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That's why I said average at best - average beer is going to taste way better than bad beer and also perfectly acceptable, I don't mean it in a negative way, just that in the standard 3-7% golden beer fermented with only yeast category, Cascadian & New Zealand hops provide the best and widest array of tastes regardless of what you're after, as that's where the soil is best and where the breeding is generally done
Are there actual, scientific studies on this topic? Because it's hard for me to take your word for it when all my lived experience has been the opposite.
So there's obviously a split between objective fact and opinion and conjecture, but:
- Outbreaks of powdery mildew in the early 20th century meant it became somewhat infeasible to grow most aromatic and flavoursome hops, leading to research and breeding programmes to produce disease resistant hops with other desired characteristics
- Most of the mildew-resistant hops were wild and from the US and Canada
- Hop breeding and research started in the UK but ended in the 2000s
- Oregon State University has been breeding hops for almost 100 years
- The USDA also has their hop research center in Oregon
- The US is responsible for 40% of hop production, of which over 98% is in Oregon, Washington and Idaho
- Cascade hops, from the USDA research center in Oregon, started the craft beer movement due to the combination of high flavour and disease tolerance
- German hop research started in 1926, but only had any real success after the 1980s
So essentially, the US has just got very lucky when it comes to hop production with good soils and disease resistance, while German beermaking was set back leading other styles to become and remain popular, such as very lightly hopped wheat beers, sour beers where the acidity comes from the fermentation instead of hops, and more recently Belgian style beers that are stronger abv so the stronger alcohol taste substitutes for some of the strength of the hops
There probably are also studies, but they tend to look into mechanisms/variations whereas this is more of a series of coinciding factors which don't really need much research to make sense
Thank you for the explanation, I didn't know about a lot of that! But the jump from all of that information to "beer with hop outside US/NZ is only average" is too large and too subjective.
I get it's a big jump, but I've been clear I'm restricting it to the most popular types of beer and explained why US bred and grown hops had the good fortune to be the most aromatic disease resistant hops, so I still don't think it's unreasonable
Again, none of this applies for styles beyond 3-7% golden beer fermented with yeast only, and even then there's a few exceptions for certain styles where the aromatics are different (eg bitter, which is less about the aromatic hops and more about the earthy notes of the bittering hops), but for the most popular lagers and pale ales I think it holds
The issue is that just based on the history you've mentioned I can't say much about the status today. What developments have happened over the last two decades with more advanced methods? How much of the research is shared between countries, how much of the plants etc?
Hops are highly sensitive to the soil acidity and minerals in terms of the compounds the plants produce, so sharing plants is largely infeasible, plus because it's the US many of them are trademarked so there's no sharing for that reason
Surely fertilizer and other additions can be used to adjust this, or genetic editing can be used to incorporate some stuff?
Okay, but almost everything is trademarked, doesn't mean it can't be bought/sold?
That's a lot of expense compared to just importing US-grown hops, as there's a lot of soil to adjust
And yeah, trademarks on plants are no joke, there's a bunch of restrictions on buying/selling them etc.