Part I: Where are my hops?
It has been reported, over the past several months, that the brewing industry is facing a shortage in the availability of many of the popular hop varieties. News outlets like the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio have picked up on the tremors in the trade.As most of the folks reading this know, hops are one of the four major ingredients that brewers user to make beer. The other three being malted barley, yeast, and water.
Hops have been used in beer for close to a millennium, while beer in one form or another has been around for close to 5,000 years. Prior to the inclusion of hops, an amalgamation of herbs and spices were used to "preserve" the beer. Unfortunately, some of the ingredients used were actually psychoactives. Once hops were "discovered", the monks, who were the brewers, found the cones to offer a better preserving factor, act as a slight bittering agent, and impart a delicate floral flavor.
If we fast forward to the present day, we find that the most popular style consumed around the globe is that of a Pilsner-type of light lager. By light I mean in color and body. The Big Three (Anheuser-Busch, Molson-Coors, and SABMiller) predominantly focus on this style, and their dedication to consistently and quality control are executed extraordinarily well. Most of these beers are very clear, crisp, and have a low-to-moderate alcohol content. They are also low on the amount of hops used - these beers aren't super-bitter. A lot of the bite comes from the carbonation within the beer. On the flip side, modern American microbreweries tend to use an abnormally high amount of hops in their beer, in order to put their own unique twist on a well-known style, or to experiment with something new (e.g. Watermelon Wheat and Imperial Pilsners). Their beer may range from the moderate lager that the mega-companies produce, to over the top, lip puckering, tongue twisting, mouth-scraping IPAs. For them, the latter generally requires a high amount of hops to be used so they can deliver a well-balanced beer.
The ironic part is both the mega-scale breweries and craft breweries have to use a large amount of hops. You are probably thinking, "in the last paragraph, you said the big guys don't use a lot of hops in their beer; what gives?" It is all about production scale. Whether you brew 5, 200, or 100,000 gallons at a time, you will encounter a time where you will need a lot of hops.
There was a series of events in 2007 that are easily identified as sources of the hops shortage. The first was a series of terribly devastating storms in Europe that destroyed approximately 40% of their hop crop. Now, assuming that Germany alone counts for 25% of the total, global, hop supply, a 40% drop in their yield results in supplying 15% of the world's hops. That is a reduction in availability of 10% on the world-scale. The second event was one of the worst droughts to strike Australia and New Zealand, that allowed them to barely grow enough hops for their own domestic brewing use. New Zealand is known as the world's foremost supplier of certified organic hops. The third event was the abandonment of growing hops in the United States, poor yields in the Pacific Northwest, and ravaging wildfires in the hops-growing region of the US. The sum of these events has led to a skyrocketing increase in price per pound. What the brewer could get for $5 USD a pound now costs in excess of $20 USD per pound. Homebrew supply stores are running out of perennial favorite hop varieties, as are the hop distribution companies who are responsible for providing the essential ingredient to breweries around the globe.
All told, the consumer can expect to see a 10+% price increase, per pint, based on the lack of hops alone.
Within the brewing world, this seems to follow a 7 to 10 year cycle. Unfortunately, something on this scale has never been encountered before.
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