"Hand Selected" Hops?

A bit religious, and poorly understood for sure. There is a woman named Maria Thun who studiously documented her experiments planting and harvesting various crops under varying astronomical conditions and showed a consistent impact on yield and crop form depending on the timing of sowing and harvesting. Her son Mathias is carrying on her work now.

While it's clearly not the only way to grow successful crops and carries too much woo woo energy for lots of folks, Biodynamics is a very solid framework for organic farming.

 

Those others in the video are SN employees from what I can tell. I recognized Scott Jennings who is the head brewer at Mills River. Ken would have the big vote. ;-)

At Bell's one September I talked to employees going out West for hop selection along with John Mallet. One was a brewer, one was the hop buyer for Bell's.

Some might get to go as a training exercise. Others go because they have done it, and have the ability to pick out what is desired.

 

Jeff, the one person other than Ken which was identified by name in that video was Megan Peltz who was stated to have a Masters in Sensory Science. Is she now a Sierra Nevada employee? Or was she brought in as a consultant?

Cheers!

 

One Google search was all it took, Jack.
https://californiacraftbeer.com/summit-participant/meghan-peltz/

 

The term bullshit rather depends on who is spreading the manure.

I respect Weedy @honkey as a brewer of integrity and have been enjoying his beers since before he moved West. When he talks about hand selecting hops I believe him.

On the other hand when a cheap high gravity lager prints "choice hops" or "selected hops" on the can then the words ain't necessarily so.

 

Everybody's different. We go into it with fairly low expectations and are really hoping to avoid really undesireable lots. Sometimes we get lucky and are presented with a lot of great lots like in 2019. That was an unbelievable harvest as far as quality is concerned.

Everyone is different. Some want their Centennial to be classic pine, some want bubblegum. Some, like me, want Simcoe to be the classic "my cat ate my stash and pissed on a christmas tree" that I got out of it way back in 2004-2009ish, and others favor a more pine forward hop. Some like really late harvest Citra that is big bold and diesely, and I am always looking for the stone fruit in that hop. But.... at the end of the day, we are really trying to avoid the duds.

I think that smaller brewers and homebrewers must think that they are at a disadvantage here and that they, not being able to hand-select hops, are getting whatever we leave on the table. All I can say is that many of the finest IPAs I have ever brewed or tasted were made using hops that were bought on the spot market or were otherwise not hand-selected. The brokers fully realize that this assumption could very much damage their individual brands and I think, by and large, they do a very good job of ensuring that everyone gets a product that lives up to expectations.

 

In post #16 Weedy stated:

“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.”

Do you think that the IPAs you brewed benefited from this blending situation?

Cheers!

 

With all due respect to Weedy, that is not my understanding of how it works and I am sure that it is different for each broker. That being said, I am a huge fan of blending for consistency's sake.

 

Have you been finding any Simcoe that is catty like that in recent years? YCH has tightly controlled Simcoe recently and their minimum for lot selections is more than I can take, so we stopped using Simcoe since everything we were getting was piney and not the catty hop that I wanted to use.

 

And as a homebrewer what I most appreciated from Simcoe is the piney character and unfortunately (for me) I have not had any piney Simcoe hops in well over 5 years. Because other commercial brewers have already bought up the piney lots?

Cheers!

 

My last two selections of Simcoe were very good and definitely what I was looking for.

 

Can't say for sure, but I have certainly smelled plenty of very pine-forward Simcoe in the past 4 years, but a lot of the lots also had plenty of sulfur characteristics.

 

I presume that is perceptible thiols. Do they smell 'catty' to you?

Perhaps these hops were harvested later in the harvest season?

Cheers!

 

I was speaking more to a pronounced diesel character. G&O as well.

 

You paint a picture of highly desirable hop characteristics.
Thank you.

 

Well, that sounds like a late harvest aspect to me.

Thanks for your input in this thread.

Cheers!