In the processing hall of the Hop Research Center in Hüll, Germany, hop breeder Anton Lutz stops to sample the ongoing harvest of the renowned Hallertau growing region. He tears open a freshly packed, bookshelf-sized bale of hops, pulls out a handful of cones and passes half of them over to me.
Following Lutz’s lead, I shred the cones in my fingers, hold the remnants under my nose and inhale. The warehouse-like room is distractingly full of noise, with a machine ripping cones from bines just a few feet away. The Hop Research Center is basically a working farm, designed to evaluate its research projects in long-term, real-life tests—and in the middle of harvest season, honest-to-God farms tend to be noisy and chaotic. But the first whiff of the hops offered by Lutz focuses all of my attention. Instead of the gentle, herbal notes of the region’s signature hop, Hallertau Mittelfrüh, a slew of wildly fruity aromas makes my eyes open wide.
“Something like pineapple,” I say. “Lychee. Loads of tropical fruit.”
Lutz nods, his fingers stained chartreuse with lupulin, a bright green fleck of hop cone stuck to his neatly trimmed mustache. He inhales again.
“Maracuja,” he says. He nods and smiles. “And apricot. That’s Callista.”
As in wine, Old World hops are known for their relative restraint and subtlety, versus the bombast of New World varietals. Think of the four, acclaimed noble hops—Saaz, Tettnanger, Spalt, and Hallertauer Mittelfrüh—that have made Continental Lagers famous for centuries. But across Europe, hop breeders like Lutz are working to develop an array of exciting new cultivars that stray far from the refined, elegant aromas of tradition. In the place of gentle, cedary notes, these hops might throw off tons of maracuja (also known as passion fruit). Instead of orange blossoms, some of these new hops offer an entire forest of pine trees. Where you might expect delicate spice, you instead get a wacky fruit salad, filled with peaches, melons, and grapes.
While such unusual aromas are probably the most interesting aspects of new hop varieties for beer lovers, breeding programs like those of the Hop Research Center have goals far beyond mere aromas—which makes a lot of sense when you remember that this institute was founded in 1926, long before the age of tropical-fruit IPAs.
On our walk through the Hop Research Center’s greenhouses, laboratories and nurseries, the program’s research director, Dr. Elisabeth Seigner, outlines its origins.
“In those days it was founded because the growers had great problems with downy mildew. All across Europe, downy mildew was a real problem with all the landrace hops,” she explains. While treatments with copper hydroxide helped with the disease, the institute started crossbreeding the traditional hops of the region with wild varieties, which have a natural tolerance for downy mildew. “Chemical protection was very effective, but even in those days, we started breeding research,” she says.
Today, the breeding program for new cultivars is just one of the institute’s five main areas of focus, which also include plant protection, organic hop production, hop analysis, and a hop production advisory service. (Put another way: the institute creates new hops, tests hop pesticides, figures out how to grow hops without any pesticides at all, studies the chemical components of hops, and consults with farmers on their hop farms, working right in the middle of Germany’s largest hop-growing region.) Since its humble origins in the fight against mildew on traditional noble hops, the breeding program at Hüll has grown into one of the largest in the world.
“We are the institute with the highest number of crosses per year—100 crosses per year,” Seigner says. “The next year 100,000 seedlings are raised in the greenhouse, and then they are raised in our kindergarten.”
The process of developing a new hop like Callista certainly isn’t speedy. After the initial crossing, it can easily take 12 or 15 years before beer lovers are assigning star ratings to the very first commercial beers that will be made with it. In the first few years, Seigner says, the new hop crosses are primarily evaluated for disease resistance, vigorous growth, twining ability—new bines should be good at twisting around the guidelines of trellises in the hopyard—and cone shape. It might take another four years after that before the new crosses are evaluated for taste and flavor in a research brewhouse. And then, starting in year seven or eight, there are the initial, limited-production growing tests in production hopyards, which check how the plant grows in different types of soil. Of those 100 new crosses each year, just one or two—or easily none at all—might eventually make it to production.
Lutz, the breeder of such revered cultivars as Hallertau Blanc, Mandarina Bavaria, Hüll Melon, Callista, and Ariana, among other new hops, likens his job to working as a fortune teller.
