Brewer-Backed Public Hop HQG-4 Nears an Important Milestone

Back in the middle of the last century, the USDA embarked on a hop breeding project that would ultimately change beer. Their goal at the time was to help American breweries make their domestic lagers with high-quality locally-grown hops. It didn’t really work out that way. Instead, their punchy, expressive first effort, the Cascade hop, was too aromatic and flavorful for the Coors and Buds of the land. Instead, those hops inspired homebrewers in the 1970s who would found their own small-scale operations go on to develop American pale ales and IPAs.

Hop Quality Group
Following an MBAA meeting in Providence, RI in 2010, a collective of small breweries joined together to launch the Hop Quality Group. A California-registered nonprofit, the group pursues a number of initiatives to ensure the highest quality hops for the industry. One of their projects is public hop breeding—with a focus on the needs of smaller American breweries. Today there are 52 members in the Hop Quality Group.

Once that market developed, commercial breeders saw an opportunity to make money offering new cultivars, and from the late aughts on, they have dominated the field for new hops. The initial phase of the public hop-breeding program was hugely successful, and produced a number of excellent cultivars like Willamette, Nugget, Crystal, and Mt. Hood. Those were hops for a different era, however, and when the Hop Breeding Company and others entered the market, they made the hops that would transform American IPAs (Citra, Mosaic, Simcoe, etc). Public hop-breeding slowed or stopped for a time, until craft brewers got together to support the USDA program, with a high-tech focus on modern hops.

The USDA has released some hops in recent years (Triumph, Vista, and Vera), but one series of elite lines funded by the Hop Quality Group (HQG) has some brewers very excited, and the first hop from their program is about to get its name and go into wider production. It’s currently called HQG-4, and it is the product of not just conventional breeding, but advanced chemical analysis to identify the high-thiol varieties used to make hoppy American ales. It should receive that name in mere weeks, and you can already get a taste of it in beers made by Ninkasi and Russian River.

Project Background

Hop breeding is a strangely tangled thicket of different groups and funding sources. It’s taken me years to sort out the various different groups and relationships—and I still don’t have it totally figured out. For example, Indie Hops, a private company, works in partnership with Oregon State University and breeder Shaun Townsend to produce their proprietary varieties. But Townsend does not work for the USDA. John Henning does work for the USDA, and his research takes place on the OSU campus—but isn’t connected in any way to Townsend’s. Moreover, Henning has been a USDA breeder for nearly thirty years, producing ten named varieties—not including the Hop Quality Group lines.

Where does the Hop Quality Group come in? A consortium of breweries, they helped fund Henning’s work on hops of specific value to their breweries. Ninkasi co-founder and founding brewmaster Jamie Floyd is a past president of the HQG, and has been with the breeding project from the start. He offered me a thumbnail summary of the background. “As an organization, we started, all those years ago, by giving a donation of $100,000 to the USDA to help support this program working with Dr. Henning out of Oregon State. There is also a public breeding facility up in Prosser, Washington.”

The work began in 2015, and proceeded through the usual steps. I wrote about the breeding process at length in 2022, profiling a different hop that is also about to earn its name—go have a look at that if you want a background on the process. What’s different with the HQG is the coordination between the breweries and Dr. Henning. Once the thousands of single hops have been winnowed down to 300, “those get spread out across membership,” Floyd said, where breweries rub and assess them. The cultivars in this project are purpose-bred to meet the interest of the member breweries.

In one of the more interesting wrinkles to the story, the HQG also run advanced labs on the advanced lines—after they’ve winnowed the 300 down to 15 or so. One of the hops came back with a remarkable bar graph, showing off-the-charts levels of a particular free thiol (3S4MP), along with high levels of another important thiol (4MMP) found in Citra and Mosaic. That got the brewers pretty excited, and it joined three other varieties as “elite” line hops. (Of them, HQG-2 has been dropped, and HQG-1 is moving very slowly, but HQG-3 is showing very positive progress.)

Once they had those four elite lines, HQG sent them to farmers to produce amounts sufficient for the breweries to tinker with. “We work with three primary growers,” Floyd said. “One is Crosby here in Oregon, one being Nate Jackson in Idaho, and then one being CLS, which is Eric Desmarais, up in Yakima. So we have one in each growing area.” From those expanded acres, brewers began to experiment with the hops, and HGQ-4 emerged as a favorite.

Let’s Meet HQG-4

No one has embraced this hop more than Ninkasi Brewing. Earlier this year, the Eugene-based brewery released Experimental IPA, which was created to highlight HQG-4. It includes four other hop varieties, so it’s not a pure experience of the hop—but that’s not surprising given that the beer is in regular rotation and the acreage is so low. But it does demonstrate how excited they were to get the hop in a beer.

“We have really been excited about this hop for a long time. We made a single hop beer when the Better Living Room was open and it evaporated--like it was just gone. People loved it. So for this crop year we were designing a new beer anyway for our year round [line] and Daniel Sharp (Director of Brewing Process Development) and I really wanted to get ahead of it and put the hop in a beer and get going. We bought a significant amount of this year's crop to be able to do that. Daniel and I want to be a part of what this HQG4 revolution”

Ninkasi wasn’t alone in loving the hop. Russian River Brewing was the first brewery to really take it for a test drive, and co-founder (and former HQG financial lead) Vinnie Cilurzo was also smitten. He tells the backstory on Russian River’s development of the variety:

“Back in 2023 I was one of the first brewers to get to use what came to be known as HQG-4. This was when the national hop convention was in Sonoma County, so the Hop Quality Group decided to have me brew with it on our pilot brewery to have on tap at both our pubs during the convention. This was one of the first steps the HQG took to expose HQG-4 to a lot of growers. More recently, and like Jamie at Ninkasi, I started using it in some experimental IPAs. Initially this started in our pilot brewery then we made a full distribution release of an R&D beer on our big brewhouse that was simply named, RnD IPA # 68. This went out in draft and bottles earlier this year and was one of the most successful one-off IPA releases we have ever done. The receipe was about 80% HQG-4 and the remainder, HQG-3, another hop from the HQG breeding program. This year, I have some HQG-4 contracted and so long as we get enough hops, it will make it into one of our regular year round IPAs, Happy Hops.”

