Chinooks Return To Oregon

Here’s the deal. Jim likes to catch fish and I like to eat ‘em, especially fish loaded with Omega 3s, like King Salmon, also known as Chinooks.

A few years ago we learned that the endangered Chinook, allowed to fatten up on plankton and moderately free from the threats of hooks, nets and overheated salt water, were predicted to make a record run in Oregon. And come back they did, more than doubling their population.

Jim didn’t go out to the Columbia or Deschutes to rope a “June hog,” but we both took comfort in knowing the mighty Chinook were thriving in the clean cold Columbia, as well as it’s Oregon tributaries.

It wasn't lost on us that meanwhile, in the Willamette Valley, another fatty packed with acid and oil, the Chinook hop,  was nowhere to be seen. Gone. Flushed out. Moved to Washington. We learned that Chinook hadn’t been grown in Oregon for about 20 years, for no particular reason. In our quest to diversify hop crops in Oregon, this glaring absence was simply unacceptable.

We contacted our friends at the Coleman Farms and they said” bring it on.” So in 2010, the same year the Chinook salmon made their triumphant return to Oregon in record numbers, we planted Chinook hops down on the famous "alluvial farm," within casting distance of the Willamette River.

We’re glad we did. Sure, it’s not the easiest hop to grow, as it has only moderate disease resistance to Downy mildew. But the Colemans -- burly, smart and themselves genetically designed it seems to thrive and win in any environment, enjoy a challenge. With about 80 years of hop growing experience in the family, the Colemans were not going to let the threat of mildew deter them, especially in view of the major advances made to combat DM in the past 12 years.

For a baby year harvest, we’re very, very pleased. The yield was just a tad under our projections, but when you consider we just weathered the coldest and wettest spring in Oregon’s recorded history, we’re high-fiving.  Not breaking metatarpels, but slamming the palms with sufficient force to produce an audible "smack." Looking forward, as the Chinooks continue dig in, we’re optimistic about next year’s mature harvest.
 

Would you look at those side arms! 

A fat, healthy row of Chinook hops, flanked by
hop blood brothers John and Tom Coleman,

down on the Alluvial Farm near

Independence, Oregon (August 2011).

More importantly, the brewers who’ve rubbed and sniffed our 2011 Chinook harvest have been delighted. The Chinook, at around 13.6% alpha acid normally, was once used primarily by industrials, such as Coors, as a bittering hop. Today, this dual purpose Golding/Brewers Gold derivative has also shown value for it’s aroma profile, which registers from herbal to smoky to grapefruity (see Stone’s flagship “Arrogant Bastard,” as an example).

That in mind, we’re not uncomfortable with the alpha acid of our 2011 baby crop, which came in just under 10%. Several brewers have noticed a slightly improved herbal and citrusy aroma than what they’re accustomed to -- they're happy, we're happy. Shortly, we’ll have the numbers on the total oil, which can range anywhere from 1.24 to 2.63 ml/100 g. A rich, resiny hop with an underrated aroma that, we believe, is well suited for both Oregon’s Willamette Valley and the craft brewer’s fermentation tanks.

As the saying goes, the only shot you never make is the one you don’t take. Indie Hops is dedicated to expanding the menu of aroma and dual purpose hops in the Valley, a mission which we hope and believe will help rebuild Oregon’s pre-eminence as a leading supplier of hops while also bolstering new beer flavors for craft brewers.

In the old days, the white water rivers of the Pacific Northwest were so thick with salmon returning home to spawn according to legend you could walk across without getting your feet wet. Next year, we're anglin' for a boomer crop of greenies so big and fat with oil they blot out that famously hot Oregon sun.


RGW
Octobert 1, 2011



Who Dat? 
Why, that’s Jim Koch, the irrepressible and boundless craft beer Ubermensch. What’s he doing? Why he’s doing what he does best: inspiring, perspiring and pontificating, while the dangling Chinooks whisper: catch me, if you can.  (Alluvial Farm, August 2011)

There He Is Again! 
Jim Koch and hop enchantress Gayle Goschie, down on the farm, while the Nuggets pour in like the nearby Silver Falls.  Silverton, Or (August 2011).

He’s Everywhere! 
Jim Koch breeding good will with hopmeister Dr. Shaun Townsend, Ph.D, at the OSU hop farms in Corvallis, Oregon. August 2011.

     

Variety, Uniqueness, Consistency

Craft beer thrives in a culture of diversity and adventure. In our own little town of Portland, Oregon, as soon as we reached thirty-some breweries and mumblings of “over saturated” picked up, a dozen more breweries opened up much to the enduring gratitude of happy customers. The growing variety of beers, pubs and breweries is attracting more and more thirsty people everyday.

Perhaps more than any other arrow in the quiver of ingredients, hops cast a spell on brewers and imbibers of American craft beer, tickling the potential for variety and individualism. Their symphony of oils reaches each of us with a unique tone, the crescendo leading some to ecstasy and others to seek refuge. We continue to be amazed at how wildly different educated palates can interpret the same hop.