“The breeder wants to see into the future 20 or 30 years, to see what the growers and brewers need,” Lutz says.
Fruity new aromas might get the attention of brewers and drinkers, but Lutz says that those tend to be a byproduct of other goals.
“At the moment we are using more U.S. breeding material. Not just for aroma, but because the U.S. hops are more tolerant to heat and drought.”
“We found some [hop varietals] that are very good for flavor, but bad for production. We need good flavor, but they also need to be good in the hop garden.”
Higher temperatures and diminishing rainfall are major threats to Europe’s traditional hop regions, many of which are unirrigated, relying only on seasonal precipitation. The Hallertau is getting much less rain than it was a generation ago, as is the Saaz region in the Czech Republic. Hops—effectively the same varietals that haven’t changed for centuries—have been grown commercially in these regions for 800 years or more. In order to ensure that hop growers in these traditional areas can keep producing hops in the future, breeders have to create new cultivars that can thrive in a harsher climate.
“Our goals are improved yield, resistance to disease and pests, aroma quality or high-alpha bittering varieties, and certainly climate tolerance,” Seigner says.
Breeding itself is a delicate process. Commercial hop plants are generally all female, with female flowers. To create new crosses, male hop plants—which usually but don’t always have male flowers—are also bred. But, in the middle of a commercially important hop region like the Hallertau, how do you raise male hop plants, when just a pinch of their pollen can create unwanted hybrids on the surrounding farms, potentially ruining the crop?
For the Hop Research Center in Hüll, the answer is to keep all of its male plants—some 3,000 of them—in the town of Freising, about 20 miles away, where there is no commercial hop industry. With thousands of plants also in Hüll, that makes for a lot of greenery.
“We have roughly 15,000 different female breeding lines, and roughly 200 regular cultivars developed by breeders around the globe,” Seigner says. “Besides the USDA hop collection in Corvallis and the hop collection in the Czech Republic, these are the three largest collections of hop genetic material in the world.”
At the Czech Republic’s Hop Research Institute in Žatec, some 200 miles to the northeast, program director Josef Patzak shows me around the institute’s greenhouses and breeding lines. In a way, it’s a mirror image of the institute in Hüll, only with a pronounced local character. The expressionless façades of the institute’s vintage, 1974 office buildings are a textbook example of the dark era of communist “normalization” architecture. By contrast, much of the institute’s breeding takes place in the picturesque village of Stekník, next to a Baroque château. Together, the two sites offer a good representation of the modern Czech Republic.
The institute here has long focused on conserving the traditional breeding lines of Saaz, the German name for Žatec, and the common term for the region’s noble hop. But after the economic crisis of 2008, Patzak says that the institute developed new goals, some of which mark a departure from tradition.
“For us, flavor hops are unusual, because I think 99% of all our beer is Lager,” he says. “But Boomerang is a bit of a flavor hop. Mimosa is a flavor hop.”
Those recent Czech hops are certainly flavor-forward: I picked up tons of tropical fruit—mango and what I think of as banana—from Mimosa, and rich, strongly spiced notes from Boomerang. But as at Hüll, Patzak says that his institute’s goal is mostly about supporting local farmers.
“We found some that are very good for flavor, but bad for production,” Patzak says. “We need good flavor, but they also need to be good in the hop garden.”
New flavors are just one of the four main breeding goals of the institute in Žatec. The first, a holdover from an earlier era, is high-alpha cultivars; Patzak notes that the total amount of all alpha acid available on the global hop market peaked in 2008, the first year of the crisis. The second breeding goal, inspired by the economic concerns of farmers after the crisis, is new breeding lines for low-trellis systems, like those on many U.K. hop farms; while the traditional high-trellis hopyards of the Žatec region are visually impressive—a maze of leafy bines stretching up more than 20 feet off the ground—Patzak says there’s a chance low-trellis hop farms might be more economically viable in the region in the future.
A third goal is new aroma hops. The fourth is new flavor hops. Additional goals include plants that are ready to be picked at different times, so that farmers are less overwhelmed in a short period of time: growing new cultivars like Saaz Late, released in 2010, allows farmers to spread out the busy harvest workload over several weeks instead of just several days.
