There was a time when “hop products” meant plugs or pellets instead of whole-cone hops. Brewers looking for efficiency switched from bales to cylinders, ramped up contact with the wort, got better utilization, and called it progress—and it must have been, considering how many centuries we’d been using just whole flowers.
Today, the hop landscape is much stranger—in a good way—and when it comes to hopping up our beers, we have more options than ever for how to do it. We can work with cryogenically separated lupulin powder, concentrated hop oils, terpene blends, and viscous hop extracts that look more like something that grew in a lab, not in an Oregon field.
If that sounds intimidating, it shouldn’t. These products exist for a reason: They concentrate the compounds brewers want while minimizing plant matter, flavor variability, and loss. The results are more intense flavor and aroma, greater efficiency, and better control over the final beer.
However, to use them well, we need to understand both what they are and what they are not. It also helps a lot to know how brewers have learned—often through trial and error—to get the most from them. Think of advanced hop products less as replacements for traditional hops and more as specialized tools: Used thoughtfully, they let us dial in aroma expression, reduce hop creep, or capture volatile compounds that would otherwise be lost.
“More tools” doesn’t always mean better beer. But when it comes to getting the most out of our hops, it’s worthwhile to keep an open mind—and, naturally, to learn from our mistakes.
A Primer on the New Forms
First things first: What do we mean when we say, “advanced hop products”?
Here, we’re talking especially about form rather than flavor—specifically, concentrated pellets, oils, and extracts, and plus certain products with specific functions (such as aroma boosters and foam enhancers). There are so many hop products these days, we can’t be exhaustive, but here are some of the ones you’re most likely to encounter.
Concentrated pellets are great “gateway products,” and they include brands such as Yakima Chief Hops Cryo, BarthHaas Lupomax, and Crosby Hops CGX pellets.
The companies produce them by separating lupulin glands from hop-leaf matter at very cold temperatures, then recompressing the concentrated resin. The result is a pellet with less vegetal material and more of the compounds that contribute bitterness, flavor, and aroma.
Then we have various liquid “flowable” that you can pour directly into beer, and there are different formulae for different uses. Once upon a time, brewers would use hop extracts only on the hot side for efficient, controlled bittering—and they can still do that—but today there are many options for boosting aroma and flavor.
Some of these extracts—such as BarthHaas Spectrum and YCH HyperBoost—are designed for the cold side, meant to replace or reduce dry-hop loads. Even later on the cold side, Abstrax recommends that brewers add its Quantum extract to the brite tank—and its oils are all aroma, contributing no bitterness whatsoever. Extracts designed for the whirlpool, meanwhile, include YCH DynaBoost and BarthHaas Incognito. Hopsteiner suggests its Salvo for late boil or whirlpool, while its more concentrated SalvoPlus can go into the hot or cold sides.
Notably, many of these products can also be used at other points in the process—and, inevitably, that’s an area where brewers have been experimenting on their own.
Whether dry or liquid—I’m just waiting for an advanced hop gas, at this point—all these products share the same basic logic: Remove the parts of hops that don’t contribute to aroma, concentrate the parts that do, and give brewers more control over how and when they’re added.
All these products promise similar benefits: less plant matter, less vegetal flavor, less ingredient loss, higher yield, and more aroma—at least, that’s the theory. In practice, home- and pro brewers quickly learn that different concentrated hop products behave differently in the brewhouse and that a few practical tricks can make all the difference.
Putting Them to Use
Using these products can create new challenges for your brewery, so let’s dive into the practical side of things.
One option is to choose a product that doesn’t require a process change—just a recipe change. Another is to make equipment or process changes that mitigate some of your (forgive me) stickier challenges when using these new products.
Longtime readers will know that, as a brewer, I prize simplicity. So, I like to start from a place where there’s little or no practical difference in how to use the product: concentrated pellets, especially in dry hopping.
Concentrated Pellets
These products behave basically like traditional T-90 pellets, just with a higher concentration of oils and acids. So, your usual process should work just fine; it’s only the quantity that you should consider adjusting.
“We have experimented with multiple products over the years,” says Andrew Sanderson, quality manager at Sly Fox Brewing in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. “We have found that Cryo and Lupomax products perform best when added using standard dry-hopping procedures—after the beer has reached terminal gravity and the bulk of the yeast has been removed.”
If there are any brewers left out there who’ve yet to try concentrated pellets, this should be reassuring: The mechanics of dry hopping—contact time, temperature, and timing relative to fermentation—remain familiar. However, Sanderson does recommend dry hopping only after a “soft” crash (to about 60°F/16°C) to reduce volatilization and the risk of hop creep, which may be more pronounced when using a concentrated product.
Overall, when it comes to concentrated pellets, the differences are mostly about dosage and efficiency, like learning to drive a car with a more powerful engine. Specifically, if you’re going to add them anywhere on the hot side—such as late boil or whirlpool—take note of the elevated alpha acids. While typical Citra T-90s, for example, might have 13 percent alpha acids, Citra Cryo pellets might have up to 28 percent. Add them heedlessly into hot wort without doing some calculations first, and you may end up with undrinkably bitter beer.
Flowables
As we move from the realm of somewhat familiar pellets into one that’s more liquidy or syrupy, life gets a little more difficult.
If you talk to enough brewers about advanced hop products, a recurring theme emerges: solubility. Many of these concentrated hop extracts are thick, sticky, and stubbornly resistant to dissolving into wort, even once you manage to get them out of the can or bottle. Brewers who simply dump them into a kettle or fermentor may soon discover that they’ve created a resinous, expensive blob instead of an evenly distributed hop addition.
