Proprietary Hops and Brew Industry Growth

That is not really the case. Below is a link to the 2016 hop crop report. In that report you will see that the vast majority of hops that are grown/produced are not Trademarked.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/hopsan16.pdf

Cheers!

Edit: It would seem that the appropriate way to read this report is to consider hops that are Registered and Trademarked as being proprietary. From a hop variety perspective more hops are not Registered/Trademarked. It would require some effort to total these two categories up from a hop amount (pounds) to see which is most produced. I think it is fair to say that proprietary hop production has significantly increased in comparison to non-proprietary hop production over the past few years.

 

You'll also want to take a look at the thread on Citra hops as there's a bit of discussion there about production amounts, which is really the issue here not the number of varieties.

Here's a nice summary of what the numbers for 2015 show:

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/citra-hops-are-hip.478181/#post-5188898

 

Maybe Cashmere will become more popular too?

Cheers!

 

U

i went to hop school in Yakima WA in 2015. The QA with growers at the end had some info from the growers perspective. One gem was that a grower said she thought Comet would be a great hop, as it was very fruity, and those characteristics were not desired back then, so it fell,out of favor. The market has changed, so Comet now has a market.

 

I think comet may be leading the trend of revisiting old hops that have been cast to the way side for their flavors. While not cutting edge, in my homebrews I have used traditional bittering hops like chinook, magnum, and apollo as late kettle additions and dryhop additions. Sometimes it works well, sometimes not so much.

 

Certain hops have become more of a luxury good than they used to be which is a shame imo, so I think we will continue to see more and more proprietary ones. But this new appetite for different hops also has an upside as mentioned, older hops that have fallen out of favour in the past are being revisited. I have some called "nonsuch" in my freezer at the moment which were originally bred in he 1940s in the uk but were probably considered too "american" so not used by british brewers at the time., I'm looking forward to using them

The most important bred hops historically like Brewers Gold for example were never proprietary ones and I'd hope all the people releasing proprietary hops and cashing in have altars to Ernest Salmon and his work at Wye, without which we wouldn't have most of todays great hops

 

Hear, hear! All non-proprietary hop varieties still took money to develop, usually from govt. agriculture programs. Oregon State University and other schools are developing aroma hops to meet market demands, but its about a 10 year process to go from the first identified cultivar to hop variety ready for wide-scale planting. Profit-seeking companies aren't going to give away their proprietary varieties for free, so the development costs and programs for the next Cascades and Centennials, etc. need different support if they are to be available to growers outside of licensing agreements.