Meridian featured in the 2012 Craft Brewers Conference Symposium Ale, Yippee!

The buzz is building. Meridian has crossed the Oregon border. Our friends down in San Diego at Karl Strauss have just bottled up a hop bomb, exploding with flavor, to welcome the thousands of brewers who will celebrate all things crafty at the 2012 Craft Brewers Conference.

This bad boy, tongue-in-cheekily monikered as a ho hum “San Diego Pale Ale, which is sort of like calling an MX missile a “bottle rocket,” comes in at a burly 10.2% ABV and 95 IBU. Welcome to San Diego, where it ain’t beer if it doesn't sprout a fully loaded hop vine.

A few months ago we sent a brewers cut of Meridian to Paul Segura, the master brewer at Karl Strauss. He took one whiff and spontaneously uttered whilst the eye lids fluttered: “We have got to dry hop our Symposium Ale with this beauty.” And he did, along with his righteously motivated brethren within the San Diego Brewers Guild.

This afternoon Chris Cramer, Karl Strauss’ preternaturally cheerful CEO, ordered me to “get down here now” and taste this beauty. Words like “floral,” “aromatic,” “incredible,” "tropical fruity," and “unique” burst forth like fireworks exploding on the Fourth of July.

We can’t wait to see our little darling perform on the Big Stage. To be sure, all glory to our friends in Yakima, who furnished the Columbus and Citra for this ruthlessly hopped special release. Indie Hops is overjoyed to have provided the Crystal and Meridian.

A funny sidenote – the press release on the San Diego Pale Ale on “The Beer Spot” blog identifies our contribution as “Columbia.” This, my friends, is an honest and totally understandable mistake – we thought it was Columbia too until we did a whole lotta digging, testing, evalutating, measuring, and musing.

Here’s a picture of the Symposium Double IPA wolf in sheep’s clothing.

And here’s a picture of the commemorative poster, including Indie Hops, the little engine that could… Note that the Hops logo (the circle with the cultivars: "Columbus, Citra, Crystal..." also misidentifies our Meridian as "Columbia." Honest mistake, nobody's perfect.

Let’s toast to the glory of hops, malt, water, yeast and TLC! Make sure to stop by our booth. Jim, Matt and I may be short on most of our 2011 inventory, but our 2012 harvest is only months away. We appreciate your support and friendship.

RGW
4/27/12

note:  photos courtesy of:
http://www.thebeerspot.com/news/article/2012/04/karl-strauss-s-2012-craft-brewers-conference-symposium-ale

Columbia Debut Delayed as Meridian Steals the Show

The Story of the Discovery of a New Oregon Hop

Oh dear.

Remember Columbia? The “sexy” sister to Willamette unceremoniously banished years ago to the basement of hop history? Remember how we gleefully announced that we had resurrected this beauty? That we’d be the first to grow it commercially? And that our craft friends couldn’t wait to set her free?

Separated at Birth, Indeed
We originally reported that the hop on the left
was "Columbia" and the one on the right
was it's sister, Willamette. Turns out our
"Columbia" was actually a new plant,
which we've coronated as "Meridian

Well, we grew her, and dried, baled, and pelleted her, but a funny thing happened on Columbia’s walk down the red carpet. Since nobody had ever “dated” her before, we didn’t quite know what to expect. We suspected she’d be a beauty, with a slightly higher alpha than her floral sister, but this Gal quite simply dazzled us beyond our wildest dreams.

One by one we brought in some of the finest snouts in the land to give her a rub and sniff. It was fun to watch. We’d fill a table with several fresh varieties and our guest would do the dance, concentrating hard, earnestly associating the aroma with descriptors. Without exception, they’d take a whiff of the unlabeled “Columbia” pile and stop in their tracks, arrested, if you will, by the stunning uniqueness. We began hearing words like “Meyer lemon pie.” “Fruit punch.” “Unique.” And “wow!”

The evidence began piling up. When we harvested her, the drying room at Goschie Farms bloomed with a strikingly unique and pleasant aroma. We suspected she’d be different than Willamette, but this different? Something was …. off, in a good way.
We sent her off for a chemistry profile. More and more brewers who sniffed her were amazed at her uniquely fruity aroma. Could it be? We waited. The results came back. Per the literature, we expected Columbia’s alpha-beta ratio to come in at 2:1. But, at 1:1.5, this spunky girl flipped the ratio. She wasn’t just a shade different, she was looking like a brand spanking new leaf!

