Anchor Flavors and Other Hoppy Trends

The events in Portland continue to thrill and amaze (our mayor tear-gassed!), but I think it’s time to return to something less divisive and more on-topic. Therefore I give you hops. On this week’s podcast, Patrick and I offered a kind of lightning round of hoppy bites, and even so we got nowhere near touching on everything we had on the agenda. I will now extend my remarks.

Anchor Flavors

In the realm of American ales, hops are king. The modern revolution started in 2007 with the introduction of Citra, and the number of new hops, with ever more unusual flavors and aroma, have been flooding the market since. (It’s a worldwide phenomenon.)

Once there was a predictable map for hop flavors and aromas. They were for decades the flavors of pale ales and IPAs (think grapefruit and pine, trailing off to floral notes with maybe something a bit catty or dank). The new hop varieties have vastly expanded that map. Tropical fruits and berries are now common, along with savory elements, creamy flavors (cocoa, coconut, vanilla, caramel), candy, resinous woodiness, vegetables (cucumber, tomato, bell peppers), and zingy elements like mint and menthol. And that is by no means an exhaustive list.

Crowd all those together and the sheer density of sensation can bewilder. To go back to the map metaphor, it’s easy to get lost in the welter of flavors. One trend I’ve noticed in 2020 is breweries returning to classic hops—Cascade, Chinook, Centennial—to provide “anchor flavors” that orient drinkers with something familiar so they can find their bearings. Using anchor flavors allows brewers to place the new exotica more strategically. Counter-intuitively, it’s then easier to find the unusual new notes when they’re offset by recognizable ones. The anchor hops become the canvas, and new flavors are placed strategically where they’ll make the biggest impact.

I expect this to be a more common approach to recipe design going forward and a way for brewers to place novelty within a context of familiarity.

New IPA Trends

The frontiers of IPAs seem to have more to do with ingredient than process. The short-lived brut IPA boomlet was the most recent new sub-style among IPAs, but that was a couple years ago. After the incredible string of variations (Belgian, black, white, fruit, hazy, milkshake—what’d I miss?), I don’t know that the public is clamoring for new styles. Those crazy new hop varieties seem to be taking the place of style mutation in the novelty lane.

In the process of experimentation, brewers first push the boundaries out, looking for the most extreme expressions of something. Having found it, there’s usually a retrenchment back toward a sweet spot. The juicy/hazy era has in many ways been a mirror of the bitter era. Both went to pretty crazy extremes, and it seems like we’re coming back away from the most exaggerated examples of haze and juice, the way we did from our heights of bitterness. In one direction, that meant extremely sweet, soupy IPAs, and in the other, ones with so many dry-hops they were characterized by harsh burns or vegetal flavors.

Running parallel to this trend is the new wave of “seltzer IPAs”—those 100-calorie IPAs meant to compete with seltzers and light beer but deliver high-octane hoppiness. (I have not heard this term before and may be inventing it. Apologies.) I’m talking about Deschutes Wowza, Bell’s Light Hearted, Firestone Walker Flyjack, Dogfish Slightly Mighty, and so on. By necessity, these four-percenters have to find balance points far from the extremes yet deliver flavor impact robust enough to satisfy an IPA craving. They function as an antidote to milkshake IPAs, and my sense is that breweries are learning a lot by brewing them that will help them locate and perfect that sweet spot of hoppy ale-brewing.

Neomexicanus

It has been more than a decade since native hops from New Mexico have entered the scene, and they’re starting to have a big effect on hop development. Lotus, Medusa, Zappa, and Sabro all have neomexicanus parentage.

A number of years back, I brewed with a strain of pure neomexicanus hops and they are intense. In their undiluted state, they’re too intense, and at least the variety I used (called Latir) were full of weird, savory/musky notes. Over the past decade, breeders have been working with them in conjunction with European stock to create vivid flavors, but ones that are approachable and pleasant. And keep in mind: it’s only been a decade or so. The process of breeding hops takes at least that long to bring a single, commercially viable strain to the market. There’s still a lot of runway with this germplasm, and I expect neomexicanus hops will create decades of new varieties.

No doubt I could rattle on for pages more, but that’s a good start. What have you been seeing out there? Where are hops taking us?