These Wild Hops Make Your Beer Taste Like Mango

There is a saying in the wine industry, "it takes a lot of beer to make wine." Because when you spend all day tasting and analyzing wine, you really just want something cold and refreshing that you don't have to think about at the end of the day.

I grew up in Sonoma, California, which until the 1940s was the number-one hop-growing region in the world. Which makes my California-native wild hop varietal that I stumbled upon all the more exciting.

One day while walking around, I noticed that there were these wild hop vines growing up on a fence. I smelled them and they reeked of fresh mango or something, which is different than your average fresh hop's usual aroma of hay and spice. I knew they were hops because they kind of grow like ivy when they are wild. This was around the same time when I decided to open up my own brewery in Santa Rosa, so I dug them up and tried to replant them in my family's vineyard.

What I'm interested in—rather than just a hop varietal's signature profiles—are hops' regional influences. In other words, their terroir.

They've done studies on hop oil concentration of the same exact hop variety grown in different regions, and surprise: The same hops have different flavors depending on different soil. And what do you get when you grow hops in one of the best wine-growing regions in the world? Hops that—if brewed properly—can make your beer taste like mango, among many other tasty things. Sorry, wine snobs. Turns out beer can be just as complex as your vintage Bourgogne too.

What happened in the 1940s that allowed Washington to dethrone California as the top American state to grow hops? Industrialization. A hop grower created a hop-picking machine that made the arduous hop harvest way less painful. Until that machine was made, hop pickers had to wear wool suits to keep from getting this nasty hop-induced rash, and even walk on stilts to harvest. The problem is that the machine only worked in flat areas, which did not work on those scenic terraces that you see pictured in some of your favorite wine labels.

Now, the issue with bringing the hop-growing tradition back to California is the drought.

The reality is that hops are a crop that need a lot of water. And while there are some areas in Sonoma that stay pretty cool during heatwaves, our water table is not what it used to be. My family's vineyard does have a pretty good well, but we're not irrigating as much right now in effort to conserve water. To be fully transparent, our hops are receiving about half a gallon of water per vine per day. Which is crazy, since a lot of hop yards do straight-up flood irrigation.

Still, we are successfully harvesting and now making freshly hopped beers out of them (as opposed to using dried hop pellets that look like hamster food, which most commercial breweries use). To put it in perspective, it's kind of like using fresh herbs versus dried herbs when cooking; fresh hops make a fresher and grassier beer with a lot more intensity.

Aside from this wild cluster variety, I'm also growing cascade hops (a workhorse, all purpose hop), centennial hops (earthy, spicy, grapefruit-like but more spicy), and chinook hops (super fruity, almost like a fruit cocktail).

The rule of thumb for growing hops in California is to plant the "c variety," meaning any hops that start with the letter C. These are pretty hardy and do well in California's arid climate.

The interesting thing about hops is that most of the crazy ones that you see in beers right now started out as proprietary hybrids, kind of like marijuana strains. I've even heard that some hop yards have armed guards on duty protecting their strains, which makes my foray into California native hops all the more exciting. Who knows? I may have found the next big IPA hit.

As told to Javier Cabral