The Story of Hops
And then there is the willow wolf, whose winding, choking growth is as destructive to the willow as a wolf is to sheep. -Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 77AD
The Wolf Vine
Hops, humulus lupulus, are known as the wolf vine for their aggressive, choking growth over nearby plants.
Pliny the Elder’s vivid description of hops as a little wolf (lupulus) is still used nearly two thousand years later in the scientific name for hops: humulus lupulus. The Roman historian noticed this aggressive vine growing up to eight metres (twenty-six feet) in length by winding its tough, barbed twine around anything growing nearby. Willows, it seems, were common prey.
So how did a plant with an evocative, predatory name come to be known by the less impressive or even slightly silly name hop? No clear explanation survives. It’s possible that the name comes from an early word for hopped beer hoppe, which itself developed out of the Anglo-Saxon word hoppan (to climb). But we don’t know for sure.
We do know that people enjoyed beer for eight thousand years before they started adding hops to it. Specifically, hop flowers. The hop vine is good for making rope but it’s the flower with its delicate, aromatic yellow powder that makes the plant a critical ingredient in modern beer. The Romans had little use for these bitter flowers and it wasn’t until centuries after Pliny’s death that they start to appear as entries in the pages of history.
Our story begins with the first written record of hops as an ingredient in beer, etched onto the vellum pages of a medieval text by the hand of Bishop Adelhard in 822 at the Corbie Monastery in modern-day Amines, France. From there, hops crept from the shadow of obscurity into the brew kettles of central Europe until, like the aggressive wolf vine, they had choked out competing flavourings and held the entire brewing world in their tight embrace.
The Origin of Hopped Beer
A Household Brewery
Beer was considered a food, like bread, for most of history. And for most of the past nine thousand years woman were the brewers. The first alehouses were extensions large households built to make extra money by selling surplus drinks. There were important centres for medieval community life.
Women did most of the brewing in the Middle Ages. Beer was made at home and like other drinks it was considered food. Like bread. Some large households produced a surplus of beer and, when they could afford it, built a surplus of seating to go with it. These were called alehouses.
They weren’t called beerhouses because beer hadn’t been invented yet. Beer is what people called ale when it was brewed with hops. Before brewers began using hops they brewed ale and flavoured it with a mix of herbs called gruit. This could be anything from spruce buds to bog myrtle, juniper or heather, or really anything at all so long as people enjoyed it. These herbs contributed to flavour, helped preserve the ale, and made it more nutritious.
Ale was until recently seen as a healthy drink that could “balance the humours” and in so doing make people well and fit. There are historical recipes aimed at a variety of needs from giving people an energy boost to curing sickness or general malaise. One recipe that included sage, wormwood and even horseradish was considered “very proper for People of gross fat Constitutions, whose Glands are apt to be loaded with tough clammy humors.” It was said to be especially effective when taken in the morning.
The medical theory that illness was caused by an imbalance of the four humors (yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm) was developed by the Greek physician Hippocrates in 400 BC but was just starting to catch on in at Bishop Adelhard’s monastery. The 8th and 9th Centuries were a time of early globalization in Europe. The powerful Carolignians united all Western Europe except for the Iberian Peninsula under the great warrior king Charlemagne. Charlemagne spread not only Christianity, but also literature and science from the Classical world, and Arabic scholarship from the Middle East. His monks worked hard to make Latin translations of work by Classical Greek and contemporary Islamic scholars available from France to Italy. Bishop Adelhard may have read work by an Arab-Christian doctor named Yuhanna ibin Masawaih who valued hops for their antibacterial properties, to assist digestion and as a sleep aid.
Even if Bishop Adelhard hadn’t heard of doctor Masawaih there were many other Islamic scholars who were both popular in Europe and writing about the curative properties of hops. Hops were mostly foraged but hop gardens (humlonaria) appeared in Europe at the same time the Carolingians were importing and promoting scholarship from abroad. Hops may have been used regularly as one of the herbs making up gruit mixtures or perhaps only sporadically. We’ll likely never know because most writing at the time was on paper rather than the more durable and expensive vellum. Vellum, a sturdy writing material made from cured and stretched calf skin, is our great window into the Middle Ages. But it was far too precious for everyday writing like recipes.
