SWTFYM - Say What The Ftruck You Mean: Making Sense of Hop Acronyms
Owing to the importance of hop aromatics in AUNZ Craft Ales, beer packaging is are littered with hop related terms and acronyms. The terminology can be really confusing. Some of it’s marketing spin. Some of it’s brewing lingo which isn’t well translated and some of it seems as useless as the acronym in this blog’s title. As most craft drinkers aren’t brewers themselves or have marketing spin doctor qualifications…. explanations are understandably warranted. Help is here! here are a few insider points to help decipher your latest craft can.
WH: Wet Hopped denotes the use of fresh hops in the beer production. It has the advantage of being able to capture all of the hop aromas and tastes, without any being destroyed in the freezing process of cryo hops or the more typical drying process of pelletised hops. Owing to the small window 48 hours before the hop flower flavour noticeably degrades, WH is only possible during the hop harvest and is limited to breweries with efficient logistic routes to the hop farms.
DH: Dry Hopped while convention would hint has to do with dried pelletised hopping, it’s a red herring. Dry hopping is the Late Show. Its where hops are added either in fermentation, conditioning or packaging. Unlike all other hoppings, dry hopping adds hops into the wort or beer when the liquid is cold, i.e. utilising cold infusion. These allows aromatics to disperse that would have been changed or lost in the heat of previous additions. Also addition after fermentation protects some aromatics from inevitable chemical change from the yeasty environment. While adding raw product after the microbe killing phase of the boil seems dicey, hops seldom carry bacterial strains that can survive and thrive in the airless, low pH, ethanol rich world of finished beer.
DDH: Double Dry Hopped is a term used to indicate the brewer has added more dried hops than usual for the style, for the purpose of hop aroma, not for bittering. Double is used here as loose as a cannon and doesn’t in any way mean twice as much hops or twice as much hop perceived flavour.
Hazy: Hazy means the beer is opaque. This occurs when the brewer doesn’t filter the beer to remove the suspended partials of predominately hop vegetable matter. While adding adjuncts such as wheat flour in home brewing can produce the same cloudy effect, it does nothing for the taste. The hazy effect in craft beer is taste based. By not filtering the beer the brewer is retaining flavour compounds that they consider add to the taste profile, such as delicate top floral notes.
For Early Hopping, Late Hopping, Whirlpool, and Hopback hopping additions refer to the sections describing the brewing process, specially the ‘The Boil’ and ‘Whirlpool’ subsections.
Late Hopping is where hops are thrown into the boil just before the end of the boil, anytime within 30 minutes of the finale. The addition of the hops here, with reduced contact time to the high boil temperatures, isomerisation is limited and the overall impact is release of volatiles that stay in the wort, i.e. amazing hops flavours into our final beer. Worth piping in, with the exception of late hopping, the boil is not considered a step where hop flavours and aromas are added. While hop aromatic compounds are released from the hops at this point, unfortunately most of these are lost into the air, making the brewhouse smell delicious but escaping from our brew.
So having named late hopping, early hopping was bound to become a thing. So now we call hopping at the point the kettle is filling early hopping.
The whirlpool is also where we most often add in hops for flavours and aromas. Unsurprisingly known as whirlpool hopping which incidentally is later than late hopping but earlier than hopback hopping but never earlier than early hopping. Clearly no taxonomists were let loose in a brewery.
Hopback ·is another aromatic hop addition. It literally happens in between whirlpooling (or the boil) and the next step, cooling. We do this by adding whole hop flowers to a basket/chamber in the piping before entering the cooling equipment. This both imparts aromatics and conveniently as wort filters through it as well as acting as a trub filter. As it is a sealed chamber it also has the advantages of not losing any aromatics into the air. Hopback has been abandon by most for the more kinetically satisfying whirlpool addition. The hopback though is best suited to fresh hopping, while the whirlpool hopping is best suited to pellets as the centrifugal forces gather pellet matter together much better than fresh hop.