"Hand Selected" Hops?

I filter this sort of language (“hand crafted,” “hand roasted,” “built by hand”) as mostly marketing. Even if the producer really has forged a relationship with the grower “hand selected” doesn’t say anything substantial about quality.

 

I don't care for the term hand selected hops as you said it can be total bullshit...

On the other hand, the hops that someone found the right batch of and purchased make for beers that can taste magical.

There are way more bad hops then good ones nowadays. If you just took what they sold you it won't matter how good your equipment is or how perfect the recipe is.

 

Hand selected hops, choice quality grains, pure water (as if anyone uses impure water) are marketing phrases that really don't mean a helluva lot.

Like the "new and improved" laundry detergent that's the same old stuff in a different box.

 

Yes, brewers can choose specific lots of hops. They're able to go to Yakima during harvest, and do those things you mention. @honkey has mentioned several times about doing this.

 

Do those PNW hops get washed before being sold? I'd imagine with all the smoke they could turn some IPAs into rauchbiers.

 

I don't know for sure, but I doubt it. Washing them would likely wash off a lot of the oils in the hops. The hops are generally dried, baled, and processed into pellets.

 

The Brewers have to agree to buy a minimum amount, something around 5000 lbs of a variety, which is 2 or 3 acres yield. They rub the hops and are looking for aromatics that they desire. With experience, the brewers can say this willngive me the beer i want. Color is also examined on the bright blue table the samples are on. There are differences between lots of the same variety of hops, so the brewer might have several samples to go through. Grower, location, specific field, time of harvest, etc all influence the sample's qualities.

Breweries send 1 to several people for selection. They often rub elbows over beers at night at the Yakima Sports Center, a dive bar with a great tap list that brewers know.

 

Hops get kilned before they are baled. The hop rubs are done on samples cut from yhe bale. Not the first year with fires. Brewers would reject an off aroma such as smoke.

 

Sadly, the Sports Center is no more. Word is that it was struggling, and then the Covid lockdown really put a hurt on them. The place was cool because it was both a diner and a bar (and, personally, I would disagree with calling it a dive bar). When the Fresh Hop fest was in the parking lot behind it, it came in handy after I dropped my pint glass on the floor of the Porta Potty. They were kind enough to run it through the dishwasher a couple times. I repaid them by drinking a couple pints before going back to the fest.

https://www.yakimaherald.com/scene/...cle_3cabce38-2c19-5888-87fb-13c8187fd978.html

 

Now called just the Sports Center, should have looked closer, it lives on much the same.

https://www.yakimaherald.com/news/l...cle_74fb0aef-6f97-5548-b13e-dca4594364cd.html

Edit Bale Breaker had a tap takeover on 7/21, check the Sports Center Facebook page. Pizzas now, no burgers.

 

I think it is a meaningful thing to pick out your hop lots. There was a recent interview with Vinnie from Russian River saying theirs increase in skill in picking out the best hops was the source of a lot of the improvement in their beers of late.

 

Don't care the least because most breweries use hop pellets anyway.
Less wasted beer.

 

Its worth remembering that brewers may seek different attributes out of a specific hops than "the norm". In a past thread about celebration ale Terrence from Sierra Nevada mentioned that they really look for the rose aroma in their cascade(? Centennial? Whichever c hop leads the way for them). That's not necessarily "better" or "worse" from any objective angle, its just a unique aspect they favor and selecting lots is the only way they could ensure that aspect was regularly present

 

I see that Weedy of Tombstone Brewing was already tagged.

Maybe some other beer industry folks will be willing to provide their thoughts about selecting specific hop lots?

@erway @jzainasheff @SierraTerence @brianhink @Tarheel4985

Cheers!

 

I'm kind of surprised by some of the replies here. I guess I can't tell if people think that the term "hand selected" is just a poor way of describing the selection process or if people think it actually doesn't matter if you participate in lot selections.

There is a HUGE difference in hop lots and there's more than one way that wholesalers and growers define a lot. It's not as simple as saying "This hop variety is grown by this grower so they smell like________." It's not even as simple as saying "This plot of acreage contains hops that smell like _______." One of the problems with hop quality in recent years has been that a lot of growers increased their acreage without increasing their processing capacity. Let's say a grower has 10 acres of a hop, but they can only harvest 5 acres a day so they harvest on back to back days, there's a difference already (normally a small difference, but sometimes pretty drastic) and those hops are now considered to be two different lots of hops even though they came from the same field. Every grower has different pick windows that they determine their hops to be best at, so if that one day difference from one grower exists, imagine how much more drastic it is when you have growers in different states with different soil, different lighting, different irrigation, harvesting at different times using different equipment and different kilning temperatures and times.

At my last brewery, I got burned on some bad hops that I had signed a contract for and I had no course of action for getting out of it since I was too small to select and that seller didn't let breweries out of contracts. I think it was something like 990 lbs each of Mt. Hood and Chinook that I had no interest in using and ended up selling at a loss to breweries that didn't care about the quality of their hops as much as they cared about the price being low. The Mt. Hood was full on cheese and the Chinook was like black peppercorn and peanuts. I was really new at the time and didn't even know that lot selections were a thing. After doing some research, I started only contracting hops that I could select. My first year doing selections was in 2015 or 2016 and if I remember correctly, I had 6 lots of Cascade to choose from. It blew my mind how much variation there was. I remember one of them smelled just like cardboard and the hops were a yellowish brown color. One of the Cascade lots smelled like roses and tangerine (the one I selected) and it just so happened to be either the winner or the runner up at that year's Cascade Cup. One of them had a crazy high alpha acid content and smelled like marijuana. I've experienced this every year with older hops like Cascade and Comet where there's so little similarity between different lots that I almost have to wonder why we even bother to give them the same name. All of these that I'm describing are individual lots by growers.

So breweries come in and select the hops they want to use after inspecting them. In some instances, rather than selecting a single lot from a grower, a brewer might smell 2 or 3 different lots that they like different attributes of so they request that the processor blends whatever proportion the brewer wants of each lot... Now that blend is considered a new lot. At the end of all of the selections, the processor takes everything left over and they try to create a consistent blend, sometimes now making several different lot blends each one getting their own lot ID. Breweries that don't select get these blends. Sometimes that's fine, but it does mean that it's highly unlikely that they got the highest quality hops, but they will at least get fairly consistent hops year to year thanks to the blends all averaging out. Those of us that get a single lot do have less consistency year to year, but we also have access to what we think is the best of every year.

In addition to selecting the hops themselves, some brewers might opt to use a specific pelletizer or they'll talk with the processor about getting a specific parameter to their pellets. This also makes a huge difference. Some processors make very loose pellets that tend to retain more oils where some make very hard pellets that will store better, but they degrade some of the aroma in the pelletizer that way. Our pelletizers use proprietary techniques to maintain very cold temperatures so that as the hops get hammered, they don't suffer from heat transfer. It all matters and I think it's one of the most important things for a brewer that's serious about quality to participate in.

 

Thank you for the, as usual, super informative post. That is very fascinating how much variance there is from lot to lot on the same hop grown in the same field. Never would have guessed. Before, I was very interested in finally visiting a hop farm. Now I absolutely NEED to!

 

This clip has some information and shows the process of selection. Ken Grossman is in it, talks about the same varieties difference over different harvest days. The Sports Center is too!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/craft-beer-yakima-valley-washington-hops-farmers/#app

It is true that most breweries use pellets. The brewers can still select what hops go into the pellets they will get, as covered by @honkey .

 

Thanks for that. I hope everyone upthread that said "hand selection is just marketing bullshit" watches that clip. Twice.

 

And reads the post by @honkey twice.