The earlier evidence of the regular use of hops in beer comes from the 11th century. Beer, as the hopped version of ale, owes its origins to the polymath, Benedictine abbess and future saint Hildegaard von Bingen. Hildegaard produced a systematic examination of plants and their uses, published as her 1158 book Physica. Physica is one of the most famous medical texts ever written and is the first record of hops being used as a preservative in beer. Before Hildegaard, beer had to be brewed with a high alcohol content if brewers wanted it to have a long shelf life. This was expensive. It required more grain, incurred more grain tax, and used more firewood to produce that regular ale. Hildegaard discovered that adding hops made beer last longer than ale even with less alcohol. It was a revolutionary discovery.
Hildegaard von Bingen
Hildegaard von Bingen (from Bingen) discovered, or was at least the first to write about, the preservative qualities of hops in beer. Her work on medicinal plants, Physica, is one of the most influential medical books of all-time. Hildegaard was also a composer, philosopher, mystic, and Benedictine abbess. She founded two monasteries and is a Catholic saint. This image is an AI rendering based on existing sketches of the Saint.
Hops made economic sense. It was a magical ingredient that saved money and, possibly, even improved productivity. People drank on the job during the Middle Ages. A lot. Just how much depended on the type of work and how hard it was but the average worker consumed between two and ten pints of beer or ale per day. With a labour force that was constantly drinking, employers must have been keen to not only save money on the beer that fed them but also to have found a lower alcohol option. It probably helped that it tasted good, too. After Hildegaard’s discovery the bitter, floral taste of hops began to spread across Europe and would soon become popular for its own sake.
Europe Develops a Taste for Hops
Hopfen, hops in German, became progressively more common in brewing records during the 13th and 14th centuries as hopped beer grew in popularity in the Low Countries, Bohemia, and central Europe. By the 15th century hops were a common ingredient across the Continent.
The use of hops as a preservative created an incentive to brewed beer in larger batches. By the 13th century brewing was shifting from a mostly household chore for women to a professional trade for men. Early commercial breweries employed eight to ten workers. They sold most of their beer locally at first but soon launched a profitable large-scale export trade once Germans developed a standard barrel size that was easy to manufacture, exchange, and re-use. Men now brewed most of the beer produced in Europe, especially in cities and large towns where there was a lot of local affordable beer. Women still brewed in the countryside and were responsible for much of what we know today as farmhouse style beers.
Commercial brewing was regulated by guilds and rulers would often give monopolies to the Church to help them raise revenue. Monasteries had always brewed, but mostly for their own consumption. The Church monopolies generated enough money to draw attention and anger from an increasingly powerful merchant class. They did not last long. Rulers began rescinding brewing monopolies in the 14th century and by the 16th century breweries were mostly secular businesses.
Monks Drawing Yeast
Monks have always brewed, but began commercial production at-scale in the 13th century. In the late Middle Ages the English word for yeast was godisgood (God is Good). Yeast was a magical but poorly understood substance that transformed malty sugar water into delicious beer. Brewers would scoop yeast foam off of a fermenting batch and add it to a new “blood warm” batch to get fermentation started.
Some monasteries continued to brew, and some do to this day. These are often known as Abbey-style beers. They include the 11 remaining Trappist breweries, over seventy other breweries also run by monks, and the world’s oldest continuously operating brewery at the Benedictine abbey at Weihenstephan, in continuous operation since 1040.
By the 15th century hops, like Charlemagne, had conquered Western Europe albeit much more slowly and quietly. And just as Charlemagne had turned a continent of pagans into zealous Christians, the delicious qualities of hops had turned the hearts of hop-less gruit drinkers to a new way of life. Or at least a new way of making beer. Gruit, the hop-less ale made with a blend of herbs that varied by region and season, had been brewed for millennia. But like the wolf vine described by Pliny, hops had sprung up to choke out the ancient gruit market after only a few centuries on the brewing scene. Their use would even become law in the world’s new brewing superpower. Bavaria.
The early 15th century was an uncertain time in Bavaria. A recent war of succession, campaigns in Italy, rebellions within the German territories, and the rumbling of religious discontent that would lead to the Protestant Reformation were all happening at once. Wilhem IV, Duke of Bavaria, needed to maintain order and be ever ready to field and feed an army. Duke Wilhelm addressed his food security challenge with Teutonic efficiency and an eye to his people’s love of beer. He created the first beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, on April 23, 1516.
