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THE NEW HOP ORDER: The Sensory Plus™ Promise: Consistent Hop Character
330 Plays2 days ago
In this exclusive series - The New Hop Order, presented by HPA - The Crafty Pint Podcast explores what’s happening on the cutting edge of hop innovation from breeding and processing to brewing. In this episode, we’re talking with Haas’ Sensory Manager Jeff Dailey and HPA’s Australia & New Zealand Sales Manager Michael Capaldo about Sensory Plus™ – a proactive quality assurance process they apply during hop harvesting and processing for more consistent performance in beer.
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Transcript
Introduction to Hop Innovation Series
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the new hop order presented by HPA, our series which explores what's happening at the very forefront of hop innovation from breeding and processing through to brewing.
00:00:13
Speaker
Great beer starts with trust in your recipe, your process and your ingredients, which is why the sensory and technical experts at Haas developed Sensory Plus to deliver hop products with proven consistency in both flavor and chemistry.
Quality Assurance in Hop Products
00:00:26
Speaker
To talk more about proactive quality assurance during hop harvesting and processing, I'm joined today by Haas's Sensory Manager, Jeff Daly, and HPA Australia and New Zealand Sales Manager, Michael
History and Global Expansion of Haas
00:00:38
Speaker
Capaldo. Guys, welcome.
00:00:42
Speaker
Hi. Good to see you too, guys, and thanks for joining us. um Jeff, awesome to have you on the on the show. For our listeners new to the world of international hop growers, give me the Haas story in a nutshell.
00:00:57
Speaker
Yeah, ah so Haas was started by John I. Haas, that's the name, in 1914. After working as a teenager in Germany, John ah came to the West Coast, started in California, then moving up to Yakima, trying to bring brewers, the highest quality cluster on the planet, which at that point just meant seedless.
00:01:16
Speaker
ah But we continued to expand acreage in Toppenish to the point where we became became the largest private farmer and hop grower in the world. In the 1970s, after investing heavily in advanced extractor technologies, we caught the notice of John Barth and his family ah from Nuremberg, and they bought us out starting the Barth Haas Group.
Sensory Plus Development and Impact
00:01:36
Speaker
um After that, about a decade later, we joined with ah Hot Products Australia to continue to expand ah Early 2000s, 2003, I believe, we partnered as a joint venture to form the hop breeding company, which is where Citra and Mosaic and Crush and Dulcita all come from.
00:01:56
Speaker
ah We expanded out into smaller and smaller craft by opening Simply Hops, which became Barthas X, and investing, buying Yakubu Valley hops, and eventually starting Barthas China about 2019 or 2020 with two campuses in China to serve that market.
00:02:12
Speaker
Yeah, fantastic. So not not a small player by any means there. Not by any means. Jeff, um we're here today. We're going to talk about Sensory Plus. This is a process that Haas developed to ensure, I guess, proven consistency across hot products. um Can you give me the rundown? Talk me through how this works.
00:02:31
Speaker
Yeah, so I i joined in 2019, coming out of the master's focusing on modern sensory science techniques. And I came to Haas working with Lori Labrie, who had been managing the raw material program for you know four years. She knew what she was doing, but she also recognized that the brewing world was changing with the needs for craft brewers. So we transitioned from her program of that citra, it smells like citra into something that's more descriptive, something that will help us attain more granular detail regarding the diversity of aromas that exist within all the lots of citra, you know, and every other 70 variety that we work with.
00:03:09
Speaker
um Part of this was, you know unlike in some place, we have a lot of customers that come to Yakima during our our harvest to do what is called selection. They're coming, they have their own needs as individuals, and it's our goal to provide the highest level of service and efficiency when it comes to getting them to select lots.
00:03:27
Speaker
So by having more granular detail on our end and collecting information from customers in terms of what they need, we created a system, a um you know kind of a separating system where we're providing feedback to each other in order to make that process more efficient and make the consistency tighter because then our combined sensory between brewer and broker, we send back to the growers and all of us are partnering together to create a more consistent product across all of our varieties.
Consistency in US Hops for Australian Markets
00:03:54
Speaker
From there, taking into account all of our products, Lupamax, Incognito, Spectrum, amongst others, ah we look at the individual lots, their descriptive chemists their descriptive sensory that's formed by my trained panel of about 30 people, and pick lots that are that complement each other or contrast each other in a positive direction in order to take multiple lots and create via advanced you know flavor science these more consistent blends that work together in order to be consistent based on that sensory outcome.
