How a Hop Earns Its Name
The breeding greenhouse. Each tray contains a unique family, each cell a unique variety. One seed goes into one cell. Photo: Michael Ferguson
A Sightglass Article
In this collaborative project meant to highlight the network of artisans, scientists, and growers who support great beer, Reuben's Brews and I select a subject together. I write an in-depth piece here at the website, and Adam Robbings and Matt Lutton will interview one of the central players on Reuben's podcast, also called Sightglass. You can find their interview with Michael Ferguson here.
If Michael Ferguson gets his wish, the creamy-sweet hop currently known by the clinical name HBC 1019 will one day be called something more poetic. If it’s a very, very lucky hop, it will join the ranks of named hop varieties that become signature flavors defining the hoppy ales driving American craft brewing. For the moment, however, it’s a mere aspirant, a talented but unproven performer who has yet to show she has what it takes.
When her journey began, 1019 was just one among thousands of seedlings. Through a process of winnowing, she graduated into an elite class of experimental hops, beating huge odds. She has the qualities brewers say they like, and has the vitality and yield to become a commercial crop. Yet 1019 still has a long way to go. Ultimately, proprietary hop varieties are products, and now she must win the hearts of brewers (and drinkers). That process will take longer than the initial breeding, and it’s usually a decade before a variety will become a named product.
The world’s most successful breeding program is conducted by the Hop Breeding Company (HBC), a joint effort of Yakima Chief and John I. Haas. Citra was HBC’s first great success, and it was followed by Mosaic—the two most important aroma hops in the US. Two breeders are intimately involved in these programs: Jason Perrault on the Yakima Chief side, and Michael Ferguson on Haas’s. For this inaugural Sightglass article, we’ll follow the process of breeding HBC 1019, from seedling to glass, as a way of understanding this long, uncertain process.
Male flowers, cut, bagged, and hung to dry. Each bag contains a unique male source. Photo: Michael Ferguson
“Pollination bags,” placed over female plants to prevent rogue pollen from contaminating controlled crosses. A spout allows breeders to pollinate each plant with a specific male cross. Photo: Michael Ferguson.
A Single Seed
The science of hop breeding is tricky. While it seems like it would be easy to just cross a couple favorite selections—Mosaic and Citra, for example—that’s not how it works. Hop biology is complex, and as with humans, the offspring often do not look or behave much like the parents. In order to replicate a variety, growers must make clones. It’s the only way to ensure a new Cascade plant produces hops that taste like Cascade. And among hops, only the female plant produces cones breweries can use to make beer. Many people know this about hops, but they may not register its implications. Michael Ferguson points out the mind-bending reality. “Every variety—Cascade, Citra, whatever—came from one plant.”
In species, like humans and hops, where mating requires separate male and female parents, offspring’s genomes are an unrepeatable blend of traits from the parents. (Biologists describe such organisms as “dioicous,” pronounced dye-EEshus.) “It’s just like with people or with animals,” Jason Perrault explains. “If you have ten brothers and sisters, there may be some similarities because you share that genetic background, but the way those genes recombine is unique to each individual.”
Hill: A single plant
Cross: progeny from two known varieties
Hybrid: plant from the cross
Dioicous: Plants with separate female and male parents
Agronomics: The science of crop production
Rhizome: a hop’s rootstock
Trellis: a structure to support growing hops
Bale: 200 pounds of hops
Yield: The pounds of hops an acre produces
Since males are only good for breeding, if breeders want to cross those hops, the best they can do is use the mothers, who will both only contribute half the genome. They have to find males to pollinate them, and this creates the potential for fantastic variety. “I can’t directly cross Citra and Mosaic, because all the commercial hops are female,“ Ferguson explains. “I have to cross a male onto one of those, so I’m only going to have 25% of Citra and 25% of Mosaic. The male side’s always an extrapolation based on close relatives.”
These aren’t entirely random males, however. They are chosen from hops related to the ones they seek to replicate. Perrault described this often lengthy process. “It’s a series of making a cross, maybe onto the original cultivar you’re interested in, and then selecting both males and females from those crosses and then making sib-matings between the brothers and sisters, or maybe back-crossing to the original parent again and then making another round of selections.”
Agronomics represent the second and equally important challenge for a hop plant. It’s not enough for a variety to produce hops that taste sublime in an IPA. They must produce enough hops per acre (ten bales, or 2,000 pounds, seems to be the benchmark), grow well, and resist diseases. In some cases, an especially vigorous variety with similar traits to another are worth pursuing. “We certainly don’t need another hop variety that doesn’t yield well,” Ferguson said. “I don’t need another eight-bale Cascade. I’ll take another 15-bale Cascade!” In order to produce a viable commercial hop, the cultivar must have qualities that make it perform as well in the field as it does in the glass.
