Hops are the dried flowers of a climbing perennial, and the ones that end up in a BC beer were most often grown in Washington State rather than in British Columbia. The Canadian acreage is small, the varieties almost without exception were bred in other countries, and what is genuinely local is the farm, the harvest week in late August and the fresh-hop beer that appears for a few weeks and then disappears. Telling those three things apart is most of what the subject requires, and it is where the usual talk about Canadian hops goes wrong.
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What A Hop Gives The Beer
A hop cone carries two things a brewer wants. Alpha acids, concentrated in the lupulin glands, are bitter on their own and do very little until the boil, where heat turns them into a form that dissolves in wort and tastes clean rather than harsh. That is why a bittering addition goes in at the start of a long boil and stays in. Essential oils are the other half, and they behave in the opposite direction, since the same heat that makes bitterness useful drives the oils off, so aroma hops go in at the end of the boil, into the whirlpool, or straight into the fermenter as a dry hop where no heat is involved at all.
Beyond bitterness and aroma, hops do two quieter jobs. They hold back spoilage organisms, which is why a heavily hopped beer keeps better than a lightly hopped one and why India pale ales were brewed the way they were. And they pull protein out of solution in the kettle, which helps a beer clear and helps the head hold.
Hops Arrived Early And Mostly Left
The first European breweries in what is now Canada were working with hop stock grown nearby as far back as the mid-1600s, so the plant is not a recent introduction here. What changed in the nineteenth century was scale. A serious export trade carried Canadian hops south, and it peaked before an 1890 United States tariff cut into it, which is the sort of policy shift a perennial field crop cannot absorb. In the Fraser Valley, the first commercial hop yard was planted at Sardis in Chilliwack in 1892, and the valley kept growing hops for decades after that.
The acreage since has gone the other way and then partly back. Canada is not a major hop producer on any measure that compares it with Germany, the United States, the Czech Republic or the southern hemisphere, and the local acreage of today is a revival from a very low base rather than a continuation of that nineteenth-century trade. Small farms have gone in over the past couple of decades, mostly supplying brewers who want a local story they can stand behind at the tap, and the total is still small enough that one good season or one bad one is visible in what is available to buy.
The Varieties You Will Actually Find
What gets planted here is largely what gets planted in the Pacific Northwest, because that is where most of the breeding work was done. These are the names worth being able to place, and every one of them tells you where a program was run rather than where your glass was filled.
| Variety | Bred in | What it brings to the glass |
|---|---|---|
| Cascade | United States | Grapefruit and citrus peel, the hop behind the American pale ale |
| Centennial | United States | Lemon and a soft floral note, with more bitterness than Cascade |
| Chinook | United States | Pine and resin with a spicy edge, and enough alpha acid to bitter with |
| Columbus | United States | Very high alpha, pungent and earthy, used sparingly for aroma |
| Simcoe | United States | Pine and apricot with a clean dank edge |
| Citra | United States | Lime and passionfruit, the tropical note in a great deal of modern pale ale |
| Mosaic | United States | Blueberry and mango, usually added late or dry hopped |
| Willamette | United States | Herbal and floral, descended from Fuggle and much gentler |
| Magnum | Germany | High alpha and very little aroma, which is exactly why brewers buy it |
| Northern Brewer | Germany | Wood and mint with a clean earthy bitterness, common in lagers |
| Hallertau | Germany | Herbal and floral, the classic noble aroma hop |
| Saaz | Czech Republic | The spicy, soft bitterness of a Bohemian pilsner |
| East Kent Goldings | England | Tea and honey with a rounded earthy softness |
| Styrian Goldings | Slovenia | Fuggle lineage grown in the Brežice valley, herbal and dry |
Names That Are Not Canadian
Three varieties turn up in almost every list of Canadian specialty hops, and none of them was bred here. Nelson Sauvin comes from New Zealand and smells like white wine grapes and gooseberry. Galaxy comes from Australia and gives peach and passionfruit. Sorachi Ace was bred in the United States from Japanese parentage and lands somewhere between lemon, dill and coconut. All three are experimented with on a small scale in North America, and a BC brewer may well dry-hop with them, but calling them Canadian varieties confuses where a hop was invented with where it was farmed.