What's in a Name?
That which we call a Columbia
by any other name, say,
hmmm, "Meridian," would smell
as sweet. With apologies to Bill Shakespeare.

We ran more chemistry. It became evident that she was not Columbia. But what was she? The only pedigree that came close was Glacier. But a defining characteristic for Glacier is her super low cohumulone, at 12%. Compare that to the mystery girl’s CoH, at 45%. They didn’t match.

We ran through all the databases, looking for a match. The conclusion was inescapable: nothing matched. We had found a new hop, a strikingly beautiful new hop that packed a powerfully unique new aroma. We called our customers who had ordered Columbia and with a mixture of excitement and trepidation explained that what we thought was Columbia wasn’t Columbia. Thankfully, our customers shared our enthusiasm for this new find, and offered congratulations.

Suddenly, we had a million things to do. We had printed up a bunch of t-shirts that showcased the debut of Columbia, the famously forgotten Sister. We had to hold on to those. We had to delay putting in new acreage until we could learn more about the agronomy and disease/pest resistance of the new plant.

And we had to give our mystery girl a name. That wasn’t hard – we discovered the plant on Goschie Farms within a few meters of a country road named “Meridian. “ Meridian – a navigational term, an imaginary circle on the planet passing through the North and South poles, but also used in conversation to mean the “zenith” or “summit.” Hmm. We like that. Wherever you are, when you’re drinking a beer hopped with Meridian, you’re approaching the zenith or summit of flavor.

Back to the Basement,
Dear Sweet Hidden Sister
The good news is that when Columbia finally debuts,
we've got a boatload of commemorative t-shirts ready to roll!

As of this writing, the brewer feedback continues to pour in. One brewer has used it in a single hop lager beer, which he described as “clean” and “crisp” with a “refreshing sweet lemon character.” Meridian has also raised eyebrows and oxytocin injections (Ok, made that up) in a wide range of ales, from pales to dark roasted malt “winter seasonals.” It’s reported to play well with Belgian yeast and has a way of amplifying the zesty zing of weissbiers.

We’re excited over here, about excited as anyone should be allowed to get over the discovery of a “sexy” new hop plant. We want to thank Gayle Goschie for her well-intentioned but fortuitous “mistake,” Dr. Shaun Townsend who helped us determine that “Columbia” wasn’t Columbia, and all of our friends in the craft brew world who basically said we don’t care what you call it, we just want more of it!

At the same time, on a somber note, we’re mindful that poor Columbia, as mighty and strong and beautiful as we know she is, will have to wait another few years for her big night in the spotlight.

RGW
3/22/12

In Pursuit of Columbia

Dan Kopman of Schlafly Beer in St. Louis

was our first customer to order Columbia. Shown here,

on the left, with Gayle Goschie, R. Worthington and

Matt Sage (left to right). Goschie Farms, July 2011.

Columbia Finally Gets Her Limelight



Oregon Rain!!
Roger and Dr. Al Haunold
performing the Willamette
Valley Hop Dance, Goschie Farms.
"These are my babies," beams
The People's HopMeister.

Introducing, finally, after being banished by the King of Beers in the hop basement for two decades, the fragrant, the durable, the the unsung sister of the Queen of Oregon Hops, the soon to be mighty Lovely Miss Columbia!!  
We've written previously about our efforts to resurrect Columbia, the forgotten sister of Willamette. To recap, back in the Summer of Love, Dr. Al Haunold was asked by Bud to breed a hop similar in character to Fuggles. Several years later, early in the Disco era, he presented two new cultivars, Columbia and Willamette.

Bud's team of six brewers evaluated pilot beers using the new little "Fugglish" darlings, and all six selected Columbia as the winner. Rank, however, has its privileges. Along comes their boss, Bud's head brewmaster, Frank Schwaiger. Frank zeroed in on the chemistry. Columbia had a slightly higher alpha acid profile than Willamette (8-9% AA vs. 5-7%, respectively), but otherwise the oil profile was virtually indistinguishable. Our German born Brewmeister prophesied that the US consumer would never go for a higher alpha acid hop (a prediction that ranks right up there with Henry Ford's lawyer advice that the automobile was simply a fad and the horse was here to stay).