20,000 Seedlings
The odds of finding a cross that offers great flavor and aroma and good agronomics are daunting. The only way to turn them in breeders’ favor is with enormous numbers of individual crosses. Ferguson selects the varieties he wants to work with and then begins making crosses. He focuses on certain varieties, but even with a small set, he can produce thousands of offspring. “Each cross will produce upwards of 2,000 seeds per cross,” he said. In the first year he makes these crosses, placing a single seed in a small cell amid a tray of dozens. “The seedling is the funnest part of breeding. I can walk down a cross of Citra and Mosaic and see 200 siblings—and then you can start to see trends in aroma.”
Ferguson doesn’t move the early seedlings to a standard field, but instead plants them close together in a short-trellis environment. Almost none of them will go forward, so that first year is one of elimination. Ferguson separates the males and females, judges them for vigor, and begin to assess their aroma. “You’re like a robot with an algorithm. When you know the plant you’re looking for, you’re like: ‘You suck, you suck, you suck—you look interesting.’” Only 1-2% of these seedlings will make the cut and head to the next round.
Hybrid seedlings go from greenhouse into the field and planted in a high density short trellis. Photo: Michael Ferguson
In year two, Ferguson takes those lucky two percent into a typical commercial field. Even at that vastly reduced number, he’s still wrangling hundreds of plants. Most will only be grown as a single “hill” (plant), but some are so promising Ferguson will fast-track them and plant seven hills. Hop plants don’t produce well in the first year, so even with seven hills, he’ll only end up with 10-20 pounds of hops. That’s not much—but it’s plenty to start brewing with.
Haas has its own small brewery, and brewmaster Virgil McDonald will keep the mash tun humming to test the new crop as Ferguson selects possible winners. Fifty to 80 of those second-year hops will go into beer, and McDonald has a standard formulation for test batches. They all use pale malt, the same hopping regime, and a neutral yeast with identical targets in terms of bitterness and strength. “We only brew with about 25% of the selection,” Ferguson said. “Flavor is the hardest thing to anticipate—aroma doesn’t translate very well to flavor.” Over the course of the year, they taste through those beers, looking for a few to advance to the next stage.
And Then There Were Five
From those hundreds, Ferguson cuts the list down in year three to just a handful, called “advanced selections.” He selects these based on preliminary assessment of plant vigor and the hop’s performance in beer. Now he needs to determine if the hops can really cut it as a commercial cultivar. To do this, he plants seven hills of each variety in different locations to see how they perform in terms of yield and so on. “Once we know we have an exciting flavor, we want to make sure the agronomics are good.” Because hop plants take two years to mature and bear a full crop, this stage takes Ferguson through the end of year four. During that time they’ll continue to brew with these hops and offer breweries small amounts for test batches.
From the roughly half dozen they have in advanced selection, breeders then select two varieties to move forward. For four to five years, these hops have been under Ferguson’s microscope (sometimes literally) as he measures them against stringent metrics for aroma, flavor, and agronomics. Now Haas strings an acre of these hops, and grows them for another two years. This is the moment the hop gets its experimental name. For the Hop Breeding Company, they begin with HBC. It’s also when the expense spikes, and here’s when Haas offers to collaborate with breweries.
Hops are unusual in that they are highly specialized crops. They’re bred for a single purpose, and consequently have only one class of interested buyer: breweries. For decades, up until 15 years ago or so, the breweries driving the market were industrial lager breweries. They used hops only for bitterness, not flavor or aroma (which were generally anathema to their consumers) and so they only cared about alpha acids—the higher the better. They funded breeding research and demanded ever more bitter hops with the sole purpose of having to buy fewer pounds of them. For growers it was a catch-22, but one they couldn’t escape.
Craft breweries changed the calculation. Though a small fraction of the beer market, their focus on IPAs starting a decade ago meant they were using enormous amounts of hops. Eventually they started buying more than the big companies. To the growers’ relief, they didn’t care about buying fewer hops (and seem keen to keep buying more)—they cared about flavor and aroma. The success of Citra, released in 2007 and now the best-selling US variety, clued breeders and growers into the future direction of the market.
The hops are bagged into burlap sacks and kilned on a commercial kiln floor. Photo: Michael Ferguson
The future were IPA hops—intense, tropical, and fruity. “The money is in flavor-forward hops right now,” Ferguson told me when I asked what kind of hops they were targeting for commercial development. “I would definitely default toward screening varieties on an IPA basis because what it boils down to is you either get a flavor outcome or you don’t.” Craft breweries, once a bit player in the hop market, now drive everything about it, from breeding to new hop products. And that’s why when Ferguson needs a partner determining whether one of his elite hops has commercial prospects, he turns to craft breweries.