00:04:26
Speaker
And we can guarantee the sensory outcome being consistent because with our brewing capabilities on site, for every batch of Lupimax, we brew with every single batch every year and have been doing so since 2019. And so we've got a little bit of history that kind of supports our premise that we are creating a very consistent product. In fact, probably the most consistent product that's out there.
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, fantastic. um Michael, it's my understanding, I guess, that ah ah only a few Australian and New Zealand breweries are eligible for US hop selections. How does HPA guarantee access to these highly consistent US hops?
00:05:03
Speaker
Sure. Well, it's firstly, it's eligible and available to find the time and resources to come out to Yakima, right? so Because it's not it's not cheap to get out there in the first place. So HPA is a regional representative of the Bar Pass Group.
00:05:17
Speaker
um So we qualify for selections of the material that we're buying. So when we're going out there and we're buying Citroen mosaic, two big ones that we talk about, you know, bred through the hot breeding company, we grow on our own farms ourselves, and we have part of the ownership rights. So when we're actually um doing selections of this, we're actually doing selections on behalf of customers big and small in Australia. So there really are very few who actually make the eventual trip. But the important thing for us is to be able to provide a level playing field for these great hops so that if you're if you're getting if you're not coming up to Yakima and if you don't qualify with the minimum buyer to be able to get onto a sensory table, we can still guarantee that the quality of the product you're going to get you know has been past Jeff's sensory team and Jeff's sensory team has been a part of the process. But we've also got
00:06:10
Speaker
We've got customers, Australian customers who are out there. So we've got that that brewing knowledge. And we've also got HPA management and sales team over there. And HPA management and salespeople, what the ones who get out to Yakima all come from brewing backgrounds. We've all run breweries. we've all you know We've got master brewers and et cetera in our course. So we really get a fantastic cluster of of diversity and combine that with the knowledge that John I. Haas gave us.
00:06:36
Speaker
And it's all about looking for what is success in the selection table. So Jeff was talking about, um you know, his his sensory panel of of people, but also about, you know, Citra isn't just Citra. There is, you know, you can get granular, very granular on what you want to get out of Citra, right? So we look at the previous purchasing behavior of what we bought, you know, down maybe the farms that we've been purchasing from or the regions.
00:07:05
Speaker
Really important is the screening of analytics that we receive. So maybe it might be alphas, oils, hot storage index, extraneous matter, et cetera. But we also combine that with some pre-screening from Jeff's sensory team to make sure that the lots that actually get presented to us on the table have already been pre-screened.
00:07:26
Speaker
So yeah, we put a lot of work and effort into it. Does that does that answer your question? It does. i think it's some I think people just want to you know go out to Yakima Valley. and But it's great to know that all hops are selected extremely expertly before they even make it to Australia. So fantastic.
00:07:42
Speaker
Jeff, how does Sensory Plus inform which bail lot task presents for HPA to select from? That's a great question because the fact that it relates to some of the things that Michael was saying.
00:07:53
Speaker
um We know based on the past and the the feedback from Michael from management, from OJ, exactly what Citra is expected to be, what Mosaic is expected to be by Australian brewers.
00:08:06
Speaker
And so we look at both the contracts that have put in and we always put on the table basically lots that represent two to three X what that contract is in order to provide a diversity of samples.
00:08:18
Speaker
you know, we do that especially because our nose is not Michael's nose. We have our internal biases are great training and we have an understanding to some degree of, you know Michael's funky nose, especially the last couple of years of doing intake on Galaxy with him. We kind of understand what he's looking for.
00:08:34
Speaker
But we do want to put that diversity out there because we don't want to shove the wrong lot on customers. So we do our initial screening. um We look the varieties. We look at the clustering of varieties. One of the techniques that we use statistically based on our sensory is to show that there are, say, five consistent types of citra.
00:08:54
Speaker
And we know that HPA is looking for you know an 80% blend of type 3 and 20% of type 2. And we make sure that's well represented. On top of that, you know, ah OJ has been gracious enough to have me involved in those selections to support and provide some guidance as well. And so we can say, based on the work that we do for products like Lupamax to blend, you know, a hundred thousand pounds, multiple lots together to create something consistent that we can make recommendations for the selections to say, well, that lot really isn't going to work with that lot when you blend them together. And that way we are taking multiple steps to make sure that the best pellets are coming to the brewers of us Australia.
00:09:33
Speaker
Sounds like such ah a wonderful collaboration and a partnership there. um Michael, in Australia, HPA have invested heavily in new facilities and process updates to, I guess, increase throughput and improve quality. um where Where does Sensory Plus factor into that that
HPA's Investments in Facilities and Processes
00:09:50
Speaker
element?