Last summer a focus group panel was held that illustrates these varied perceptions toward hops. A group of accomplished craft brewers from Oregon tasted a series of single-hopped beers, not knowing what the hop was in the various samples. Descriptors they used to describe the prevailing hop character, and the number of panelists who used that descriptor, are below:

Clearly, one brewer’s nectar can be another’s poison! [One guy’s fruity apple can be another’s cat pee?]

As we’ve striven to learn from brewers how they’d like to see the hop world evolve, this theme of variety, creativity and uniqueness stands out.

Our resident brewer and Brewery Ambassador Matt Sage has recently travelled the craft brewery scenes in Washington State, Oregon, Southern California and Colorado, seeking insights into what brewers are looking for in hops. His findings are as varied as his travels! Click here for a taste of Matt’s curious adventures in the world of hop flavor.

Alongside variety and uniqueness, brewers also care about consistency. After all, when we find something we really like, we want it to be consistent. What can Indie Hops do to help the hop world evolve in a way that craft brewers would like to see? Well...might as well start with variety, uniqueness and consistency!

Click here for a review of a few of the breeding projects underway at Oregon State University that we are spearheading in our quest to probe the mysteries and amplify the wonders of the noble flower.

Cheers!
JS
jim@indiehops.com
2/8/11

The Low Down on Simcoe®

Having trouble getting Simcoe®? You’re not alone. A ton of brewers have asked us for Simcoe®, which we don’t have, as it’s a proprietary hop owned by Select Botanicals Group, LLC, who restricts who can grow it. Our growers have not been licensed to plant Simcoe®.

A brewer in Southern California recently told me he just bought the last 3,000 pounds. I didn’t ask what he paid, but in view of the high demand and short supply, I’m sure the “spot” price was not pretty.

The scarcity of Simcoe® and the near-desperate demand prompted me to poke around. First, let’s look at the sheets. Yakima Chief Ranches,Inc. applied for the original patent in 199. They identified Simcoe® as a dual purpose bittering/aroma hop, with a hefty yield of 2300-2500 pounds per acre. The current owner of the trademark Simcoe(r) is Select Botanicals Group, LLC, of Washington.

A review of the USAHops website shows that the Washington farmers planted 237 acres of Simcoe® in 2010, up 29% from 2009. (By comparison, WA farmers planted 443 acres of Chinook, up 15%).

However, the average yield was 1,698 lbs/acre. This is a 20% drop from the year before and about a 30% decline from it’s purported average yield ( 2,300—2,500 lbs/acre). (By comparison, Chinook’s average yield was up around 8% at 1,963 lbs/acre).

I understand that Simcoe's owner has licensed three (3) farms in Washington to grow their prized invention. I'm not sure how many merchants are allowed to sell it.

It’s clear that the supply was down. A baby harvest? Pest or mildew issues? Not sure.

Why the popular demand? Let’s look at Simcoe’s chemistry:

Alpha acids: 12-14% (Chinook 13-15, Centenn. 10-13)
Beta acids: 4-5%
Cohumulone: 15-20% (remarkably low!)
Total Oil: 2—2.5 ml/100 g (huge, on par with Magnum and Centennial)
Myrcene: 60-65% (Chinook’s is 52)
Farnesene: 0% (Chinook and Centenn. “trace”)
H/C ratio: 2.1 (same as Chinook)
Storability: good
Parentage: Undisclosed (the inventor’s not telling)

Brewers have described the aroma as complex, hovering between citrusy/grapefruity and piney. I’ve read references to Simcoe® as “Cascades on steroids.” Interestingly, in Yakima Chief’s patent application, the only hops referenced were Cascade and Galena, in the context of shattering potential and shoot emergence, respectively.

So let’s say you want Simcoe® but can’t get it or don’t want to pay high spot market prices. Are there “alternatives?” Choosing an “alternative” is at best an inexact science. Do we find a cultivar with similar hop chemistry? We can’t compare parentage, as Yakima Chief’s keeping the blood lines secret. We could study key molecular markers on the Simcoe® mystery hop and on likely parental genotypes, but this would take both big time and big money.

For now, if your recipe calls for Simcoe® but you can’t get it, you might experiment with blending hops. We haven’t done the science, nor have we played with pilot brews ourselves, but our hunch is a blend of Chinook and Horizon might do the trick (Horizon for bittering only).

In our view, the spot market spike and scarcity of Simcoe® points up the need for diversification. Brewers should have access to suitable hop alternatives. Growers should have access to rhizomes without paying restrictive licensing fees. Scientists should have access to the parentage, both to develop alternatives as well as to validate disease resistance assessments.

Of course, the shortage also underscores the need by brewers to contract long term with merchants or growers for must-have varieties. In 2011, we will be harvesting our first crop of both Chinook and Horizon. We’re naturally very excited, as over the last few decades both workhorse hops have been the exclusive province of Washington growers.

Roger Worthington
1/24/11

PS. For more information on Simcoe®, click on:

http://www.yakimachief.com/hopvarieties/simcoeyc014.html

To compare Simcoe’s hop chemistry with other cultivars, click on:

http://www.indiehops.com/haunoldpub-privchart.asp and
http://www.indiehops.com/aroma_variety_survey_chart.asp

To read Simcoe®’s patent application, click here

For more information of Select Botanicals Group, LLC, see http://wa.14thstory.com/select-botanicals-group-llc.html

Click here for the trademark ownership.

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