“Private breeders have an advantage over the public program,” says Henning, because “they have marketers that supply brewers with whatever acreage they want. Whereas [the USDA] just release(s) a hop to the public and it’s up to the whims of the brewer. I can talk to the brewer, but unless they’re willing to do private contracts with the growers, it has to go through the merchants—who happen to own the private hop-breeding companies.”
On the flipside, hops bred in our public sector give botanists like Dr. Henning benefits by having “a mandate from Congress to do research in genetics for the benefit of the American industry.” One key element among global breeding programs is how varieties fare in their respective climates.
Dr. Darby said that selecting for disease resistance not to mention funding sources drives the U.K. program. Developing a resistance to wilt “has been a feature of the breeding here since the early part of the 20th century.” He adds “the U.K. is looking at a small industry with a very defined customer base for a premium market. The U.S. hop breeding [programs] serve almost the exact opposite.” Zing!
What he meant, diplomatically, is that the domestic industrial brewers, by virtue of accounting for some 80 percent of the industry, growers still rely on those contracts to keep their farms from being repossessed. American hops are “a commodity market,” as Dr. Darby called them, requiring “rapid production of a bulk product,” but as the craft segment grows and aromatics vie for alphas, the dual targets are approaching equilibrium. Even in England growers are “trending toward American-style hops” as brewers seek a change in the objectives toward stronger, unusual hop aromas.
Switching from aromatics to agronomics, those lucky Kiwis don’t have powdery mildew or aphids down there, so those are non-issues in their burgeoning Nelson region. But in Japan, back in the 1930s, they discovered the presence of Hop Stunt Viroid (HSV) and rebuilt their hop programs afresh, which solved the problem. This virus-like particle doesn’t have a protein code around it, just the RNA. Henning noted that it’s a pathogen that can severely limit hop growth and production and varies dramatically from variety to variety. Great efforts eradicated HSV in Japan, but it seems to have arrived in the U.S. possibly some five years ago. Fear not, it is not exactly the mad cow disease of hops that, if it makes its way into your beer, would turn you into a babbling idiot (unless, you know, that’s already the case), but it concerns Henning nonetheless.
So the odds of any given cross being selected for commercial growing and brewing is rather poor. Perrault estimates that “99.9 percent of everything we grow gets thrown away.”
USDA-ARS geneticist Dr. John Henning (left) and Annheuser Busch agronomist Scott Dorsch examine and smell hop cones for quality and aroma characteristics.
