Sensory Directed Mixture Study of Beers Dry-Hopped with Cascade, Centennial, and Chinook

Abstract

American craft beer style and flavor is often driven by the unique qualities of American hops. Cascade, Chinook, and Centennial hops are used prominently for dry-hopping singly and/or in blends to impart an intense hoppy aroma to beer. A sensory directed dry-hopping mixture study was performed to understand the contribution that each of these hops make to beer aroma. Utilizing a 4th degree simplex-lattice mixture-design, sixteen beers were prepared (including an “unhopped” control) by dry-hopping a common “unhopped” base beer with different blends of ground whole cone hops made from the three hop cultivars. The treatments were evaluated by trained panelists using descriptive analysis, where the response variables used by the panel encompassed the sensory attributes that described the unique aromatic features of these three hops, (i.e., citrus, tropical/fruity, tropical/catty, and herbal). Using these outputs, the sensory contributions of each individual cultivar, as well as mixtures of the cultivars, were examined on a per attribute basis. These results can be used to select combinations or blends of the three hops for use during dry-hopping that provide similar or dissimilar overall aroma intensity and quality in dry-hopped beer.

Keywords:

• Dry-hopping
• flavor matching
• hop blending
• mixtures

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Brewers Association for funding this research, Crosby Hop Farm for the donating hops, and BridgePort Brewing Company for producing the unhopped ale for this project. We wish to acknowledge the diligent work of the Cameron McDaniel, Ian Schacter, and Ryan Howe whose valuable assistance with the dry-hopping treatments helped this project run smoothly. We offer sincere appreciation for Cliff Pereira’s expertise in designing the efficient resolvable incomplete block designs used for sensory analysis and would like to acknowledge Daniel Vollmer for helping to provide insight on the hop blending design used for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.