Queries 9.12: Celeste newest hop in town; Tom Shellhammer honored

* Celeste and . . . Teorem?
* Hop quiz
* Shellhammer honored
* Velvet Cake hop blend

Welcome to Volume 9, No. 12. Hop Queries Central is moving to Washington state. Soon. Hard to say how soon, because you may have read that recent events are keeping the disrupted housing market disrupted. Meanwhile, these dispatches may at times be brief. But I promise to get to the matter of discussing the quality brewers most in Cascade before long.

CELESTE AND . . . WHAT?

Celeste hops

West Coast Hop Breeding announced the release of Celeste, formerly known by experimental names WCHB-102 and 2B. She is named for heavenly beauty, and features bright, sweet, and clean notes of passion fruit, honeydew, and pine.

The news is noteworthy enough to merit a post of its own. If you didn’t read it and don’t want to click over, here are the basics. Celeste (10-12.8 alpha acids, 6-7% beta acids, 1.5-2.3 mL/100 grams total oil) is the second hop from WCHB, established by five Oregon hop farming families in 2016 to ensure that Oregon hop growers have a sustainable future by developing excellent aroma varieties. She is available through The Hop Guild, Charles Faram Canada and US, and direct from West Coast Hop Breeding.

Chris Holden at The Hop Guild describes Celeste as a small but mighty bulldog. She “has the potency to brew fun beers and sit at the big boy table with the big sexy hops,” he said. “My favorite is the lime and passion fruit combo that hits you in the face and carries through to the finished product.”

You can expect to find Celeste and other newcomers like Luna and Rhapzody on the International Hop Growers Convention list of 342 varieties “grown on Earth with an economic purpose” next year, unlike a hop like Monohon, which will not be widely grown. Looking over the 2025 list, I was surprised to see newcomer Teorem from France. She is grown pretty much exclusively for Brasserie Meteor (yes, you are seeing the same letters in both), France’s oldest brewery. However, Hop France must string a few extra plants to ensure against a shortfall, and a small sample recently made it to the Colorado. She is the most American-like variety to emerge from the Comptoir Agricole private breeding program and showed up in a beer from Milieu Fermentation Aurora. Will that be the only sighting?

HOP QUIZ

What hop variety shares her name with a hop disease?

Read more

WCHB looks to the heavens for newest hop name

A closeup look at the lupulin and Celeste, a hop developed by the West Coast Hop Breeding

West Coast Hop Breeding today announced the release of Celeste, formerly known by experimental names WCHB-102 and 2B. She is named for heavenly beauty, and features bright, sweet, and clean notes of passion fruit, honeydew, and pine.

Celeste (10-12.8 alpha acids, 6-7% beta acids, 1.5-2.3 mL/100 grams total oil) is the second hop from WCHB, established by five Oregon hop farming families in 2016 to ensure that Oregon hop growers have a sustainable future by developing excellent aroma varieties. Pat Leavy, one of the farmers in the collective, does the breeding, making crosses from germplasm he has collected during the past 20 years. Celeste has “heavy downy resistance plus powdery tolerance for production in organic systems.” The hops Leavy grows are certified organic.

Ben Smith at WCHB member B&D Farms adds, “Celeste yields well with a minimum of inputs.”

Celeste is available now through The Hop Guild, Charles Faram Canada and US, and direct from West Coast Hop Breeding.

At this moment, The Hop Guild has enough 2025 crop for full batch brewing. Chris Holden, director of sales and marketing, made it clear he his a fan while talking to brewers at the New York State Brewers Conference. He first smelled what was then called WCHB-102 sitting in bales at the mill while THB was producing Citra Hopsauce, its proprietary flowable extract. “The bales overpowered the Citra Hopsauce,” he said. “That told me that the she was a winner.”

He describes Celeste as a small but mighty bulldog. She “has the potency to brew fun beers and sit at the big boy table with the big sexy hops,” he said. “My favorite is the lime and passion fruit combo that hits you in the face and carries through to the finished product.”

Queries 9.11: Luna, Ramosa, Rhapzody, Nobella, Huell Classic, Monohon

* What’s new?
* Wet hop loving cattle
* Cryo him a River
* For your reading & listening pleasure

Welcome to Volume 9, No. 11. When I started writing about varieties that are likely new to you I realized how much space they would take up. That’s why my plan to look more closely at the qualities in Cascade hops that brewers prize most highly will have to wait until April. As will a report on what I learned last week at the New York State Brewers Conference.

NEW FLAVORS, FAMILIAR FLAVORS

In alphabetical order . . .

