The Cutting-Edge Ingredients Making IPAs More Pungent Than Ever

On a recent weeknight, I asked my wife to smell my beer.

She sized me up with a skeptical side-eye, stepping back.

“I swear, this isn’t a pull-my-finger prank,” I said, cracking open a tall, trophy-gold can of Hazicus Maximus, a new double IPA from Lagunitas Brewing in Petaluma, Calif. “Just one sniff.”

She warily accepted the can and inhaled deeply, her eyes widening with each whiff of dank grapefruit — like smoking high-grade cannabis in a Florida citrus grove. “That smells so good,” she said, sipping the potent IPA.

The striking and enticing scents came from a pungent blend of hops, led by fruity and candy-like experimental variety HBC 630, and terpenes — organic compounds that give plants, herbs, and fruits their signature aromatics — from the Grapefruit Kush cannabis strain. The concentrated liquid emulsion, from Abstrax Hops, is added at the very end of brewing, when the fermented beer is in a brite tank and awaiting packaging, for a finishing automatic boost.

“If the experimental hop is the bass player of Hazicus Maximus, then the terps are the lead singer,” says Jeremy Marshall, the Lagunitas brewmaster. “Together they get to be pals on our palate.”

Since the bitter-IPA boom of the aughts, the American IPA has evolved into a high-powered tool calibrated to deliver appealing yet intense flavors and fragrances to drinkers. Our current IPA epoch prioritizes turbocharged fruitiness and intense scents. Creating love at first sniff once required breweries to add lavish amounts of hops, dry-hopping IPAs two, three, or four times.

“At some point, your liquid can only absorb so much,” says Chris Baum, the head brewer and a co-owner of Varietal Beer Co. in Sunnyside, Wash.

To help brewers boost aromatics, hop companies are developing high-tech solutions that are fueling today’s most fragrant IPAs. Crosby Hops in Woodburn, Ore., is cryogenically freezing fresh hops, helping brewers create harvest-fresh beers any time. John I. Haas, a hop supplier in Yakima, Wash., blends botanicals and hop oils to create Euphorics that can add intense yet familiar fruity flavors, such as Pineapple Paradise and Peachy Keen. And Abstrax Hops in Tustin, Calif., created the Skyfarm series of fruit flavors from strawberry to blood orange by using terpenes, no need for fruit purée.

“Shipping whole cone hops across the country is not the most efficient way to brew beer.”

“Skyfarm has resonated so heavily with the industry,” says Ross Hunsinger, the brand director at Abstrax Hops, which counts New Belgium, Firestone Walker, and SweetWater as customers. “Brewers are able to add a straight-up fruit flavor to a 9 percent anything. People are approaching brewing so differently than 20 years ago.”

Striving for Extra Aromatics and Efficiency

Brewers can amplify an IPA’s fragrance through extra hops, but the additional plant matter soaks up valuable beer. Hop companies are preventing loss and making brewing more efficient by creating concentrated extracts such as Salvo, from Hopsteiner, and pellets such as Cryo Hops from Yakima Chief Hops. It uses liquid nitrogen to separate hops’ vegetal, grassy outer leaves from the interior lupulin glands containing resins, oils, and acids that lavish IPAs with colossal scents.

Big aromas are paired with little waste. “For brewers, there’s a huge necessity right now for cost savings while not sacrificing quality,” says Bryan Pierce, the chief sales and marketing officer at Yakima Chief Hops. “We’ve had a couple customers where it’s like, ‘I’m getting an extra keg or two out of every batch.’”

Last year, the company upped the ante by releasing DynaBoost, a flowable oil extract that pumps up the fragrant profile of specific varieties, including Citra and Simcoe. Yakima Chief Hops then developed the even more concentrated HyperBoost. So many different products can seem like overkill, but it’s helpful to think of them like different shades of paint.

To make more expressive beer, “you’re now layering in different flavor components,” Pierce says, noting that IPA powerhouses Von Ebert Brewing, in Portland, Ore., and North Park Beer Company in San Diego have embraced the new tools.

Hops are often reduced to simple descriptors. Nelson Sauvin calls to mind white wine, while floral Cascade evokes floral grapefruit. “When we smell a hop variety, we use the lexicon in our mental library to try to describe what we’re smelling,” says Alejandro Cortés González, the brewing solutions specialist at Haas.

“We wanted to ramp up the punchy elements. We’re really hell-bent on getting the flavor and aroma where we want them to be.”

Hops, though, contain numerous terpenes that paint a composite picture. A Citra hop, he says, might evoke mango, lime, and pine resin, “but it’s not quite like that. It’s a combination of subtle aromas and nuances that create this expression.”

