’s new Elite 290 Micro-series is built for brewers who care about sustainability and performance. It runs on a natural refrigerant with near-zero global warming potential (GWP), has a compact footprint, and features variable-speed fans for efficiency. We’ve chilled beer for more than 3,000 breweries across North America, and with 24/7 support and remote monitoring, your cold side stays dialed in—day or night. Get the details on natural-refrigerant technology at gdchillers.com/podcast.

Berkeley Yeast
Here’s a brewer nightmare. It's the night before packaging. You walk into the brewery, straight to the tank. You pull a sample to do a forced diacetyl test and you wait for it in silence. Something feels not quite right. You reach into the water bath and bring the flask to your nose… And it’s a butter bomb. The logistics start running through your head. Do we hold the tank? We have accounts waiting. How many days until it clears? And then you wake up and remember that you use Berkeley Yeast's FRESH™ Chico. It’s got ALDC inside every cell, so diacetyl can’t even form in the first place. Through primary. Through dry hopping and hop creep. Diacetyl stays ultra-low. So you don’t have to add ALDC, or wait for diacetyl to clean up. And most importantly, you don’t have to wake up in a cold sweat, worrying about scary stories like these. FRESH™ Chico is now available in dried bricks for as low as $88 at berkeleyyeast.com.

PakTech
This episode is sponsored by PakTech—delivering craft-beer multipacking you can t