00:09:51
Speaker
Well, so Sensory Plus is certainly a key component of it. um But you really have to get the process right from the start. And when I say from the start, I mean from the on-farm process. And I think that we're going to talk a lot about the effort we put into Sensory Plus and and the sensory side of things. But if you don't put an equal amount of effort into the on-farm side of things, the processing side of things, from the pickers to the kiln floors, to the baling, to analytics,
00:10:18
Speaker
By the time we get to sensory, you're not going to have a whole lot of great material. So i think I think our biggest improvement has really been from the farm to the end of the sensory process. um So back in, I believe it was 2020, we commissioned, sorry, 2019, we commissioned our newest picking shed.
00:10:37
Speaker
And in 2025, HPA commissioned Hop Central, which is an incredible state of the art pelleting facility in Myrtleford. And there've been so many process improvements in the packaging. And I think the brewers can relate to what process and packaging, what process what process improvement in packaging and how it can impact on the final product because most brewers have canning lines or kegging lines. And they understand that if they improve their processes along the line, they're going to get more longevity out of their product. So, um, hop central has certainly helped us get more longevity out of our product or will help us because we're only near two now, but we we can already see our retention samples are performing better than they have on previous pack lines.
00:11:22
Speaker
But getting back to, um the actual sensory side of things, we've got this enormous crop. And, you know, let's say it's it's all great, but there are going to be nuances on there. And and and what does Trudor type look like for Galaxy? That's our biggest crop, for example. So punchy passion fruit, complex citrus and juicy peach, right?
00:11:44
Speaker
And... You can have one of those characteristics or two of those characteristics present, but one of them not there. So being able to identify, first of all, is there true to type? So if there's no true to type character in that sensory and the panel selects that, then that bail isn't actually going to make the cut to go into the galaxy blend.
00:12:02
Speaker
One thing we've we've learned over time is that if you get true to type material and non true to type material, and blend them together, you're not going to get true to type material. You're going to get not true to type and that makes bad beer.
00:12:16
Speaker
And, you know, if we're going to be trusted to sell you beer, we need to help you make consistent true
Brewing Validation and Sensory Training
00:12:22
Speaker
to type beer. So getting that bail screening right through the sensory plus process, uh, is important and it's, uh, really performing well.
00:12:32
Speaker
Yeah. Nice. um Jeff, both HPA and Haas have been conducting their own in-house brewing validation. You mentioned this earlier. um what What trends are you seeing since applying Sensory Plus to the Australian crops?
00:12:46
Speaker
Yeah, so i mean we've we've seen a great improvement from the early days. yeah I started in 2019 and we started doing brewing trials and reviewing every batch of pellets that came. ah And we did that year over year until 2023 when OJ first invited me down to start the process.
00:13:02
Speaker
of bringing the team up to speed, starting with just more advanced training to look for what a nonconforming product look like, and then using that information to go back to the farm. Because like Michael said, really, that the great gains have been in early process, both targeting fields that are consistently produc producing nonconforming product, looking at irrigation and fertility practices in order to basically bring out the best of Galaxy in all the diverse growing regions. From 23, 24, we went in hard and started doing a lot more sensory. 25 was the year where we had made enough progress ah with training, doing a week of training with the whole intake team ahead of time, getting all the samples lined up, looking forward to the commissioning of HOP Central.
00:13:49
Speaker
And then the final step is taking that group of sensory information and validating based on the number of people whether or not true type character was there and going through the process of building actual recipes ah for the galaxy where we consistently went through and paired up ah hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of kilos of hops at a time to make sure that those batches those lots were ah synergizing appropriately to bring out the true type character of galaxy and we've just seen incremental process progress
00:14:19
Speaker
since 2023 and especially the last two years where we're getting up to the best crop that we've seen of Galaxy from American
Conclusion and Brewer Engagement
00:14:27
Speaker
brewers. That's their feedback at this point. Amazing. Thank you so much, Jeff and Michael. It's great to get an insight into the Sensory Plus process and its various applications.
00:14:37
Speaker
Brewers, if you'd like to get your hands on some top quality US or Australian hops, be sure to talk to your HPA rep, ASAP. And stay tuned for more episodes in the new hop order series presented by HPA, looking at the latest hop innovations. Jeff, Michael, thanks for joining me.
00:14:55
Speaker
Happy to be here. Cheers. Cheers, Thanks, Steve.