The Reinheitsgebot declared that beer must be made with only barley, hops, and water. Yeast is not included as a permissible ingredient because people did not understand microbes at the time and didn’t know what it was. The new beer law created pride in pure, high quality Bavarian beer. At the same time, it ensured that rye and wheat, popular in beer but essential for bread, was reserved for food.
The Reinheitsgebot was a publicity coup for hops. If the Bavarians, famous for their excellent beer, were not even permitted to use any other flavourings, how much were these really needed? Besides, the practical German beers weren’t only delicious, they lasted longer and required less grain. Europe was impressed. But as is their wont, the English were sceptical.
Hops were not popular yet in the United Kingdom. This is where ale was brewed. It was a point of pride. Hopped beer was for Europeans, not the English. Dutch immigrants had introduced hops to England a century before, but the public was sceptical. It wasn’t until a hop growing industry emerged near Kent in the 1520s that the public began to see that hops could be an English thing, too. Within a century un-hopped ale was no longer popular. Richard Bradley, British author of a popular 1729 book called The Riches of a Hop Garden tells a story from the early 1600s that shows the how the public had turned its back on ale in favour of beer;
…what Grace it yielded to the Taste… all Men may judge, that have Sense in their Mouths: And if the Controversy be betwixt Beer and Ale, which of them shall have the Place of Pre-eminence, it suffices for the Glory and Commendation of the Beer; that herein our own Country Ale giveth place unto it; and that most part of our Countrymen doth abhor and abandon Ale, as a loathsome Drink; whereas in other Nations Beer is of great Estimation, and is by Strangers preferred as the most choice and delicate Drink.
To translate that passage into 21st century English, it says that anyone with “sense in their mouths” prefers hoppy beer to un-hopped ale. Beer deserves the glory while ale is abandoned as a “loathsome drink.” Hops had clearly caught on. Ale, at least according to Bradley, had become a backwards drink for backwards people.
Brewing records back up the claim that beer was the drink of England by the 16th century. Recipes for stouts and porters of the time contain what would today be considered an obscene volume of hops for those styles. Heavily hopped strong dark beers were a popular export product, particularly for customers in the Balkans and Russia.
Merchant Ships Cross the Baltic
Beer degrades over time as it is exposed to heat and oxygen, both of which happened on sea voyages. Brewers did their best to preserve their cargo by making high alcohol, heavily hopped export beers. The first of these were the strong porters sent to Catherine the Great’s imperial court in the late 1700s, and then the strong, hoppy ales sent to India in the early 1800s. Today, these beers are known as Imperial Stout and India Pale Ale.
Although beer lasted longer than ale, hops could only keep it tasting fresh for about a month, given the storage conditions of the day. Beer was prone to either going bad or losing much of its initial qualities during long sea voyages. Brewers accounted for this by increasing both the alcohol and hop content of their export stouts hoping this would deliver their beer to foreign markets in top form. The strategy worked and northern Europe become a massive export market for British brewers. By doubling down on the time-tested preservative duo of high alcohol and lots of hops brewers also created a new style of super-strong dark beer that we know today as Imperial Stout.
The Tsarina Catherine the Great and her imperial court famously loved big, bold export stouts from England. With well over 10% alcohol and what is today an unrecognizable amount of hops for a dark beer, the export stouts of the late 1700s were like nothing ever produced. The lesson was soon applied to pale export beers as well. Within two decades of Catherine’s death these strong, dark export beers would inspire a new style of beer that remains the gold standard in hoppiness to this day. The India Pale Ale, or IPA.
Hoppy light-coloured beers gained popularity throughout the 18th century United Kingdom for their clean, refreshing hop flavour and absence of heavy malt. Porters and stouts were great, but they weren’t a summer drink. They certainty weren’t a drink suitable for a climate like tropical India. British expats working in sweltering conditions in the colonies were anxious for a refreshing taste of home. To their horror, when their coveted pale ales finally arrived after months at sea they tasted muted, bland, or even awful.
Although these beers were delicious when consumed fresh, they had the same problem as export stouts – they didn’t hold up on the long sea voyage to the British Overseas Territories. The sea route to India was particularly hard on beer. Hops degrade with light, oxygen, and temperature. The level of degradation is relative to the intensity of these factors that the amount of time available for them to do their work. The three-month trip from the UK to India crossed the Tropic of Cancer once and the Tropic of Capricorn twice, before ending in a sweltering environment. If beer couldn’t hold up on a Baltic sea voyage it really suffered on the way to India.