Sponsoring HBC 1019
Hop breeders rely on brewers to guide their selection. They are in a natural partnership where both need the other to thrive. When breweries visit during the year—and especially during hop selection—they stop into the Haas Innovations Brewery to sample the latest fruits of the experimental program. When they cotton to a particular variety, Haas may send them home with a few pounds to try in a beer. If they really like a variety, they can sponsor a hop.
Sponsorship is a way for breeders and brewers to share the cost on an acre of the new cultivar. Brewers pay a reduced price, and that helps defray the expense of stringing them up—which costs around $8-$10,000 an acre. Reuben’s and Odell are sponsoring HBC 1019, and they’ll each have an acre to play with. In the first year, which in 1019’s case was harvested last fall, the yield will be low and result in a small crop. Sponsorships last three years, however, and in years two and three a brewery will receive enough to make a decent amount of beer. That allows breweries to try the hops in a variety of different contexts—at different points in the brewing process and in combination with other varieties. This becomes valuable R&D Haas can use to market the hop.
The brewers sponsoring 1019 both see sponsoring a hop in a kind of civic spirit. “To help support the industry in this small way is the least we could do,” Reuben’s Adam Robbings said. “The future of our industry is based on innovation, and hop innovation is really a large driver of the craft beer industry in recent times. Imagine a world without Citra!” Odell’s Brendan McGivney agreed. “It’s important for us to do what we can to help the development of new varieties, because we know they’re necessary for the industry. To me it’s just sharing the risk with the breeders.”
1019 makes her debut this month.
Of course, it’s also a lot of fun. If you’ve never visited a hop field, it’s hard to communicate what a powerful spell those little green cones can cast over the beer lover. Robbings had one of those experiences when he first encountered this hop. “1019 was totally unique. A broad, sweet tropical (almost candied) fruit-forward aroma is what really grabbed me when I rubbed it in the field. It was unique to pique my interest—in a field of green, and with my lupulin-covered hands, nose and face!” There’s something exciting about the prospect of entirely new flavors and how you might use them in a beer. He added, “It’s a great example of what we call brewing ‘glass backwards’—by designing beers from the hop field. Literally!”
Robbings, McGivney, and Ferguson all commented on 1019’s intense aromas, and all invoked Sabro’s vanilla/coconut quality. When they sampled it, Odell captured these tasting notes. “Piña colada. Tropical. Sabro/Mosaic-like coconut, melon, banana, caramelized plantains. Really intense, potent. Malibu rum.”
After all the lead-up, I wanted to taste 1019, too—and fortunately we timed this post to coincide with the release of Reuben’s first brew, Puffs of [Classified]. It’s quite a hop, with a distinctive caramelized sugar note. The dominant quality is dark rum, but it features shafts of other flavors as well. One is a sweet banana (but more like the little, intense ones you find in India), a note that at turns seems more like coconut or vanilla, and very ripe pineapple. One could imagine the beer served with a little cocktail umbrella. I was impressed to find nothing savory in 1019 at all—one of the dangers of modern cultivars. Its sweetness is probably going to be too much on its own, but used in combination with fruity hops, it should delight fans of sweet hazy and milkshake IPAs.
A Real Name?
It will be a few years at the earliest before HBC 1019 earns a name like Talus, Sabro, or Mosaic. At this point, her fate is in drinkers’ hands. Reuben’s and Odell will have three years to test the hop and see whether customers respond to its profile. If customers like it, Haas will take a chance and begin planting more acreage, opening it up to a broader market. This intermediate state, where the hop exists in experimental status but is commercially available, will last years. At some point, HBC will decide whether to name it and begin an active marketing campaign, or relegate it to its unnamed status. Even then, a numbered experimental hop may not fade away completely.
“HBC 472 is a good example,” Ferguson said. “That was a sister of Sabro; it’s very oaky and vanilla. It was a very exciting variety, but it leveled off at about 50 acres. We’ll keep it around as HBC 472, but it will probably never get a name.” The breeding and agronomics, though they take a half decade, are actually the speedy part. “You can get a handle on whether a hop has decent agronomics by year five or six, but even on the most exciting hops like Sabro and Talus, it’s taken five years to build that market.”
HBC 1019 is in year five. Will she be one of the very, very lucky ones and one day, perhaps around 2026, earn her name? It’s all up to you.