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I came across a cool tidbit of hop information on YouTube about the re-discovery of a brand new wild hop named Monocacy found in Maryland.
Don’t know if it is hardy enough to be bigger than just a novelty or if it has flavors that brewers can truly use but it is great to see hops waiting to be found.
First, I want you to hop (sorry) over to the Beervana Blog and read this POST and don’t give me any TL:DR guff.
OK, now that you are back, there are two golden nuggets in that piece. First is that a hop can have rum and caramel and banana notes. That is mind blowing. And second, is that a brewery can sponsor an up and possibly coming hop in exchange for dibs on the crop.
And the big takeaway that I want most beer fans to keep in mind is how veeerrrryyy long it takes for a seedling to be an actual crop. Hats off to the potent combo of science and farming that can do it that quickly while satisfying IPA fiends.
In a recent piece in the New York Times magazine, writer Chuck Klosterman went through a hypothetical exercise about which musician would be remembered and revered in the distant future. Nowhere was Frank Zappa mentioned but maybe that is because a hop breeding group is named after the artist and the hop, FZMR2 has already been bought up by Sierra Nevada and used already in one of their Beer Camp 2016 beers, Pat-Rye-Ot.
Characterized as a mixture of “peppery citrus and melon”. It is a cross of two wild plants Neo-Mexicanus, Medusa and Rio. Zappa has been quoted about beer but it is unknown if this hop would have had him writing music about bitterness.
I do like more particular names in hops. Equinox and Mosaic are pretty words but don’t really convey much. They have that pharmaceutical name feeling to me. A Prince hop though, would really convey meaning.