Hop Products

With today’s advanced hop products, there are no silver bullets. Yet they can be powerful tools in the brewery—if used carefully, intentionally, and while heeding the advice of fellow brewers.

Whether it’s selecting very different lots of Nelson Sauvin or trialing new hop products to see what they can contribute, North Park founder and head brewer Kelsey McNair says he’s always looking for ways to squeeze in more hop flavor—but without leaving the realm of the familiar.

North Park founder and head brewer Kelsey McNair shares his approach and various techniques for achieving fully saturated hop flavor in IPA, West Coast pilsner, or any hop-forward style.

Pro brewers these days are learning about how best to take advantage of cold-side aroma extracts and other advanced hop products. Why shouldn’t you?

As it always does, the recent Craft Brewers Conference offered glimpses of where brewing may be going, whatever your scale. From terpenes to Dynaboost to new yeast strains, here are a few finds from the trade-show floor have us excited about what’s next.

Inner Voice strives for freshness—both in the flavor expression of their classic and progressive beers, and in the experience of their light and welcoming taproom.

Cryo, Incognito, Salvo, Spectrum, Phantasm, and more are all tools that Garrett Ward uses to punch up hop flavor in their juicy (yet still bitter) IPAs. He discusses how they use these new hop formats in both hazy and clear American IPAs.

Brewers are experimenting with a variety of ways, old and new, to squeeze even more aroma and flavor from their hops and cram it into their beers. But how much hop saturation is too much for drinkers?