The result: Bud chose Willlamette, which went on to fame and fortune, and Columbia never saw the light of day. Until now. Yesterday, on a brilliant, sunny day in the Valley, we walked the hopyards at the idyllic Goschie Farms with Columbia's proud papa, Dr. Al Haunold. Al last saw big green Columbia cones dangling some 40 years ago. Needless to say, he was happy to see Willamette's slightly bolder sister finally get her moment in the sunlight.

Separated at Birth.
Pointy Columbias, on the left,
and plump Willamettes, on the right.

And so are we. Columbia and Willamette share the same parents and yet they sport amazing differences. Take a look at the picture to the right. The Columbia cone is longer and narrower with spiked bracts (granted, this is approxiately 2-3 weeks before harvest). Willamette is fuller, rounder and plumper. As mentioned, the chemistry profiles are slighlty different. As for aroma, based on an in-the-field rub & sniff, both have superb aroma, but the Columbia has a subtle "lemon twist" at the finish that seems to trigger an eye-lid flutter response and cheeky giggle.  

Welcome to the light, Miss Columbia. May you enjoy many more moments in the sun as we, the beer drinking public, finally get to revel in your glorious bounty.

Roger Worthington
8/19/11







A Man Outstanding in His Field.

Here he is -- the man who

brought us 23 public hop varieties.

Dr. Al Haunold, surrounded by Columbia hops.







Organic Hops and OSU Breeding Program Update, 9/6/10

As previously reported, Indie Hops has contracted with Goschie Farms to grow 20 acres of USDA certified organic hop. I recently visited the fields and my goodness did they look healthy, clean and orderly. See the pictures below.

We planted both Cascades and Centennials. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the history of these historic hops. This is the biggest single tract of USDA certified 0rganic hops in Oregon hop history.

Per Gayle: the rhizomes were planted in an organic compost mix in February and the pots were then placed on a graveled area. With the cooler and wetter than normal Spring, the pots onthe warm gravel did quite well in establishing themselves. It wasn’t long before they developed pretty white/bright feeder roots. I’m glad we planted when we did. Had the rhizomes been placed in the ground in March/April, they would have sat shivering. We waited, thank goodness.

Once the grass cover crop was worked down (grass tuffs are slow in breaking down), the pots were planted in early June. That process took a little longer than planned with the ground never drying out enough to work it without causing compaction problems, which is a fancy way of saying we would’ve got our tractor stuck in the mud.

In June, we planted into the warm ground with the now composting cover crop. The plants have been given a great start. The ground will not be certified organic until 2012 (3 year transition from conventional), but he plants will be grown under organic specifications during the transitional period. From past experience, this will give the plants a great start with this extended establishment period.

Happy Labor Day! Just another day for us in the hop world as we continue our wonderful hop harvest… Gayle

In other news, while down at GF, I spied signs of Dr. Shaun Townsends handiwork. As you know, Indie Hops has financed an aroma hop breeding program at OSU. The program has been designed to foster collaboration between academic breeders, local hop farmers and brewers. Below are a few pictures of hop vines festooned with brown bags, the insides of which contain freshly pollinated female cones.

As Shaun reports, the bags above are part of the crosses that he made in July of 2010.

For each sidearm, he clipped the major leaves off, secured a bag over that sidearm, and introduce pollen from the desired male parent to complete the cross. The plants and bags will stay in place until about October 1, 2010. At that time, Shaun will take the plants down and haul the crosses back to OSU for threshing, seed-cleaning, and pre-treatment for planting.

In addition to Goschie Farms in Silverton, Dr. Townsend is also pollinating female cones at Coleman Farms, our other farm partner (the Alluvial Farm near Independence, Oregon). The progeny from the various crosses should produce a wide range of genetic types for selection. One of the main criteria in selecting pollen and seeds for crossing, in addition to a muscular oil profile, has been downy mildew resistance.

So far, so good.
Roger Worthington
9/6/10

PS That well dressed man in the hopfields reaching for a cone on the "bag vine" is our good friend and gentleman brewer, Dan Kopman of Shlafly from St. Louis.

