Analysis of Hops/Degradation/Preservation methods

The supply of hops to the craft microbrewery industry sector is a significant economic contributor to the rural economy. The increased interest in and growth of, the microbrewing sector in Nova Scotia is creating new opportunity and potential demand for locally produced hops. When available, microbrewers are utilizing locally grown hops to create unique branded seasonally crafted beers. This allows them to offer beers with new and unique value propositions and to niche out market share in the very competitive beer marketplace. However, the hops supply for these Nova Scotia brewers are unable to keep up with the demand. Local hops are unable to meet this growing demand because it takes a number of years for a hop plant to reach its full yield, and there are other issues, such a lack of machinery to efficiently process the hops, that is impeding hop yard growth. The local industry has not used it’s own locally grown hops in Nova Scotia, as the quality of the hops grown here are not fully tried and tested. Nova Scotia hops are definitely at a different quality than those grown in Western parts of Canada, and that as growers here learn, that they will be able to increase quality of the local hops. In order to make use of anticipated increased local hop production while knowing the hop quality and maintaining consistent batch-to-batch beer quality, a local expanding brewery which grows its own hops for its own brewing would like to ensure its hops are of the highest quality, are of consistent quality, and are ‘understood’ in terms of their bittering and flavouring characteristics. An important contributor to the expansion of our local industry partner is a greater knowledge of the chemical composition of their own hops grown on-site. I undertook a small-scale research project, supported by the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), focused on determining the proportion of the three principal alpha and beta acids that characterizes the flavour of hops grown on-site and how the combination of different proportions of acids and total oil content contributes to the final taste and quality of the beers produced at the brewery. This hop oils characterization was concluded successfully, and now the brewery has an accurate knowledge of the critical hop composition and oil content of its hops. Currently, what is needed is more in-depth knowledge of how different methods of preservation of these hops impacts their acids and oil profile. This is critical because of the need to ensure product (beer) consistency over time; the hops grown and used by the brewery are used year-round, therefore understanding the degradation and optimizing the preservation over time is very important. I have obtained more funding from the Nova Scotia Productivity and Innovation Voucher Program to aid our

Industry partner to address preservation and storage of hops.