Marks of the Modern Era: Hop Breeding

Breeders have been busy for the past four decades adding to the world’s inventory of hop varieties. The focus in the early decades was on alpha acids; every few years, breeders managed to goose the alpha acids in hops so that “high alpha hops” went from 8% up to the low teens. When they kept going, breeders invented a new category, “super high alpha,” to describe them. Large industrial breweries were driving these innovations, because the higher the alpha acids, the fewer the hops they had …