Incognito—a popular hop extract, and one of the best known—has earned a reputation for this problem. Brewers often joke that it behaves more like tree sap than a brewing ingredient.
And yet, brewers are problem solvers. Jason De La Torre, cofounder and brewer at Ogopogo Brewing in San Gabriel, California, describes a mechanical solution designed to handle Incognito additions.
“We’ve been using Incognito for over six years,” he says, in addition to various other advanced products. Instead of adding Incognito to a spinning whirlpool, the Ogopogo team adds it during knockout. “We welded a bypass out of our whirlpool, right before our heat exchanger,” De La Torre says. “We have a canister filter inline that we [use to] dose the Incognito during knockout. I think we get the best efficiency using it that way.” This system ensures that the viscous extract disperses rapidly as hot wort moves through the heat exchanger.
Not every brewer will want to weld in some custom plumbing, but the underlying idea applies generally: Add sticky extracts where flow and turbulence will help disperse them quickly.
For a lower-tech approach, you can accomplish much the same thing by dosing these “flowables” into the kettle while circulating. That method will be familiar to many homebrewers who remember particularly sticky cans of malt extract.
At Sly Fox, Sanderson says, they add the Incognito (or similar product) to the fermentor, then knock out a small portion of wort—about 10 percent of the total volume—at 140°F (60°C). After the extract dissolves in that warm wort, they’ll transfer the rest of the batch at normal knockout temperatures, and fermentation proceeds as usual. “This method extracts a large amount of flavor and aromatic compounds from the product, with very little isomerization,” Sanderson says.
For home- or nanobrewers who lack dosing systems, the lesson should be clear: When dealing with viscous hop products, warm wort is your friend.
Hitting the Fermentation Window
One of the biggest advantages of advanced hop products is the ability to add them where you want them in the process—including during fermentation.
For brewers chasing biotransformation—that enzymatic yeast-hop interaction that can produce such fun aromas—timing is everything.
Sanderson says that certain flowable products work especially well in that fermentation window. “If you are looking to encourage some biotransformation, both Quantum and Spectrum work particularly well when added during fermentation,” he says. But the timing must be precise. “I would recommend adding them at, or shortly before, spunding the vessel. For us, this normally occurs around 2–4°P [1.008–1.016] before terminal gravity.”
Adding them at that stage of fermentation has two advantages. First, the fermentation is still active enough to drive biotransformation, but it’s less turbulent than peak fermentation. That reduces the risk of blowing off delicate hop aromatics.
Sanderson also notes that this kind of blowoff and volatilization is more pronounced with a concentrated product: “We prefer to add at this stage because it still allows for good biotransformation, but with less aggressive fermentation, helping retain the bulk of the aromatic components.”
And there’s another practical benefit: yeast health. “These products also do not adversely affect the yeast, so it can still be cropped and pitched into the next batch.” For breweries that re-pitch and manage yeast generations, that matters.
Tempering the Enthusiasm
With all the hype about advanced hop products, it’s tempting to treat them as universal solutions—but they’re not. Even craft brewers who embrace multiple products still use the traditional hop forms, and there are good reasons why.
For one thing, whole-leaf hops or standard pellets contribute subtle background complexities that highly refined extracts often lack. Advanced products tend to emphasize specific aromatic compounds rather than the full spectrum of hop chemistry. Think of it like the difference between a candle flame and the early-days LED bulbs that were jarring to the eye: Sometimes you want that whole spectrum rather than just a narrow band.
There are also stylistic considerations. Many classic beer styles, from pilsners to porters, rely on delicate hop balance or subtle background notes rather than explosive hop aroma. That’s not to say you can’t take advantage of these products in subtler beers—and, for sure, there are products geared specifically to more traditional or Noble-ish flavor profiles. However, you should be intentional with them.
Broadly, that probably means blending traditional and advanced products—and it definitely means some experimenting before jumping right into full-sized production batches, whether that’s five gallons or 50 barrels.
Concentrated Hop Advice
Brewers approaching advanced hop products for the first time often ask the same question: Where should I start?
I humbly offer a few general guidelines, with the usual caveat that your mileage may vary:
- First, start with pellets. Concentrated pellets are a low-risk way to explore concentrated hop products, and with some simple adjustments you can work them into your existing recipes.
- Second, adjust your dosage. These products are concentrated, after all, and it’s easy to overdo them. You’ll find dosage guides from most manufacturers, but also talk to your peers about their experiences—especially if you’re brewing a similar style, or on similar equipment, or at similar volume.
- Third, mind your solubility. Nothing wrecks consistency (and probably quality) faster than a clump of hop syrup sitting on the bottom of the kettle or fermentor and interacting with almost none of your beer.
- Fourth, keep good records. If you brew a great beer using these punchy products, it certainly would be nice to be able to repeat it. With that in mind…
- Last but not least, change only one thing at a time, whether it’s the product or the process or the recipe. Not only is this a good way to increase your confidence in the effect of a given change—maximize that internal validity!—but it also means you’ll be able to effectively learn and share with your fellow brewers.
Advanced hop products are still evolving, and the brewing community is collectively figuring out best practices. These are not magic ingredients, but they’re powerful tools—and like any good tools, their value depends on how skillfully they’re used.
And if recent years are any indication, brewers are just getting started.