What if a brewer wants to enhance a hop’s pineapple essence without, well, adding extra hops? That led Haas to collaborate with flavor specialist Intrepid Brewing, a sister company of True Terpenes, on the concentrated Euphorics, an emulsification of aromatic oils and water. A smidgen of Pineapple Paradise Daydream — just three milliliters per barrel of beer — can deliver a complimentary impact. More pineapple, no pineapple purée or hops required. “You can potentially extend that guava profile for longer with a little bit of help from Euphorics,” González says.

Aromatically speaking, few things are more fleeting than fresh hops. Their fragrances fade and degrade soon after harvest, and breweries rush to brew fresh-hop beers during late summer and early fall. During that time, breweries nationwide regularly order Crosby’s fresh hops, but delivering hops faster than they decay comes at great cost.

“Shipping whole cone hops across the country is not the most efficient way to brew beer,” says Zak Schroerlucke, the senior marketing manager at Crosby.

Several years ago, the company started flash-freezing fresh hops and turning them into CGX Nuvo, a sticky green substance reminiscent of Kinetic Sand, preserving their harvest fragrances for a future brew day. The company minimizes degradation of CGX Nuvo by storing it at zero degrees Fahrenheit until brewers are ready to brew.

“It opens up access to fresh hops for brewers all over the country,” Schroerlucke says. Why not blend fall’s first ripe hops with another hop, or concentrated product, creating a new symphony of scents? The combination could be a deciding factor for today’s overwhelmed drinker.

“The bar is set higher when someone is ordering an IPA from any brewery,” Schroerlucke says. “You’re expecting big flavor and big aroma.”

Rewriting Recipes for Boosted Aromatics

For many brewers, creating IPAs with appealing intensity is one of the most important parts of their jobs. As the brewmaster of Pure Madness Group in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Max Shafer steers both the Melvin Brewing and Roadhouse Brewing brands with a “consolidated goal of making more aromatic and flavorful beer.”

He’s experimented with every advanced hop product, most notably in Roadhouse’s Plasma hazy IPA. It’s built with four different products derived from El Dorado hops, a cultivar that evokes watermelon Jolly Ranchers. “We’ve amplified and multiplied the scope of El Dorado,” Shafer says, helping the IPA reach new depths of flavor.

Shafter is so smitten with advanced hop products — name any one and he’s tried it — that they’ve altered how he writes recipes. “If we want to feature Mosaic, we think about which ways we can use it,” he says. “It’s really enhanced that recipe writing process.”

Ten years ago, it was easy to stoke consumer excitement at the merest mention of Citra and Mosaic; now they’re old hat.

Cutting-edge products are also helping breweries refresh recipes. Solemn Oath Brewery opened in Naperville, Ill., in 2012 with Snaggletooth Bandana, an IPA boasting punchy bitterness and big scents of citrus. The brewery recently paused the beer’s production and retooled it, layering in Incognito extract derived from grapefruit-like Centennial hops.

“We wanted to ramp up the punchy elements,” says John Barley, the CEO and founder. The Incognito cranked up Snaggletooth’s perceived freshness, creating a more arresting drinking experience. “We’re really hell-bent on getting the flavor and aroma where we want them to be,” Barley says.

These advanced hop products can deliver aromatics beyond the IPA. At Varietal, Baum uses Euphorics and the aqueous HopKick extract, a Haas product offered in fragrant varieties including Centennial and Mosaic, to produce his fizzy Howl hop water that hits the tropical and citrus-y sweet spot. “If you drink some hop waters, they’re just boiled hops,” Baum says. “That’s gross. I don’t want that flavor in my mouth.”

Not every scientific achievement is worth altering an IPA’s profile, or building a new brand around. Matt Cole is the brewmaster of Fat Head’s Brewery, which has won armloads of awards for IPAs such as Head Hunter.

It’s hard for Fat Head’s to change core beers, Cole says, and justifying the expense of these new aromatic tools can also be tough. Just 50 milliliters of Euphorics, for example, can cost more than $130. (Hass recommends 3 milliliters per barrel of beer, so using Euphorics in a 30-barrel batch would cost nearly $250.) They can be “more expensive than adding excessive amounts of hops,” Cole says. “It’s a balancing act of what they contribute and the returns we get.”

Sometimes value extends beyond a brew kettle. Ten years ago, it was easy to stoke consumer excitement at the merest mention of Citra and Mosaic; now they’re old hat. For breweries, using advanced hop products can provide both fresh fragrances and sales pitches for customers.

“Last year, when we launched DynaBoost and HyperBoost, a brewer reached out to me and said, ‘I’m really excited you launched this because it gives me something new to sell to my customers in a time where we’re challenged,’” says Pierce of Yakima Chief Hops.

When it comes to IPAs, the sweet smell of success is evolving, one terpene at a time. “This is an awesome era for having the tools to be able to create different experiences,” says Barley of Solemn Oath. “We’ve got to define our future for the next 10 years.”

The article The Cutting-Edge Ingredients Making IPAs More Pungent Than Ever appeared first on VinePair.