An enterprising London brewer, George Hodgson, found a solution. Boost the alcohol of pale ales and add as many hops as you would for an export stout. The result was a pale coloured export beer so bitter that by the time it reached India it tasted like a fresh pint poured back in the Empire’s capital. The British expats serving King and Country overseas loved it. It didn’t matter that it was over 7% alcohol. It was delicious. Business was so good that Alsopp thought he could increase his margins by shipping his beer himself. So, in 1822 he decided to cut out the company that helped him build his export business, the British East India Company. The Company, as it was known, was the largest business in the world and had the political clout of a nation-state with the power to make and enforce laws in India. Hodgson’s plan to cut them out of the IPA trade didn’t work out.
The chairman of the East India Company, Campbell Marjoribanks, was irked by what he saw as a slight by the brewer his company had helped make a success. He was looking for a new supplier of hoppy pale ale when a chance encounter over dinner with an entrepreneurial brewer visiting London from Burton-upon-Trent would change the history of beer. Chairman Marjoribanks presented the brewer, Samuell Alsopp, with one of Hodgson’s ales and asked him if he could brew a similar beer. Alsopp, shocked by the unusual bitterness, reportedly spat it out immediately. Composing himself, he replied that he could.
Alsopp’s version of the heavily hopped pale ale it was like nothing anyone had tried. It was a cleaner, more flavourful and more aromatic beer than even Hodgeson’s famous pale ale. With the might of the East India Company behind him, and some good luck that delayed a shipment of Hodgeson’s competing beers, Alsopp’s Burton Ale became the dominant beer of India. People in the UK even started drinking it fresh. It was the beginning of the Victorian version of the craft beer hop craze.
The secret to Alsopp’s beer was a simple regional quirk. The high mineral content of the water at Burton-upon-Trent, and the types of minerals it contained, amplified the flavour and aroma of hops. Today, brewers around the world adjust their water chemistry by adding (or removing) minerals when making IPAs to take advantage of this accidental discovery.
Alsopp’s Brewery
What started in 1740 as an on-premises brewery at an inn rode the popularity of its IPA to become the second largest brewery in the UK by 1861. But by 1911 the brewery had failed and went into receivership leaving the elegant, massive mid-19th century brewery as a monument to the optimism of Britain’s Imperial Century.
The first half of the 19th century was a great time for beer drinkers. Across the British Empire there was a wide range of styles available at all levels of hoppiness. This ranged from the descriptively named English Mild to pale ales, Extra Special Bitters, IPA and a range of hoppy dark beers. Breweries were booming in Europe, too.
Belgium had the most diverse variety of styles ranging from working-class refreshments featuring floral hops like Grisette and Saison to special strong hoppier brews made for a brewer’s favourite clients or by monks for special occasions. Germany had ended the monopoly the Dukes of Bavaria had enjoyed on brewing wheat beers (Hefeweizen), allowing every-day brewers the opportunity to try making something outside the usual constraints of the Reinheitsgebot. Even still, Germany was lager country. Dortmunder, Helles, Märzen/Oktoberfest beers, Kellerbier, Munich and Vienna Lagers were all prized for their clean maltness and expressive hops. Advances in brewing technology, increased international trade and a competitive industry was creating affordable, great beer everywhere. Everywhere, it seemed, except in the Austrian Empire.
The citizens of Plzeň were unhappy with their local beer. It was the early 1840s and local brewers had let the quality of their craft slip. The people had enough and in 1842 the people of Plzeň banded together to hire a Bavarian brewer, Josef Groll, to create a local brew for their city that could rival anything on the Continent.
After experimenting with new malting techniques and the famous local Saaz hops, Herr Groll discovered something amazing. The lightly roasted pale malt, floral Saaz hops and uniquely local water chemistry produced a beer so clean and crisp that it would one day become the most popular style in the world. Pilsner. Named for the city that gave it life, the first modern pilsner was brewed on October 5, 1842. What is now known as Pilsner Urquell is still commercially available today and is one of the world’s largest pilsner brands.
