Hop Aroma

To brew a beer that’s bursting with great hop aroma and flavor, it’s critical to choose and use the very best you can get. North Park founder and head brewer Kelsey McNair explains their own discriminating approach.

For many of us, hop aromas are just about the most impenetrable of all smells. Yet understanding more about how the brain works with aromas can help us to make and enjoy really delicious beers.

In these excerpts from one of our most popular podcast episodes, a few of the best IPA brewers in the business talk about adjusting the mash for dryness, evolving their recipes to keep drinkers (and themselves) happy, defeating the hop creep, maximizing aroma, and more.

You don’t need fruit to brew a fruit-flavored beer—malt, sugar, hops, and yeast can all be used to mimic the character of various fruits. Yet, once mastered, there is another use for this power of deception: boosting the flavors of real fruit.

The hops you select don’t always bring what you loved about them to the finished beer. Hop Butcher for the World cofounders and brewers Jude La Rose and Jeremiah Zimmer explain how Cryo hops, blends, and process tweaks can help you nail that target.

Laura Burns, R&D director of Omega Yeast, explains how mash-hopping makes more thiol precursors available to biotransformation—and how malt itself can be a rich source of those precursors—so that even very simple beers can have exotic aromas.

Pull levers, turn knobs, spin wort—from whirlpools to “dip hopping,” here is a detailed look at some specific hot-side techniques and gear for dialing in substantial hop flavor and aroma.