* Noble or landrace?
* Roy Farms & Abstrax
* Good news from England
* Hop profile: Callista
* Additional reading
– New carbon footprint chart
– BarthHaas 2023 Harvest Guide
Welcome to Vol. 7, No. 11. Thanks again to Best of Craft Beer Awards for sponsoring Hop Queries, and to readers who have made individual contributions.
YOU SAY “NOBLE” — I SAY “LANDRACE”
Last month, I promised to write about “Old World” and “New World” hops, figuring I would consider if the terms tell brewers anything meaningful. Turns out, some background is needed. That first, then next month a look at why molecular markers may be useful when examining where new and old worlds meet.
Not surprisingly, the story that started this off suggests the “most important of the [Old School] bunch are the four ‘noble hop’ varieties varieties used to make pilsners and lagers: Hallertau Mittelfrüh, Tettnanger, Spalt, and Saaz.”
You might be nodding in agreement, but I am shaking my head. In “The Oxford Companion to Beer,” Adrian Tierney-Jones writes, noble hops is “a term that has an undeniable ring of antiquity and distinction to it, yet is merely a marketing tag and a recent vintage at that.” And, “Today there is no longer any agreement as to which hops do and do not belong to the lofty ranks for Humulus lupulus nobility.”
Tierney-Jones spoke with German hop scientists Adrian Foster before writing the Oxford Companion entry. What Germans called “fine aroma hops” in the 1970s sometimes became known as “noble aroma hops” in other languages, and neither term was ever officially defined, Forster explained to me in an email. “Therefore, not all brewers and hop merchants have the same understanding of which hop varieties rank among fine aroma hops.”