For a brewery with a well-loved flagship brand, changing the recipe is fraught with opportunities for failure. Mess up a beloved beer, and customers will let you know that you blew it, but make it better (or give it more longevity in the package), and you’ll likely hear nothing at all. Flagstaff, Arizona’s Mother Road Brewing rose to the occasion recently, redesigning their Tower Station IPA with modern hop products and no pellets on the hot side to reduce brewhouse waste (and placate the local waste-management authority) and to boost efficiency and yield while reducing shipping costs. In this episode, produced in partnership with Hopsteiner and recorded in their experimental field on the Golden Gate farm in Prosser, Washington, Mother Road COO Peter Kruger shares the story of Mother Road’s embrace of modern hop products, alongside Hopsteiner West Coast sales rep (and former Bear Republic brewmaster) Roger Herpst and breeding research scientist Ryan Gregory.
Through this conversation, they touch on:
- hot-side efficiency and brewing with no hot-side pellets
- using concentrated T-45 pellets for dry hopping
- replacing singular hops with specially formulated hop blends such as Trident™
- maintaining foam stability with advanced hop products
- hop-derived fruit-like flavor through LLZ
- the Hopsteiner hop-breeding process
- new generations of hops with better genetics to provide familiar flavors at lower cost with lower environmental impact
And more.
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