“We need a lot of time to produce new varieties—we need at least 12 to 15 years—and it’s always difficult, because if we ask the brewer what he will need in 15 years, nobody would be able to give you an answer.”
In addition, new cultivars can help farmers with higher amounts of hops per acre.
“Saaz Late was also bred for yield,” Patzak says. “It has about three [metric] tons per hectare [3.3 U.S. tons for every 2.47 acres, or about 1.33 U.S. tons per acre]. So that’s about twice as much as regular Saaz.”
Improved yield per acre is important for Saaz growers, as is heat resistance. The new cultivar Saaz Shine has similar characteristics to the classic Saaz noble hop, albeit with more fruity and citrus notes. But it is also better at dealing with weather that classic Saaz simply can’t handle.
“We found that Saaz Shine can be very tolerant for high temperatures and dry weather,” Patzak says. “And that’s very important for the future.”
While hop breeders have their eyes on the horizon, the new cultivars that have emerged from these breeding programs have already earned accolades. At the Barth-Haas Group, the world's largest supplier of hop products and services, hop buyer Florian Weingart singles out several new varieties for praise.
“I would say Hallertau Blanc, Mandarina, Hüll Melon, and the two newest aroma hops from Hüll, which are Callista and Ariana,” Weingart says. “And I would include Monroe. And one more that I would mention is Kazbek, from the Czech Republic.”
At London’s Redemption Brewing Co., Kazbek has earned a starring role in Rock the Kazbek, a Blonde Ale. Redemption founder Andy Moffat notes that its subtlety can work very well in cask ales.
“It has those slightly spicy notes you get from Saaz, but with a lot more citrus, specifically lemon and grapefruit,” Moffat says. “Its flavor profile is more subtle than that of the West Coast U.S. hops, so they can really shine through with more simple malt bills.”
Other new varieties have come or are coming from around Europe. Speaking by phone from the hop-growing region of Alsace, Antoine Wuchner, the sales manager for Hop France, singles out Triskel, Barbe Rouge, Mistral, and Elixir as the aromatic new stars of the French hop breeding program, though he acknowledges that new aromas are not the only goal. Instead, he says that his country’s hop breeding program is primarily working on cultivars that will be resistant to mildew and insects.
“We need a lot of time to produce new varieties—we need at least 12 to 15 years—and it’s always difficult, because if we ask the brewer what he will need in 15 years, nobody would be able to give you an answer,” Wuchner says. “So we decided to focus on disease resistance, because in France, we have a limited range of products to compete with disease and mites.”
“Nowadays there are hop breeding programs in most countries. 10 years ago, there were less than 20 breeding programs around the world.”
Wuchner says that Hop France will be promoting Triskel heavily at this year’s BrauBeviale trade fair in Nuremberg. He describes the aroma as white fruit, peaches, grapefruit and plums, a far cry from noble-style aromas of the region’s traditional Strisselspalt. But in a local connection, he says that it can also show some characteristics of Alsace’s Gewürztraminer white wines.
When I follow up with Dr. Elisabeth Seigner, she notes that there are some big differences in the new hop breeding programs in different Old World countries. In Germany, 80% of all hops being farmed are the new cultivars that were developed at the institute in Hüll, and in the Hallertau itself, home to about three-quarters of Germany’s hop acreage, that number is closer to 90%. By contrast, Czech farmers are far more traditional, even conservative, and even bright new cultivars, such as Kazbek, have earned only limited acreage. When I ask Patzak about this, he says that Czech farmers want to grow traditional Saaz and nothing else.
Still, the Old World hop breeding programs have a lot in common. The Czech and German breeders speak glowingly of each other in public and in private, and they both praise the other programs around Europe, like the one in Slovenia that has developed the new varieties Styrian Wolf, Colibri, and Dragon. Seigner says that the world of hop development is pretty small. It is growing, however, mostly thanks to the changes inspired by contemporary beer culture.
“Nowadays there are hop breeding programs in most countries. 10 years ago, there were less than 20 breeding programs around the world,” she says. “This craft beer movement has completely changed how hops are used.”
Words, Evan Rail Illustration, Ben Chlapek Language
