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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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If you're drinking beer from hops that aren't from the US (or New Zealand but that's a way smaller market) then there's a very good chance your beer is average at best (unless it's a stout, wheat beer, bitter, sour etc. rather than a lager or pale ale, but those two are most likely)
Weird, all the Americans I've drank German beer (from German hops) with called it far better than what they were used to
Because they don’t know anything about beer and it’s basically a meme at this point that boomers came up with (rooted in truth in their defense) because we spent decades rebuilding our beer scene after prohibition and, more importantly, Carter’s legalization of homebrewing.
Germany - like most european countries - is amazing at making old world/regional styles. You don’t go to the US to get a Czech Pilsner or a proper Marzen or rauchbier. You get stouts, hazy IPA’s, etc. Germany even relaxed its laws on what qualifies as a proper-made [insert style] about a decade ago to be more competitive with the US craft beer movement.
This is like complaining that some country doesn’t have amazing champagne like the champagne region in France or a New Yorker whining about how they can’t get a quality New York pizza in Idaho.
Weird, all the Germans I've drank Belgian beer with called it far better than what they were used to
/jk, couldn't resist trying to assert the beer superiority of my tiny country :)
I haven't had much Belgian beer, but the ones I had were great!
Try to avoid the popular exports (Leffe for example), there are a lot of breweries that make generally better beers :)
Plus if you got some recommendations for German beers I'm all ears
Thanks for the tip, I'll try to keep a look out!
Most of my experience is with the southern regions, my favorite being Tegernseer Hell - I think I've seen that in Belgium, though that might have been at one of those "sells every kind of beer" kiosks in Brussels.
Thanks. I generally buy my beers from such shops, because regular stores don't sell that many types. I'll check if they have some next time.
Some of my favourites are from l'Hermitage, la Caracole or la Brasserie de la Seine. But there are so many breweries and choices that I could drink a different one every day for the whole year.
That's why I said average at best - average beer is going to taste way better than bad beer and also perfectly acceptable, I don't mean it in a negative way, just that in the standard 3-7% golden beer fermented with only yeast category, Cascadian & New Zealand hops provide the best and widest array of tastes regardless of what you're after, as that's where the soil is best and where the breeding is generally done
Are there actual, scientific studies on this topic? Because it's hard for me to take your word for it when all my lived experience has been the opposite.
So there's obviously a split between objective fact and opinion and conjecture, but:
So essentially, the US has just got very lucky when it comes to hop production with good soils and disease resistance, while German beermaking was set back leading other styles to become and remain popular, such as very lightly hopped wheat beers, sour beers where the acidity comes from the fermentation instead of hops, and more recently Belgian style beers that are stronger abv so the stronger alcohol taste substitutes for some of the strength of the hops
There probably are also studies, but they tend to look into mechanisms/variations whereas this is more of a series of coinciding factors which don't really need much research to make sense
Thank you for the explanation, I didn't know about a lot of that! But the jump from all of that information to "beer with hop outside US/NZ is only average" is too large and too subjective.
I get it's a big jump, but I've been clear I'm restricting it to the most popular types of beer and explained why US bred and grown hops had the good fortune to be the most aromatic disease resistant hops, so I still don't think it's unreasonable
Again, none of this applies for styles beyond 3-7% golden beer fermented with yeast only, and even then there's a few exceptions for certain styles where the aromatics are different (eg bitter, which is less about the aromatic hops and more about the earthy notes of the bittering hops), but for the most popular lagers and pale ales I think it holds
The issue is that just based on the history you've mentioned I can't say much about the status today. What developments have happened over the last two decades with more advanced methods? How much of the research is shared between countries, how much of the plants etc?
Hops are highly sensitive to the soil acidity and minerals in terms of the compounds the plants produce, so sharing plants is largely infeasible, plus because it's the US many of them are trademarked so there's no sharing for that reason
Surely fertilizer and other additions can be used to adjust this, or genetic editing can be used to incorporate some stuff?
Okay, but almost everything is trademarked, doesn't mean it can't be bought/sold?
That's a lot of expense compared to just importing US-grown hops, as there's a lot of soil to adjust
And yeah, trademarks on plants are no joke, there's a bunch of restrictions on buying/selling them etc.