Spider charts for Huell Classic hops

– Huell Classic (5.7-8% alpha acids, 3.7-6.4% beta acids, 1.3 mL/100 grams total oil) has “the same herbal-grass, slightly spicy, and fruity aromas as traditional German hops, as well as the same gentle bittering quality.” Bred at the German Hop Research Center, Huell Classic is a daughter of Hallertau Tradition and an experimental Hüll male. Stepping back more generations, the male and female ancestors are genetically related to Hallertau Mittelfrüh and several also have Saaz genes in their background.

In advance of a commercial release of the hop this year, beers were brewed with her in both Germany and the U.S. The results were posted in The New Brewer (Nov-Dec 2025). In Germany, test batches were hopped with Herkules for bittering and finished with either Mittelfrüh or Classic for aroma. Although lab analyses indicated small differences, sensory panels did not detect any.

Luna hop sensory

– Luna (13.2-15% alpha acids, 7.5-8.2% beta acids, 1.9-2.5 mL/100 grams total oil) comes with a nifty video. A press release states, “Luna seemed like the obvious choice for a hop that is distinguished by lush mango, dark berry and spicy citrus characters, alongside a high polyphenol content that elevates the flavour profile and mouthfeel.”

Read more

Luna introduces flavour with a ‘u’

Luna hop sensoryIn a press release announcing that the experimental hop previously known at HPA-033 will be called Luna, Hop Products Australia states, “Just like our customers, our hops are big characters. When choosing a name, we like to consider both the hop’s flavour profile and its position in our portfolio. Luna seemed like the obvious choice for a hop that is distinguished by lush mango, dark berry and spicy citrus characters, alongside a high polyphenol content that elevates the flavour profile and mouthfeel.”

One more sentence from the press release to give you an idea which other varieties Luna is like to hang out with: “With an aroma intensity akin to Krush, and a biotransformation potential similar to Galaxy, Luna is a joy to experience in the whirlpool and dry hop.”

HPA suggests that a late whirlpool addition of 1-2g/L (0.4-0.7lb/bbl) accentuates spicy citrus characteristics, which can present as marmalade when interacting with darker malts. A dry hop of 4-10g/L (1.3-3.3lb/bbl) elevates the lush mango and dark berry character.

Luna is the result of a 2003 cross between a high alpha Australian male and Liberty, herself a cross made in Oregon between Hallertau Mittelfrüh and a German male. She contains 13.2-15% alpha acids, 7.5-8.2% beta acids, 1.9-2.5 mL/100 grams total oil.

Read more

Queries 9.10: All Cascade edition

* Hop quiz
* Cascade Cup
* Cascade Agenda
* Hop quiz answer

Welcome to Volume 9, No. 10. Wonder what happened at the 2026 American Hop Convention? I filed a report for Brewing Industry Guide. One takeaway is that although acreage may or may not shrink again in 2026, hop growers are focused on ensuring a healthy future. Elsewhere, Clayton Hops in New Zealand announced that experimental hop CIP 014 now has a proper name: Rhapzody. Beyond that, as the subject line states, this is an all-Cascade edition. Regular transmissions will resume in March.

HOP QUIZ

Which one of these hops is not an offspring of Cascade?
a) Crystal
b) Taiheke
c) Mandarina Bavaria
d) Mistral

CASCADE CUP WINNERS

Ethan Smith of Smith Valley Farms in Oregon won the 2025 Cascade Cup, B&D Farms in Oregon was second, and Perrault Farms in the Yakima Valley was third. Should you have forgotten, the Hop Quality Group created the competition in 2013, and its members judge the entries.

B&D Farms has won the cup three times, and (now) finished second twice. On Aug. 8, Ben Smith, the B in B&D, posted an Instagram photo with a comment that, “This is the probably the best Cascade field I’ve ever seen, and it will be my entry into the Cascade Cup.” It wasn’t. Smith changed his choice of what to enter after brewers made post-harvest selections. “The brewers know more than I do,” he said.

The competition wrapped up a great month for one of Smith’s sons, Ethan. He rents land for Smith Valley Farms from a neighbor and from B&D, he grows Crystal for Sierra Nevada Brewing, and Citra and Cascade for John I. Haas. Before the convention, he received a gold award from Haas for the quality of his Citra.

CASCADE AGENDA

I’m not gonna lie. It makes me smile to share these texts from Robert Young III, Mr. Everything at Tapped 33 Craft Brewhouse in Augusta, Georgia. He was briefly in Colorado and at the time drinking a draft beer called Cascade Agenda at Bierstadt Lagerhaus. It wasn’t actually a collaboration with Bierstadt, but we will get to that.

Read more