Bittering, Aroma And The Middle
The usual three-way split runs on alpha acid, the percentage of the cone that can be turned into bitterness. Bittering hops sit at the high end and go in first. Aroma hops sit at the low end, carry more oil relative to alpha, and go in last. Dual-purpose hops sit in the middle and do either job depending on when a brewer puts them in. The split is a rough guide rather than a rule, because a low-alpha hop still contributes bitterness and a high-alpha hop can be thrown in at the end of the boil for aroma, which is how Columbus is often used. What the categories are genuinely useful for is cost, since a high-alpha cone gives more bitterness per kilogram and a brewer bittering with Magnum needs less material than one bittering with Saaz.
Who Represents The Growers
Hop farming in this province organizes through the BC Hop Growers Association, a body for British Columbia rather than for the country, and it is the one a Fraser Valley farm or a local brewer deals with. The practices that actually govern a hop yard, irrigation, insecticide timing, how nitrogen is stored and how ground is rotated between crops, come from provincial agricultural rules and from what each farm decides to do with its own land.
Fresh Hops And The Harvest Window
The one thing a BC hop yard can give a brewer that a bale from Yakima cannot is timing. Hops climb a five- or six-metre trellis on a bine that twines itself up the string, and the cones are ready in late August or September, when the lupulin turns a bright yellow and a squeezed cone springs back rather than staying crushed. Pickers strip the bines, the cones go into a kiln to be dried down, and everything after that is a race against oxygen and heat, because the oils that make a hop smell good break down fastest in a warm storage room. A wet-hop beer is brewed with undried cones within days of picking, which is why the style is on tap for three weeks a year and why it tastes like nothing bottled in February.
What Hops Do Not Do
Hops are given credit in some writing for preventing cavities, easing anxiety and depression and reducing inflammation, and none of that belongs in a beer guide. Compounds from the cone are studied, but the quantity that reaches a glass is far too small for any of it to be a reason to drink one, and beer is not a health product. The same section of hop writing usually adds that hops belong to the cannabis family, which is a true statement about plant classification and nothing more, since a hop cone contains none of the compounds that sentence is meant to suggest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are hops the same plant as cannabis?
Not in any sense that matters at the bar. Hops and cannabis both sit in the family Cannabaceae, which makes them botanical relatives the way a great many flowering plants are, and that is where the resemblance stops. A hop cone contains no THC and nothing that acts on the body the way cannabis does, so the family relationship is a matter of how botanists group plants rather than of anything you can taste or feel.
Why do hop availability and price move so much from year to year?
Because a hop yard is a multi-year commitment to a plant that takes several seasons to reach full yield, while demand for a fashionable variety can change in one. Growers plant what they expect brewers to buy and contract ahead of the harvest, and when a variety falls out of favour the acreage does not simply move, since the trellis, the kiln and the picking all have to be rebuilt around whatever goes in instead. That lag is why the same beer can taste slightly different from one canned batch to the next.
What does dry hopping add that the boil cannot?
Almost all of the aroma. Boiling drives the volatile oils off and chemically changes some of what is left, so a hop added early smells like tea or bread rather than like the cone, while hops soaked into cold finished beer give up their oils intact. That is the distance between the bitterness in an old-style pale ale and the fruit in a modern one. The trade is that dry hopping costs material, adds a grassy note if the hops stay in too long, and can damage head retention.
Can I grow hops in a BC garden?
Yes, and this is the part of the subject you can try yourself. Hops are hardy perennials across most of the province, sending up a fresh bine from the root crown every spring and dying back in autumn, and one plant can put up five metres of growth in a single season. What a garden will not give you is a batch worth brewing, because you need a great many cones to bitter even a small pot of wort and drying them well takes a kiln rather than a spare room. A handful of fresh cones dropped in at the end of the boil is a reasonable use for the plant, and it is the same reason a commercial wet-hop beer tastes the way it does.
How To Taste The Difference
Drink a fresh-hop beer the week it appears, because that is the only hop experience in this province that cannot be repeated later in the year. Then find a single-varietal pale ale made with Cascade and one made with a high-oil American variety, pour them side by side at the same temperature, and you will learn more about hop character in one evening than a list of names can teach you. The variety on a chalkboard tells you where a breeding program worked. The harvest tells you where the farm is, and only one of those two things is local.
