Alpha Acid % and Hop Flavour

dlowe1992 said:

Has anyone found any correlation between lower AA% hops and hop flavour/aroma.

I ask as I was looking at a recipe the other night using willamette and styrian goldings at 4% AA ish each.
Checked CML and their stocks for both are around the 2% mark.

I know AA contributes bitterness when boiled. Obviously if used for bittering I’d double up, but these would be hopstand additions in this case. Is there any reason to believe the hops in general (oils etc for hop flavour) would be less ‘powerful’ and as such the dose need increasing?

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Alan_Reginato said:

I bought these hop package recently

View attachment 93246

The 1st (left to right) is 2021, AA 4,3%. The 2nd, 2022, AA 2,6%. And 3rd, the same, but from a different brand.

And, WTF!?! I could tell them apart. Visual, 1st was dark green, 2nd light green and 3rd looks drier, brownish comparing to the others.

About flavour, 1st had a more herbal, intense hoppy. The 2 others had a more floral, citric accent. With the last package being less prominent.

It's the first time a bought hops from different years or brand at same time, so I could compare them, side by side.

It's normal such a big difference? How the hell brewers could achieve repeatability in this way?

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Northern_Brewer said:

It's complicated - low alpha can be a pointer of low hop oils, but not always, the relationship is really messy. Just take the UK 2023 harvest where some alphas are on the lowish side, some are OK, but the flavour in most cases really isn't great at all, it was nuked by the bad weather in August.

It also has different relationship depending on the area the hops are grown in, hops from Yakima will be much more consistent than hops from the UK which can show massive vintage effects.

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dlowe1992 said:

@Northern_Brewer, I don't suppose you know anything about the 2022 Solvenian harvest?

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Northern_Brewer said:

TLDR - if you've got more Savinjski I'd increase those late additions by maybe 50%, or make them up with a bit of Celeia on top.

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dlowe1992 said:

Probably far too nuanced a question to answer simply, but what makes a good year for a hop harvest? Or to ask another way, would you have any expectations of 2024 UK harvest based on our summer this year?

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Northern_Brewer said:

Ideally you want not too weird a winter - this February we had temperatures nudging 20C at times which is A Bad Thing, particularly for Bramling Cross and the wider Golding family as they start off growing, then get to the soil surface and realise the daylength is all wrong and go to sleep for a month and never quite recover.

They're thirsty plants with all that leaf mass so they don't like drought in high summer, although irrigation helps. The really critical thing is sunlight in the last few weeks of August and early September - it doesn't need to be really hot necessarily, but they need sunlight to really develop those fruity flavours, otherwise you get the earthiness that you often get in UK Fuggles, but less so in French Fuggles or Savinjski. So 2023 was not ideal with a really cloudy August, although there was a bit of a heatwave in September which rescued the later varieties.

So this year was not ideal with the wet winter and warm February causing problems with spring dormancy, followed by a cool spring which again slowed growth and hit yields a bit but otherwise seems to have been a pretty decent year weatherwise as far as quality is concerned. Unfortunately I didn't get to try too many green hop beers this year compared to normal for... reasons, but my limited tasting seems to bear out that theory.

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clib said:

Which of the recent years have been the best for English hops?

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Northern_Brewer said:

Define "best" - a more cloudy August may give more of the earthiness that you expect from classic Fuggles, but personally I prefer a sunnier vintage where you get more lemony citrus coming though.

And you can't really generalise when different varieties respond differently to different climatic conditions. Bramling Cross is a classic - she's very susceptible to spring dormancy from warm late-winters, and in the heatwave of 2018 it was like the classic blackcurrant had "blown off" and the Goldings flavour of her mother really came through. So BX was less fruity and more spicy that year, whereas the likes of Challenger were more fruity as the orange really developed that year. You need to think of it more like wine vintages - the marginal areas can give produce that's brilliant or meh depending on the year, whereas the more "core" areas - in hop terms the US with the Yakima Valley - have more consistent conditions that don't vary so much year to year. And even here, Kent may experience different conditions to Herefordshire. But very quickly :

2024 - seems quite good so far
2023 - really difficult year, which made it very dependent on the skill of the grower. I know some brewers with close connections to their farms who were quite happy with their crop, but the autumnal August was hard on the early varieties like Goldings and Fuggles. Even the Goldings went a bit earthy. The later varieties, particularly those with some neomex genetics, seemed to do a bit better but TBH I've not bought any 2023 because of how disappointing the early green hop beers were, I may be being a bit unfair.
2022 - heatwave year so you tend to get extremes - I've not had any 22 BX but I imagine it did the same as 2018, whereas generally you got that orange citrus coming through on a lot of the UK types.
Yields were really cut during lockdown so you may not see much of them, I had some nice 2020s though.

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