Hops in Modern Brewing
Hops had finally conquered eastern Europe with the invention of the Czech Pilsner. The massive popularity of hoppy lager styles, together with the IPA and the widespread use of hops in traditionally low or un-hopped beers in the Low Countries created a surge in the demand for, and the price of, hops. Hop acreage more than doubled, increasing from 35,000 acres to 72,000 acres in England between 1800 and 1878. The peak of the hop craze began in the 1870s and continued through the 1880s following German unification.
Each country had its favourite styles. Each region, its specialties. Each city it’s proud local invention. And every brewer had his own take. Beer was passionately local. It was even a part of regional identity, like a shoulder patch proudly stitched onto a uniform.
This massive growth in the popularity of hops is in large part a result of good timing. The 19th century was the beginning of what historians call The Great Divergence, when European nations became economic and political superpowers. Population doubled. Beer consumption doubled. Economic output per person increased many times over. The invention of the steam engine, expansion of railroads, and the discovery of microbes led to the rise of large breweries that could reliably produce and ship consistently high-quality products. The United States became a major hop producer. The West’s economic miracle was also a miracle for beer.
But it wouldn’t last. Intensive cultivation contributed to depleted soils and less-resilient plants. Unusually cold weather stressed crops and an outbreak of hop diseases crashed yields. Downy mildew, verticillium wilt and hop aphids ripped through crops in America and then Europe. Rising hop prices led to a reduction in the use of hops, leading to a rise in popularity of more affordable, less hoppy styles. By 1909 hop acreage in England had returned to where it had been in 1800. And then the unthinkable happened. The rising tide of nationalism that helped build beer into a part of regional identity took a dark turn. War, which many in Europe thought had become so expensive and economically ruinous as to be impossible, broke out in 1914.
Hop production plummeted in Germany and decreased further across Europe and the UK. By the 1930s England had only 16,500 acres of hops and the hop industry on the east coast of the United States had completely collapsed. War returned after the Great Depression. German hop yields decreased by two thirds. Economic depression retuned to Europe after the war as an entire continent struggled to rebuild following its industrial-scale self-destruction. But a tender green shoot of hope emerged from the rubble of the blitz. A centre for hop research was founded in 1947 at Wye College in London, though it would be decades until the implications of this would be seen.
Early Season Hop Bine
A young hop bine climbs a rope trellis in spring. New varieties like Brewer’s Gold that developed out of the breeding program at Wye College contributed new, more potent flavours and were more resistant to disease. American hop breeding programs soon followed, developing more varieties in the late 20th century like this Centennial, developed at Washington State University and released in 1990.
The 20th century was a dark age for beer in general, and hops in particular. The period between 1930 and 1980 was especially bad. A period of industrial consolidation cast its shadow over the brewing world. Small breweries were purchased and closed by big conglomerates with the soulless efficiency of High Modernism. Tradition was out. Science was in. Beer became an industrial product. Flavour and regional style weren’t as important as efficiency and standardization. Cheap consistency was the goal. Sure, the beer wasn’t very good but this was also the age of advertising. Beer was no longer what the local brewer or pub owner liked to make. It was what corporations told you to drink. Where it was from hardly mattered because it was all the same.
But there were small oases of hope in the desert of industrial lager. Some people remembered that beer was more than high-efficiency malt with just enough hop extract to balance what little sweetness remained after fermentation. Traditional brewers had become like Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. They were monk-like rebels operating small pubs in rural Germany and England. Or old Nordic farmhouse brewers the industrial beer empire ignored like the backwards inhabitants of some half-forgotten solar system. There were even actual monks brewing time-tested recipes in real monasteries throughout Belgium and Holland. But in North America there was nothing like that.
The 19th century beer enthusiasm had faded from memory in the New World. Cocktails were trendy. Wine was always fashionable and sprits had a rugged Frontier prestige. Beer was that other drink. Even though it had always been enjoyed at or just below room temperature, companies in the Americas implored people to drink their beer ice cold because it tasted so bad warm. Benjamin Franklin would never have said “beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy” if he lived in the 20th century.
The situation was intolerable for those who had tasted traditional European brews. Some of these folks channelled their outrage into start-up North American brewpubs. Like sanctimonious reverse-Puritans they intended to escape the tyranny of New World corporate brewers by bringing back Old World traditions. The tentative popularity of their brewpubs during the 1980s encouraged the advent of start-up microbreweries.
