Some Will Have to Skip the Hops

By Greg Kitsock
Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Hops, the bitter spice in beer, have become green gold. Poor harvests, dwindling reserves and burgeoning demand for beer in Eastern Europe and Asia have sent hop prices soaring in the past couple of years. Some key varieties are almost impossible to get.

But small brewers do have several options. They can:

· Grow their own.

"People come visit us and ask, 'Are those wine grapes?' " says Taylor Smack, referring to the 200 hop plants on his property in Nelson County, Va., west of Charlottesville. The bristly vines are supported by a network of trellises built from telephone poles and 10-gauge wire. Some plants, Smack says, are 12 feet tall and sporting the burrs that will turn into the fragrant green cones prized by beermakers. All of his plants belong to a single strain, Cascade, valued for its piney, citrusy aroma and flavor.

In 2005, when he was laying plans for his Blue Mountain Brewery, Smack included a hop crop as an educational exhibit. But then the price of Cascades rose from $6 to $36 a pound in the space of a year. (If gas prices had risen equally astronomically, you'd be paying close to $19 a gallon at the pump.)

For now, Smack has been forced to substitute other varieties in his hoppy Full Nelson Pale Ale. But he expects that when his vines reach maturity in another year or two, yielding about 400 pounds annually, they'll solve his Cascade problem and meet 25 to 35 percent of his total hop needs. "It makes us look like geniuses," Smack says of his early decision to become a hop farmer.

Blue Mountain offers tours every day except Monday. Beer is available for on-premises tasting and to go. For more information, check out http://www.bluemountainbrewery.com.

In Fredericksburg, Blue & Gray Brewing owner Jeff Fitzpatrick cultivates about two dozen hop plants of a German variety called Hallertauer. They'll let him brew one batch of a fresh hop beer in the fall, he hopes, with enough left over to throw a few cones into his Fred Red Ale and other beers. (Check out http://www.blueandgraybrewingco.com for tour information.)

On the West Coast, Lagunitas Brewing in Petaluma, Calif., maker of such colorfully named beers as Hairy Eyeball and Gnarly Wine, has planted a one-third-acre test plot with two newer varieties, Emperor and Pathetique.

Hops are a hardy, vigorous plant (they can grow six to eight inches a day, Fitzpatrick says). It would be surprising if more breweries didn't follow suit.

· Win the lottery.

Jim Koch, chairman of Boston Beer, decided to make some of his hop reserves available at cost to his colleagues: specifically, five tons of Tettnanger, a classic German lager hop with a delicate, floral bitterness, and five tons of East Kent Goldings, an English ale variety noted for its earthy, softly fruity aromatics.

He got so many requests -- nearly a quarter of the country's 1,400 craft breweries came running with hat in hand -- that he decided to hold a lottery. In the end, 108 breweries received anywhere from 88 to 528 pounds: all told, Koch estimates, it was enough to brew 10 million pints of beer.

The winners included some fairly sizable regional breweries, including Mendocino Brewing (maker of Red Tail Ale) and Abita Brewing Co. (best known for its Purple Haze and Turbodog brands), but also many tiny operations that were forced to scour the market for whatever was available.

Koch, who has long-term contracts with hop suppliers, says he may repeat the lottery next year if the hop shortage continues.

· Substitute.

Beer is more than 10,000 years old, but the first mention of hops in brewing was in a 12th-century pharmacopeia by Hildegard von Bingen, German mystic and theologian. Before the 1600s, brewers often flavored beer with a blend of spices called gruit or grut. B. United International, a Connecticut-based importer of specialty beverages, this month will introduce 13th Century Grut, a wheat-based ale seasoned with a blend of bay leaves, ginger, caraway, anise, rosemary and gentian. Look for it in 16.5-ounce bottles retailing for about $5.

This experimental beer was formulated by Fritz Briem, professor of brewing science at Doemens Academy in Munich. "We had a long discussion whether he should use any hops at all," recalls B. United's president, Matthias Neidhart. In the end, Briem decided to throw in a smattering of pollinated wild hops, more for their preservative properties than for their flavor.

Neidhart also noted that several ingredients commonly found in gruit (sweet gale, yarrow and henbane) had been rejected because they're now known to be poisonous or narcotic. (There are excellent reasons why hopped beer displaced gruit.)

But there is no shortage of safe hop substitutes, Neidhart says. His portfolio includes a number of Italian microbrews that draw their flavor from gentian roots, Chinese tea leaves and the peels of chinotto, a bitter citrus fruit.

If the hop crisis does no good otherwise, it might spur small brewers into an even greater frenzy of creativity.

Greg Kitsock's Beer column appears every other week. He can be reached at food@washpost.com.