V for Victory! When the rain quenches and the soil nourishes and the sun shines, the hops win. When the hops win, we all win! Provided of course they’re handled just right…

Hoptalk with Hopmeister Al, Part IX

Aromas? Yes. But Can the Willamette Valley Handle Dual Purpose Heavies Like Centennial, Horizon and Chinook?

If the Willamette Valley is renown for its aroma hops and Yakima Valley for it’s high alpha, where do “dual purpose” hops fit in? Since most mid to high alpha hops hail from Yakima, does that mean they don’t or wouldn’t thrive in Oregon?

First, a bit of background.

“Dual purpose” is a term of art that first emerged in the mid 1990s, about the time that our hopmeister Dr. Al was hanging up his cover-alls and putting away his clipboard. “We never used that term,” recalled Al.

All Purpose Cluster

“Actually, when I first came to the industry in 1965, brewers talked about three major categories of hops. Aromas, high alphas, and general kettle hops. The latter referred mostly to Cluster hops, such as Early Cluster, California Cluster, Yakima Cluster, and Late Cluster. All of these were virtually indistinguishable by quality characteristics. They differed only by their maturity and harvest dates. California Cluster seemed to rank above the others for reasons that I never quite understood.“

The industrial brewers, continued Al, “reluctantly” used Clusters, since they were cheap, easily available, and supplied generic bitterness to their beer. “They boiled the heck out of those Clusters to get every drop of bitterness,” Al laughed, “and then finished it off with an aroma or general kettle hop.”

By the mid 1970s, the emphasis shifted. “General kettle hops” went the way of the Do-Do as the Big Boys simplified the choice between aroma and high alpha. It wasn’t until the 1990s, that a third party re-emerged, this time at the urging of the craft brewers, who demanded the best from both worlds -- hops that could be used for bittering and European style aroma. Thus was born the utility or “dual purpose” hop.

Perle the Pioneer

The closest thing to a “dual purpose” in Al’s hey day was Perle. When grown in Oregon, which is lower in latitude than its home-hopyard in Germany, Perle alpha averaged around 10-11% AA, which back in the day came pretty close to the high water mark for alpha hops.

To qualify as a noble aroma, however, a hop needed to have storagability similar to the classic old-time aromas such as Hallertauer mittelfrueh, Tettnanger or Saazer. A hop’s storagability, explains Al, is an index for measuring the life a hop’s original alpha acid content.

When kept in non-refrigerated space, the land race aroma hop often lost nearly half of their original alphas. Consequently, they were considered to be “poor keepers.” Is that a bad thing? No, says Al. “The loss of original alpha does not mean that the bittering potential had decreased by a comparable amount. Experienced brewers recognized that when alpha acids degraded, the resulting compounds could still offer bittering, even though those new metabolite compounds couldn’t be assayed by a routine alpha analysis.”

Which to me sounds like hops, like wine, can age with grace. Instead of evaporating down to nothing, the hop oils and acids instead can generate new downstream compounds.

Whether a hop is a good, fair or poor keeper is really a message to the grower on the level of TLC that will be required to preserve the best of the good stuff. Why? Because mishandling a hop during or after harvest compounds the natural loss or degradation of alpha acids. How is that measured? It isn’t. To know whether a hop has been handled, you need to know the skill, patience and infrastructure of your grower, as well as your supplier.

Let’s go back full circle to Perle. Perle’s “good” storagability made it too good to hang with the “poor keeper” nobles. In the brewing process, Perle acted more like a high alpha hop than a finicky, thin skinned and easily bruised noble.

Dual Purpose: Good Keepers

Nowadays, in addition to having fair to good storagability, dual purpose hops are generally about twice as high in alpha than nobles, with about twice the total oils. Signature examples are Centennial (11-14% AA, 2.5 oil ml/100g) and Horizon (12-14% AA, 2.0 oil), the latter being another one of Dr. Al’s hop creations (released in 1998 after Al retired).

Newport (15% AA, 2.0 oil) and Chinook (13-15%, 1.8 oil) are two more popular bittering hops with aroma characteristics, both of which Dr. Al struggles to classify as “dual purpose.” “I was approached by Miller Brewing Company in the early 1990s to breed a back up hop to high-alpha Galena. I crossed Magnum, a German super alpha hop with Galena and Hallertauer mittelfrueh parentage, with a male seedling of Brewers Gold, Fuggle and Late Grape parentage. The outcome was Newport.”

