HAAS’ New Next Gen Hop Selection Makes Choosing Hops Accessible for Smaller Breweries

Photography courtesy of John I. Haas

Designed as almost a bespoke hop harvesting experience, the Next Gen Hop Selection allows smaller breweries to participate in the hop harvest.

Typically, a brewery must meet a minimum purchase amount to select lots. While these minimums can vary from company to company, they’re aimed at breweries producing a higher volume of beer—sometimes upward of 5,000 bbls a year.

“They are typically insanely high,” said Mickey Finn’s Head Brewer, Jason Martens, who has always wanted to go to hop harvest but has never worked at a brewery producing the right volume. “[Typically, you need to purchase] 2,200 pounds per variety, which is for breweries doing 5,000 barrels.”

The minimums in the Next Gen Hop Selection, however, were “much smaller and very much more manageable,” said Martens, noting he could purchase 220 pounds of Citra as opposed to 2,200, for example.

“As they grow and can purchase those larger told quantities,” said Van Oostrum, “we are here for them. We’re here for everyone; that’s the message we want people to know.”

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Next Glass

For the first year, the HAAS sensory teams put in a lot of time and effort to evaluate every single lot of hop harvest.

After getting sensory feedback on those lots, HAAS Sensory Manager Jeff Dailey built different buckets based on a sensory profile.

For instance, a more citrus-forward vs. a more sweet-forward blend with Citra.

“Those become the buckets the customers select from,” explains HAAS Southwest Central Sales Representative for Sales & Marketing Sydney Masovero. “We’re hoping year after year, you’ll have the same bucket you can choose or, if you want, you can pick a different bucket as well. Either way, you still get the option to select the hops that will be going into your beer.”

Basically, instead of picking “lots,” you choose pre-blended sensory buckets designed by the expert sensory teams at HAAS, currently named Profile #1, Profile #2, etc.

This year, the program offered Citra, Mosaic, El Dorado, Amarillo, Centennial, and Cascade, with each hop broken down into four different pre-blended buckets. Masovero said they also showed some representative samples of a newly released commercial variety called Krush, along with some other experimental HBC ones for customers who wanted to check them out.

“We leave it up to each customer whether they want to know the sensory profile (sweet-fruit-forward, citrus-forward, etc.) of the numbered blends before they select or after, similar to traditional selection practices,” explained Masovero. “Some people like to know all the information about what is on the table before, and some like to go in blind (my preference and more fun!); there’s no wrong or right way to do it.”

What stays the same, though is that each blend is a top-notch representative of the hop. “It’s all the same quality,” said Masovero, “but you get to choose which fits your beer style.”

For example, Martens, who experienced his first hop harvest because of the Next Gen Hop Selection, chose Profile #3, while Harbor Brewing Co. Head Brewer Adam Brose picked Profile #1.

“I like a little cattiness or punchiness out of Citra, but I still like that sweet citrus and fruit,” says Martens. “For me, it was finding a balance between whatever presented the best balance of what I go for in Citra.”

Brose, on the other hand, looked for a fruitier expression of Citra.

“Mine had a little bit more melon and berry in the background,” said Brose, noting there were also blends with a little more cattiness, floralness, and just straight citrus.

For Mosaic, Martens chose a blend that “presented the most fruit,” he said, “because Mosaic tends to have that rough dankness in the background, so I wanted it to be fruit-forward to balance.”

Photography courtesy of John I. Haas

Basically, the same way as if a bigger brewery came to Yakima to rub hops.

As someone who had been to Yakima several times with other companies during the hop harvest, Brose noted the Next Gen Hop Selection was on par with his previous experiences. “We were treated really well,” he shared. “It was just a really cool experience.”

Brose looked at four different buckets of Citra. “They brought out the core sample from the bale, and we just sat there, rubbed it, really got our nose in it, and went back and forth between each one to see how we liked it and took our own notes.”

Masovero says their sensory team is there to help in whatever way needed, whether starting a conversation about what notes a brewer picks up or letting them dissect everything silently.

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Next Glass

For the Next Glass team, Masovero and the team spent a long time discussing what we got from each profile we smelled. Masovero even shared a handy booklet with the Citra flavor lexicon for reference.

And HAAS’ hospitality goes beyond just the hop rubbing.

Afterward, Brose says the HAAS team invited him to hang out next door and enjoy a few beers in the company’s hospitality lounge.

“They weren’t just like, hey, get in here for a selection and go,” he explained. “It was more like, hey, come be a part of this experience with us.”

Martens says HAAS also took him to a few farms to check out some experimental hop plots and chat with HAAS Director of Hop Breeding, Michael Ferguson.

“I was blown away,” he said. “I thought it was really cool for small brewers like us. It was a great experience.”

Photography courtesy of John I. Haas

For a smaller brewery, the benefits of participating in the Next Gen Hop Selection are numerous.

At Mickey Finn’s, Martens typically purchases one or two eleven-pound bags of hops or even smaller one-pound bags for a one-off beer. But without the opportunity to select his own lots every year, he says he can get hops that vary in flavor and quality.

Sometimes, he’ll open up a bag that particularly wows him. “How do I repeat that?” Martens says he’s always asked himself because he has no idea if the next bag he opens will smell the same.

In other words, he doesn’t have a ton of transparency into what he’s working with, so consistency and reliability have become two buzzwords for Martens.

“If you pay attention to World Beer Cup and the Great American Beer Festival winners, year after year in the hoppy categories, they are typically a little bigger breweries, who are always talking about their hop selection,” he explained.

Being able to select his own lots of, say, Citra and Mosaic gives Martens a clarity he’s never had before. “Once I get [the hops I picked] in my core IPAs, I’ll know exactly what I’m working with, which allows me to have more consistency, which can be a challenge as a smaller pub brewer,” says Martens. “Now, I know what I’m working with, at least on those main varieties for twelve batches of IPA throughout the entire year. For me, as a brewer, that consistency is nice.”

Martens says he can now make other tweaks to balance out where those hops land him. “Typically, let’s say … for a hazy, we’re finishing at four Plato—maybe plus or minus a few tenths of a degree—I might change that and maybe make it a little drier to accentuate hops in a better way or a little sweeter,” he said. “We’ll see!”

He adds, “The proof will be in the pudding, but hopefully, it will help us get more dialed in our beer.”

Brose hopes a program like this will also help him keep his beers consistent not only over the next 365 days but also year after year, especially if it means he doesn’t always have to travel to Yakima.

With HAAS tracking which blends brewers picked from the year before, Brose says he’ll have the opportunity to pick that one again or go for something new. “That leaves out a lot of guesswork that makes it a lot more accessible for us as a brewery to maybe even forgo a selection because we have to use our resources elsewhere and be like, hey, just give us this one again,” he said. “We trust you guys.”

Masovero says that’s actually a significant benefit of the Next Gen Hop Selection. “There’s that level of consistency year after year,” she explained. “A lot of customers express [it’s a benefit] if they don’t have to pay for a trip to Yakima because, for some of them, it’s more of a burden than something fun.”

Photography courtesy of Magic Muncie | Next Glass

HAAS hopes to run the Next Gen Hop Selection every year and add additional hops to the experience.

As the program grows, they’d also like to invite more small breweries to participate.

If you think the Next Gen Hop Selection would be a good fit for your brewery, you can reach out to HAAS directly. For those who already have accounts with HAAS, you can contact your sales rep; otherwise, you can email [email protected].