I visited Dr. Henning in the spring of 2024 and we did a rubbing of HQG-4. It was an intensely citrusy hop, and I got a distinct note of lime. In Ninkasi’s beer, I got more of a lemon-ish flavor, though not exactly lemon—something a bit more herbal like lemongrass or lemon verbena. As we rubbed the hops, Henning said, “It’s very intense, yeah. It has a very pungent aroma, and that’s what you’re going to find wit some of the varieties like Citra and Mosaic; they’re very robust. Strata as well is the same—the intensity can be so overwhelming that you have a hard time distinguishing the different flavors.”

Floyd mentioned the citrus as well, but also, “we’re getting a ton of tropical. So in addition to there being sort of a passion fruit/guava note that comes out of this hop, people are getting some melon out of it and then there is a dankness to it that is not catty-Simcoe or catty-Columbus. It’s its own cool thing.”

Cilurzo described it slightly differently, but was just as positive. “RnD IPA #68 had a beautiful tropical and stone fruit note that was very smooth and bright on the aroma and palate. As I mentioned, the IPA we released was mostly HQG4, this showed that it can be a standalone hop, but I think you will see it mostly mixed in a hop blend to add more depth of aroma and flavor to the beer.”

Innovations in Breeding, Looking Forward

In the late 1950s, when Stanley Nelson Brooks and Jack Horner started breeding a new robust, mildew-resistant American hop, their sense of the important compounds to look for was more rudimentary. Today, brewers and researchers know a lot more about terpenes, thiols, and other flavor and aroma compounds. HQG-4 came through the normal process of breeding, but advanced chemical analysis was an important piece of data that convinced breeders they were on to something.

I wondered this approach will guide breeding in the future, and asked Stan Hieronymus about it. Stan, of course, not only wrote the book on hops, but has taken over the hop beat since he published that book 13 years ago and has talked to more growers and breeders than anyone I know. In fact, his reporting brought the research on thiols to the attention of the beer industry. “When the time that HQG started their program they gave John marching orders to look for varieties with abundant thiols. That doesn't mean every high thiol hop they came across was great. Think of Summit, for instance, and, too an extent, Ekuanout (which has great qualities, but on its own is divisive).” But, he noted. It’s a valuable tool. “I'm not arguing that being able to make a quick chemical check can't help guide breeders.”

One of the factors lay people don’t consider is the agronomics of hops. Many of the most-coveted IPA/aroma hops have a poor yields. Two-thousand pounds per acre is considered a good yielder, and some varieties like CTZ produce over 3,000 pounds per acre. Citra is a bit anemic, yielding about half CTZ’s bounty, and breeders have been looking to find a high-yield Citra for twenty years. Is HQG-4 that hop?

Blake Crosby, one of the three original growers, isn’t sure. “Early yield data from Oregon, Washington and Idaho is a bit mixed: ~ 1,400-1600 pounds per acre currently. The foundation growers (Crosby, CLS Farms and Jackson Hop) are collaborating on ways to increase yields. This year our block looks more favorable than last year so I’m cautiously optimistic.” HQG-4 is a healthy grower, and mildew-resistant, so that’s a good sign if indeed growers can boost yield.

As it moves toward getting its name, the battle is only beginning for HQG-4. Only a fraction of the named hops that made it through the 10-15 year breeding process ever find a market. Public hops like HQG-4 are at an extra disadvantage, because they don’t have powerful marketing and sales teams to court breweries. Yet in a time when public hops have shrunk in US production, they might be more important than ever. I reached out to Eric Sannerud, a hop consultant, author of Hop Notes, and a fan who took on promoting Vista hops as a personal mission.

“Farmers can choose to plant public hops, can negotiate with any seller or sell them directly. Farmers can choose to grow them how they like, harvest them when and how they like. his theme of choice continues in the marketplace. Any merchant can buy and sell public hops—no special licensing agreements … required. And in turn brewers then get more choices of supplier, price, quality, growing location, contract terms, selection opportunities, harvest windows on and on and on.”

The ecosystem of private and public breeders, hop growers, hop brokers, and brewers makes for complicated relationships, and growers understand that private breeders take an expensive risk bringing hops to market. I suspect everyone in the industry is very thankful the Hop Breeding Company invested the time and money to develop Citra and Mosaic. But balance is important, and it has shifted. Sannerud added this: “In 2015, roughly 75% of US hop acreage was public. In 2025, only about 35% of the acreage strung for harvest is public.” So, whether you have a horse in the public vs proprietary hops debate, I suspect we can all agree that a robust public breeding program will act as a great complement to the hops private breeders bring to market.

If you want to taste this hop, you may be able to find it over the next year (it’s an earlier-harvest variety, coming in with Willamette in the last week of August in Oregon), but the acreage is still tiny. Planting new acreage is a commitment, and growers want to wait until a hop has a name and is generating excitement. Realistically, if all goes well, look for more HQG-4 hops following the ‘26 and ‘27 harvest. In the meantime, you can track down some Ninkasi Experimental IPA and keep an eye out for Russian River’s Happy Hops following this harvest. Other brewery members of the Hop Quality Group may have some one-offs available as well, so keep your eyes open. A lot of people have invested a lot of time and money into HQG-1; it would be great to see it succeed.