Dr. Al did not make the crosses for Centennial, which was originally bred at the USDA facility in Prosser, Washington. Dr. Al did assist in field testing the selection in Oregon.

Green Greatness Denied?

Although Dr. Al had a hand in the creation or testing of these four high alpha/medium aroma cultivars, none of them – Centennial, Chinook, Horizon or Newport, and you can add Mt. Raineer to that list - have flourished commercially in the Willamette Valley.

To be sure, Horizon, Mt. Raineer and Newport have failed to catch on anywhere, whether in Oregon, Idaho or Washington. With respect to Chinook, which ranks as the 5th highest use hop by craft brewers (BA 2009 hop usage survey), the entire US crop of such hops in 2009 was harvested in Washington. As for Centennial, surpassed only by Cascade as the most popular hop in 2009 among crafties, only two Oregon growers harvested Centennial in 2009, both going off radar to do so. Washington brought home nearly the entire supply.

Why is this? Do dual purpose hops grow better in the Yakima Valley? Are the yields in Yakima higher? Are Oregon growers not up the challenge? Do dual purpose hops “keep” or “store” better in the high plains of Eastern Washington?

According to Al, the answer has to do with history, habit and logistics and nothing to do with terroir, or farmer skill, or passion.

“For years the hop merchants have been contracting with Yakima farmers to grow Centennial. A dual-purpose hop like Centennial needs to be harvested, dried, cooled and refrigerated quickly, to avoid combustion and oxidation,” Al instructs soberly. “Most of the cold storage capacity is in Yakima. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to truck tons of volatile hops in non-refrigerated trucks from Oregon when they can be grown a few miles from the storage coolers in Yakima.”

Heat Blows

Hops in general don’t like heat, but higher alpha hops in particular have been known to combust or “self-ignite” when not properly cooled and stored. It’s imperative, stressed Dr. Al, that before stacking bales in a warehouse, the temperature at the core of the bale, as well as the ambient temperature, must be brought down to the 70s.

Hops with high total oils, such as Bullion, Chinook, Newport and Centennial, can generate tremendous heat inside a tightly compressed 200 pound bale. The heat needs to dissipate. It’s critical, reminds Al, that hops be allowed to cool off after drying in a loose stack when removed form the kiln. “If you bale them while they’re hot, and stack them up end on end in a closed room without allowing the heat to dissipate,” Al warns gravely, “they’ll self ignite. They’ll blow.” As in sky high. As in you better have good insurance.

If heat is an enemy, then the Willamette Valley must be a safe harbor. By comparison, the day time ambient temperatures in the Valley around harvest time are six (6) degrees cooler than in Yakima. Impatience is another enemy. Hops must be allowed to cool down for at least 18-24 hours before baling. Hops are dried in the kiln at about 140F (often much higher on especially hot summer days). The optimal temp of a baled hop before storage should hover around 72F. The optimal temp of baled hops in in cold storage drops below freezing.

A hop baled before it’s time and temp is a recipe for blackened, oxidized hops, or worse. Ka-Blam!

What about yields? According to Al, the yields between Oregon and Washington should be compatible. What about alpha acid product? Compatible. What about disease resistance? Per Dr. Al, growing Chinook in Oregon may pose a challenge because of the risk of downy mildew. However, he assures, that risk can be managed by good farming technique and vigilance.

Centennials Busting to Break Out
What about those Oregon-grown Centennials? Are they any good? I haven’t seen any data comparing the chemistry profiles, not that the numbers alone tell the story. We have received feedback from brewers who have used Centennials harvested in 2009 from Goschie Farms (one of our farm partners). In so many words, the consensus sounded something like … err uhh, Damn! This is good sh**!

Here at Indie Hops, we’re satisfied that the Willamette Valley terroir is well suited for both aroma and dual purpose varieties. In the end, it comes down to the talent, skill, patience, experience and passion of the grower. We’ve got two of the finest in Goschie Farms and Coleman Farms.

