Genesee 12 Horse Ale is back!

Thanks, but I'm in Long Island

 

Ah, that makes sense. What's also interesting is that by looking at pre-war numbers from a 1949 version of the same publication it's evident that Yugoslavian hops were among the top three countries of origin already by then, and by looking at the pre-war and post-war total it seems clear that the only real difference is the loss of the Czechoslovakian imports. So Yugoslavian hops didn't replace Czechoslovakian hops, the latter simply disappeared from the market and was presumably replaced by domestic hops instead (perhaps by Budweiser going from using a relatively large amount of imported Saaz in their blend to using US Fuggles instead? Just a thought I had). Yugoslavian hops simply reclaimed their pre-war position.

From the same publication (though later edition combined with several other editions) one can see that in 1957-1958 the Goldings variety, i.e Styrian Goldings, made up a majority of the Yugoslavian imports. I recall Pabst advertising their use of a "Yugoslavian variety" up until recently, as well as for their Andeker, I wonder if they in fact were responsible for a substantial amount of the pre-war Yugoslavian imports (another thought I had). It would be interesting to learn if individual US breweries had an impact on the fortunes of individual hops.

 

Hmm... figures I have for 1952 and 1953 show a big +1M lbs jump per year for Germany, after Czech hops were cut to zero.
GERMANY
1951 - 1.3M
1952 - 2.4M
1953 - 3.5M
... as well as smaller increases of about 100k lbs/yr for Yugoslavian hops.

Well, AB and Pabst (along with Schlitz and Ballantine) post-war were jockeying around the Top 5 US breweries, but that still meant each only had around 4-5% of the market and, in the case of Andeker, it wasn't brewed after the War until 1956 (specifically because of the lack of the correct hops) but Pre-War they advertised they used "Bohemian hops". Not sure how much any one brand or brewery could have on the totals, even if AB around that time claimed to be the largest user of imported hops, that still might not mean a significantly large enough percentage.

 

Well if you look at the total from the 1930s the average was 8 million pounds of imported hops whereas the post war total was 4-5 million pounds, with the pre-war 3 million or so pounds of Czechoslovakian hops disappearing.

Apparently AB brewed about 4.9 million bbls in 1950, so if Budweiser made up most of that pre-Busch (I'm guessing Michelob made up a small percentage of their sales), and if their hopping rate followed the average US hopping rate of about 0,43 lbs per barrel, and if the Saaz hops made up say a third of the blend conservatively, that would mean about 686 000 pounds of hops needed (and even by being generous and assuming that they used 50% Saaz hops would mean about 1 million pounds). With pre-war imports from Czechoslovakia being about 3,8 million pounds. So yeah, Anheuser Busch wouldn't be solely responsible for the Czechoslovakian hop imports.

 

Oops, sorry. There's a small town called Owego near where we live.

 

Yeah, good point. OTOH, Yugoslavian hop exports to the US in 1934-1938 averaged 1.3M* a year, while Czech.'s average had been 3.2M/yr*, so that '39 seems to be an outlier - caused by the German occupation and then the start of the War? * Checking your link's figures, they do vary somewhat from the USBA's Brewers Almanac's (common, but still annoying) but what's weird is both give average for the same set of years...

And the decrease in the total amount of imported hops by US brewers post-War might have also have been affected by, in the '30s, shortages of US hops caused by the necessary ramping up of US production after Repeal and, post-War, by US brewers having learned to live without them?

Yeah, Michelob (w/all imported hops) was a tiny fraction of AB's total barrelage back then - in 1951 they brewed 145,336 bbl. of it out of a total 5.5M bbl.

Just checked some AB files and they claimed, in 1949, that Budweiser production accounted for 40% of all of US's imported hops. More than I remembered.

OTOH, when they opened their L.A. brewery a few years later (1953), they boasted in ads:

 

Outlook for hops from the Pacific Coast has a table with numbers year by year for the 1930s, showing Czechoslovakian and German hops separately, but Yugoslavian hops do not have their own column (so presumably are under the heading of "Other European"). Alot of big movements pre-war it seems, what one could interpret as a buildup of stocks of Bohemian hops and a drop off in purchases of German hops after a few years of large purchases. I guess there has always been an ebb and flow with hop purchases, with some hops bought in bulk at good prices and then kept for more than a year afterward.

I guess I hadn't considered the possiblity that AB might have used domestic Fuggles as their bittering hop, rather than use Cluster hops for that purpose. So maybe they simply switched over from Bohemian to German hops as their late boil hops after Czechoslovakian imports stopped. That would make for an easier transition I imagine. Even today some breweries insist on using lower alpha acid hops for bittering rather than go with the high alpha types, I could imagine AB having a similar mindset and wanting to use more "gentle" hops even for bittering.

 

@Crusader - re: Yugoslavian and Czechoslovakian hop exports to the US.

Got to thinking, "So, what were their US exports in the pre-Prohibition era..." and pulled out the 1915 United States Brewers Association Year Book and turned to the stats, below right...


"Oh, yeah...Austria-Hungary..." (insert head slap Emoji here - Hey, hard to keep US brewing history AND European history in the same thought.)

Tried the 1909 ed., but it wasn't broken down by country of export.

Wait - what's the deal with 1906 more than doubling the amount of imported hops in the US? Figured it must have been a bad US 1905 crop, but I can't find any citation of that.

Oh, well, back to the virtual libraries...

 

There might be Austrian sources which separate the exports of the different growing regions. I'll keep it in mind.

According to the table in this Congressional hearing from 1908 there was a major increase in the 1905 crop in Germany and Austria , and also in imports to the US that same year (whereas the table you found shows the increase in imports happening in 1906). A bumper crop abroad with lower than normal prices as a result would seem like a logical explanation.