Professor Good Ales

Dan Wheat/Capital Press

A worker fastens trellis wire to poles about 15 feet above the ground for a new hop planting at a farm between Prosser and Benton City last March. The planting was postponed because of drought. Fields like this will be planted this year.

MOXEE, Wash. — For only the third time in the past 10 years, the United States bested Germany to lead the world in hop production last year, according to a final 2015 report by Hop Growers of America in Moxee.

The U.S. — overwhelmingly Washington, Oregon and Idaho — produced 80.2 million pounds of hops which was 42 percent of the world production, compared to Germany at 62.2 million pounds and 33 percent, according to the report.

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Courtesy Tom Becham…

It was once said by a very wise person that no one is ever wrong when they taste a beer. Everyone tastes beer differently. Someone’s flavor masterpiece is another person’s drain pour — that’s just the fact of genetics and sensory science.

There has been a general agreement amongst brewers over a class of flavors that indicate that something went wrong with the brewing process or fermentation, however — most beer people know them as off-flavors. Getting to know and recognize off-flavors is somewhat difficult for the average homebrewer without significant monetary resources, but it’s definitely not impossible. With some guidance, even the casual beer geek can set up an affordable off-flavors tasting panel with friends. Let’s talk about some sensory basics first before getting into the nitty-gritty of off-flavors.

Sensory Basics

There are some bigger breweries out there that can use expensive pieces of equipment to precisely measure attributes of off-flavors in their beer. However, most craft and homebreweries have to utilize the most precise, cheap, and fickle instrument of all — the human palate. It’s a fact that we humans can detect thousands of flavor and aromatic chemical compounds to such a degree that the fanciest gas chromatograph with mass spectrometry can’t hold a candle to our ability to detect off-flavors. The only thing that gets in our way is bias.

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It’s a day or two after the yeast was pitched in your most recent homebrew and there are signs of fermentation in the form of foam called krausen. A few days later, the rocky froth nearly fills the headspace of your fermenter as the yeast work through their busiest period, known as high-krausen.

German lager brewers traditionally took high-krausen wort from a newly fermenting batch and added it to a fully-fermented batch of the same recipe. This process, known as krausening, introduces healthy, new yeast to pick up where the primary yeast—which went dormant due to the layering temperatures—left off.

The Uses of Krausening

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It’s that time of year again, when the post-holiday, mid-winter blues turn to anticipation and excitement about all the amazing craft beers on the horizon in the coming year.

To celebrate, we once again present our picks for the biggest beer releases of the year. For 2016, we’ve introduced a six-pack of brews that includes some fresh new faces that may not have been on your radar, though we did include an old familiar friend, Pliny the Younger. Hey, you can’t leave out a beer that requires a two-week release party!

So get your plane tickets or plan that road trip, and get ready to savor some of craft brewing’s most dynamic and sought-after beer releases.

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