Cooler, Greener, Richer

In 2010, Indie will be planting “Salmon Safe” Chinook (gotta love that!), Centennial, Horizon, Perle, and a host of aroma hops (e.g., Cascade, Liberty, Mt. Hood, Ultra, Goldings, Santiam, Crystal and Columbia).

If storage is a problem, we can fix that. We’ve got the space. Our patient pelleting mill is now running, which means there’s no need to truck Oregon’s finest beer flower 250 miles to Yakima in the dog days of August. We’ll be able to quickly convert baled cones into fresh, oily, happy pellets within a few days of harvest. We’ve lowered the temperature of the pelleting die below 110 degrees F and our storage cooler is always below freezing.

But more on that later.

Roger Worthington
4/2/10

HopTalk with Hopmeister Al Haunold, Part VIII

If You Like Willamette, You’re Going to Love its Forgotten Sister, Columbia
Columbia, not to be confused with the super alpha Columbus, is your proverbial hop diamond in the rough. Released to the public in 1977, this aroma cultivar has never found it’s niche in the marketplace. Like it’s namesake, the mighty Columbia river, we think Columbia is indeed a mighty hop, but it’s potential has historically been dammed up or drowned out, ironically, by the super star status of her big sister: Willamette.

An Internet search yields little reliable information on Columbia, for good reason. The BA hop usage data shows that zero pounds of Columbia were used by crafties in 2009. The reason for that is simple: crafties don’t know much about it, merchants aren’t endorsing it, and farmers without forward contracts simply aren’t growing it.

Nipped in the Bud

Indie Hops intends to revive this long-buried, unheralded but busting-to-break-out aroma hop. We’re planting several acres this year on the verdant Goschie Farms in the Willamette Valley, where, you’ll learn, the seeds were literally planted, harvested, brewed and promptly scuttled over three decades ago.

We believe that but for the snout and cloud of one very powerful brewer more than 30 years ago, Columbia today could easily share the leading role with her ballyhooed sister, Willamette.

Here’s the story.

In 1967, our eager young hopmeister Al Haunold was charged with the task of breeding a new Fuggle-like hop, to replace the old English Fuggle hop, which had not produced well in Oregon. At the time, Cluster was all the rage in Washington, and Brewers Gold was the market leader in Oregon, as both generated hefty yields.

Industrial brewers at the time (you know: Strohs, Schlitz, Pabst, Falstaff, Rheingold, Anheuser Busch, Miller) were having trouble securing reliable supplies of imported Fuggles from the UK and Slovenia. (As a sidenote, many moons ago Fuggle had been transplanted to Yugoslavia, whence it emerged as the hop marketed today under the name “Styrian”).

In the USDA greenhouses at Oregon State, Dr.Al succeeded in doubling the chromosome number of the original Fuggle to create a tetraploid Fuggle hop, which was identical to the original Fuggle (is there anything this man can’t do?). He then crossed this tetraploid with an open pollinated male Fuggle seedling, one teeny-tiny hop flower at a time, deftly wielding a Q-tip to pollinate the male (picture Geppetto breathing life into Pinnochio).

In the year (1968), the master hopcrafter germinated the seeds, strung the tiny plants in the greenhouse, and obtained about 1000 healthy potted plants, the following year were moved to the field. After a few years of testing small samples, Dr. Al selected the six most promising genotypes (all obtained from the original Fuggle) and submitted one pound bale samples for test brewing.

The new hops were brewed and presented to a taste panel consisting of about eight brewers from Anheuser Busch, which back then was big but not yet ginormous. The selected “Fugglish Six” included what later became Willamette and Columbia.

You might think Columbia would be the clear winner by name alone. In the early 1970s, before the Feds established the EPA, the Willamette was essentially an open sewer. Papermills along the river between Eugene and Portland spewed their untreated chemical waste into the dying river. Cities dumped their untreated sewage. Salmon runs were a thing of the past. Parents warned their kids, myself included, to avoid the stinky river like the plaque (which of course meant that’s exactly where I cooled off during the hot summers!)

Selected But Not Chosen

The AB taste panel overwhelmingly preferred Columbia. The hop cultivar had higher alpha acids than Willamette (8-9% vs. 6-7%) and a higher production yield. But it was also higher in Co-Humulone (36-40% vs. 29-32%), registered a higher H/C (humulene/cryophyllene) ratio in its oil and matured 4-7 days later than Willamette.