The early efforts of these brewers focused on an English classic, the pale ale. But the style of pale ale that emerged in North America differed from its relatives across the Atlantic. That green shoot of hope that grew from the rubble of the second World War, the hop research institute at Wye College, had blossomed into new varieties of hops. Decades of hybridizing wild North American hops with time-tested European varieties had yielded a new family of hop. Called New World or American hops, these differed from their Old World, or Noble, counterparts. They had more bittering power and, rather than being floral and herbaceous, they had distinctly citrus and pine-like characteristics. This new style began to develop a cult following.
The next step was IPA. If hoppy pale ale made from American hops was good then ultra-hoppy IPA should be even better. Only it wasn’t clear what, exactly, an IPA was back in those pre-Internet days. Based on the beers that were released under the name IPA it seems like small-scale North American brewers took contemporary British pale ales with their copper colour and mild caramel flavour and scaled them up. The 4% alcohol mildly hoppy pale ales became 6-7% malt monsters balanced only by a volume of hops not seen in brew kettles for nearly a century. Since traditional IPA contained only pale malt these were a new style and came to be known as Northwest IPA, named after the northwest coast of North America where they were first produced.
Brewers on the east coast responded with a style of their own in the early 2000s. Wanting the let the hops shine through as the dominant flavour they cut out the darker malts and made a pale beer that resembles the traditional IPA more closely, only with American hops. Since hops lose some of their volatile flavours when boiled, east coast brewers began adding hops at the end of the boil and even during or after fermentation, a process called dry-hopping, to get more hop flavour into their beers. Since hops require boiling for their bitterness to be extracted there was no limit to the amount a brewer could add as a dry-hop addition to a beer. The bitterness would remain the same but the flavour and aroma would increase.
Some brewers added so many hops that the residual hop oils in the beer left it hazy. Another style was born. It is now called hazy IPA. Less bitter than its northwest cousin but with more citrus aroma it is now the more popular of the two styles. Contemporary hazy IPA often differs from the original in that its haziness comes not from hop oils but leftover proteins extracted from flaked wheat or oats added to the beer in addition to the malted barley to give it a milky haze.
The popularity of IPA during the 2000s and the haze craze of the 2010s led to a boom in hop production like the one in the late 1800s. New varieties became common as more hop breeding programs have developed around the world. Hop cultivation doubled by acreage in the United States from the year 2000 to 2020. The USA now produces a similar volume of hops as Germany, whose production has recovered over the past 40 years along with much of Europe’s other hop farming nations like the Czech Republic and Slovenia. The English hop industry has not recovered. This is due in part to higher global demand for the favours of American and German hops as well as those of specialty varieties from new hop producing nations like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. But English hops remain iconic in classic English styles and their market is stable.
A Modern Hop Farm
Modern farms grow hops in clean rows which are machine harvested. Farmers tie ropes to a wire tressles and train hop shoots to grow up them by winding the shoots around the ropes when they emerge in the spring. The harvest is done by mid-September.
Today, the majority of hops are produced by large farms who are owned by, or sell to, four big hop conglomerates. These companies, however, are not like the high modernist breweries of the 20th century. They run their own breeding programs and are pushing the science of hops forward in search of new expressive flavours. Small farmers are getting involved, too. They lack the capital to grow the new innovative varieties, which are patented and expensive, but leverage their unique growing conditions to produce distinctive products. Like producers and brewers of old, they are helping bring products to market that showcase their regions terroir – the unique flavours and aromas that results from the distinctive climate, soil and landscape where a plant is grown.
We are now living at the beginning of a hop renaissance. Big producers are advancing the science of hop breeding and small producers are making their unique terroir available to those who know where to look. The tentative microbrewery market of the 1980s has exploded into tens of thousands of craft beer producers worldwide. Small brewers are now exploring the more delicate flavours of hops with traditional pilsners and lagers after thirty years of IPA-focused brewing.
New styles of beer are sure to emerge as the number of new hops varieties continues to increase and small brewers look for ways to differentiate themselves in a crowded market. Old styles will be reimagined using modern brewing techniques and ingredients. It’s impossible to say what the future holds for hops. But after one thousand years of brewing tradition were nearly wiped out during the twentieth century hops are resurgent. The beautiful tradition of local brewing culture that embraced hops and pulled the plant from obscurity is now being lifted back into its proper place.
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