When you lift a glass of IPA to your nose and smell the complex, floral aroma, you probably aren’t thinking about botany or genetics.
However, those aromas—and the hops varieties that they come from—are the results of generations of hops breeding. New hops varieties appear all the time, and more are in the pipeline. Here’s how they come into being.
Let’s start at the beginning to get the big picture. We all know that beer is made from malt, hops, water, and yeast. Brewers yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is a fungus and water (H2O) is a molecule. Malt is most often made from barley (Hordeum vulgare), which is a flowering plant (or angiosperm). Like all grasses (including all cereal grains), barley is a monocot (its seed contains only one embryonic leaf), one of the two types of angiosperms.
That’s Classified
The hops plant (Humulus lupulus) is also a flowering plant, but it is a dicot (or eudicot), the more abundant type of angiosperm. Its seed has two embryonic leaves. Of the more than forty orders of dicots, hops plants belong to the Order Rosales, which comprises roses and their relatives—including apples, strawberries, and peaches. Of the nine families within Order Rosales, the hops plant belongs in the Family Cannabaceae, along with hackberries and—of course—hemp and cannabis. There are three species of hops—Humulus yunnanensis, H. japonicus, and H. lupulus—the last of which is the species used in brewing.
Let’s Talk About Sex
Hops plants are dioescious, meaning they have male and female flowers on separate male and female plants. Hops plants don’t produce showy flowers with large petals. Instead the flowers are small spiky-looking structures.