Why did the panel choose Columbia? It’s hard to say, concludes Al. “The alpha acid and oil levels were so close it would have been very hard to distinguish flavor differences.”

Enter Frank Schwaiger, AB’s German-born master brewer. “Frank was amazing,” recalled Al. “Before instruments were readily available for measuring alpha acid and oil components, Frank had developed an incredibly keen sense of aroma and flavor.” Dr. Al credits Frank with catapulting AB from the back of the pack to its current leadership position.

Banished by the King of Beers

Whether Frank was following his nose or simply injecting a cynical business acumen is not known, but the titan of industrial beer rejected the consensus winner. He overruled his colleagues, choosing Willamette instead. And thus was Columbia relegated to the dark basement as the ugly old sister, while Willamette flourished in the limelight

What was going on here? Was aroma the deciding factor? Both offered mildly fruity and earthy aroma. Or, as a sign of things to come, did Frank pull Willamette through because it was lower in alpha acid, and thus thought to be less bitter? We can only speculate. So that’s what we’ll do.

However, before doing that, Al wanted the record to be perfectly clear – Willamette was (and is) one helluva hop. He proudly remembers what Frank told him years ago: “Willamette,” Frank thundered, “is the closest to the original Oregon-grown Fuggle of any other hop I have ever tested.” High praise indeed and well done young Al.

Back to the story. Now, at about that time, the industrials were trending towards lighter beers that promised not to offend the average consumer, who was sought to actually prefer coca cola (sweet) to beer (bitter). In the 1970s, the bittering units of popular beers hovered around 14 IBU. Today, the global market is demanding hopped-out beers that average below 9 IBU, a level which is on the cusp of being “undetectable” or below the flavor threshold.

Less is More Money?

Perhaps Frank saw the future, a future in which the most profitable beers contained the least amount of hops and malt. Instead of targeting connoisseurs, maybe he envisioned targeting a dumbed down mass audience with a beer-flavored beverage that would be served at super cold so as to numb the taste buds to whatever hop bitterness managed to sneak through.

Maybe Frank detected more bitterness in Columbia. At the time, before the advent of High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) in 1979, Frank probably wouldn’t have known that Willamette had a lower CoH than Columbia. Cohumulone, once boiled and converted to iso-cohumulone, is thought to contribute mightily to the finished beer’s bitterness. Perhaps, with his refined snout and sensitive tongue, Frank sensed Willamette would better serve a consumer market attracted to low to barely detectable bitterness in their beer.

In any event, you’ll notice that it was a Behemoth Brewer who decided the fate of Al’s little green creations. Would a wine connoisseur let Ripple decide what grapes to grow? The criteria for hop selection are completely different. The biggies want processed alpha acid extracts for the most part, the hand-crafties want beer with flavor, aroma, nutrients, color and body.

Reversal of Fortune

In the late 1970s, AB contracted with Goschie Farms in the Willamette Valley to grow a few hundred acres of Columbia. When Frank picked Willamette and doomed Columbia, AB ordered Goschie Farms to destroy all of those lovely hops. None came to market.

Fast forward to 2006. AB again approached Goschie Farms to experimentally grow several varieties, including Columbia. Goschie dutifully and eagerly planted 30 hills of mighty Columbia rootstock.

But, as fate would have it, Columbia never found the open waters of the marketplace. AB sold out to Belgian InBev, who decided to shut down the experimental plots, again dooming Columbia back to gather dust anonymously in the USDA Germplasm Repository (where hop germplasm is catalogued and stored).

Indie Hops heard the story and shouted from the Hoptops: Set Columbia Free! We took an interest in the unsung Fuggle hero instantly, asking ourselves: Why should the fate of a perfectly good US Fuggle Aroma Hop, bearing the pixie dust of the vaunted hop magic man Dr. Al, be decided by one man at Anheuser-Busch? Gayle Goschie went out to her experimental acreage and, as luck would have it, found a few hearty Columbia survivors, begging for a chance to get into the game.

We are excited to revive the abandoned but not forgotten Columbia. Goschie Farms, Oregon’s first hopyard to obtain “Salmon Safe” certification, is the perfect place to let Willamette’s unknown but potent little sister run free.

Roger Worthington
3/12/10