Category Archives: Hops

History, Hops

More About Upper Austrian Hops

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A few years back, I wrote about the demise of Upper Austrian hop growing. At the time, I was wondering what variety these local hops were. With the annexation of the Bohemian hop growing regions, the Upper Austrian hops all got uprooted, and only after World War 2, new hop of different varieties were planted. My research into Styrian hops about 3 weeks ago motivated me to also look into Upper Austrian hops in the same way, looking at what newspapers wrote about them.

In 1863, about 6000 Zentner of hops (1 Zentner = 100 kg) were grown in the Upper Austrian districts of Aigen, Haslach, Lembach, Neufelden and Rohrbach, all located in the Western part of Mühlviertel. That particular article is very insightful about what hops were grown: it mentions both “green” and “red” hops, referring to green bine and red bine hops. The quality of the green bine hops was allegedly very good, with a high amount of lupulin, and comparable to red bine hops from Auscha/Úštěk, while the Upper Autrian red bine hops were between Auscha/Úštěk red bine hops and green bine hops from. It apparently also preserved the beer very well until late into the season, the only complaint was that the prices paid for the hops were very low compared to the quality, especially in relation to the quality and prices paid for Auscha/Úštěk hops.

In an 1868 article, the same issue is being mentioned: Upper Austrian hop growers knew that their product had a good quality, but felt like they didn’t get nearly the right amount of money for it. This article defends the profitability of hop growing even at the prices at the time by calculating quite in detail how much you need to spend on growing hops, and how much revenue you’ll get out of it.

An 1871 ad gives us more insight into what variety at least some of these hops were. A trader from Linz advertised Upper Austrian hops from the 1870 harvest for 20-24 fl. per Zentner, and mentions that it was grown from Saazer seedlings. It is not clear whether this was the case for just this batch of hops, or whether this applied also to most if not all other hops grown in Upper Austria at the time.

An 1871 ad advertising Upper Austrian hops grown from Saazer seedlings.

The same trader, Friedrich Smeykal, reported in 1872 that he sold several hop bales of 1869 and 1870 harvest to a London hop trading house, which required him to prepare and package the hops in a particular way. To demonstrate this, he presented several bales at an exhibition of a local folk festival, as it could keep hops fresh and aromatic for several years. We unfortunately do not actually learn what that particular method was.

As mentioned earlier, the Upper Austrian hop grower were discontent with the prices that they were paid for their hops. An 1869 article claimed that hop growers were only paid 60 fl. for their hops, while at the same time, Upper Austrian hops were traded in Saaz for 90 to 100 fl. This is blamed specifically on Jewish hop traders, who the anonymous author accuses of arranging with each other, thus controlling the prices. The same author suggests that hop growers should form an association to centrally control the sales of Upper Austrian hops, thus having more leverage to dictate prices.

This article was immediately contradicted by an expert who specifically pointed out in a letter to the editor that on the day the article was published, Upper Austrian hops traded at 62 to 64 fl. in Nuremberg, while hops in Neufelden (where Upper Austrian hops were traded wholesale) were sold for up to 70 fl. The editors added a note to the letter, claiming that the author, although only anonymously signed as “an expert”, was a Jewish hop trader.

About a month later, another article was published in a different newspaper, denouncing the initial reports as wrong, not only correcting the wrong price information, but also scalding the use of defamatory, antisemitic language.

Similar to what I described in my previous article about Styrian hops and how they were bought up, repackaged, and resold as “Saazer” hops, reports about similar transactions also surfaced about Upper Austrian hops. Most of these reports are again specifically blaming Jewish hop traders, like this report from 1884 or this article from 1888. One article from 1885 even claims how this relabeling was allegedly discovered in one instance: an Upper Austrian brewer had purchased bales of Saazer hops, and when they opened one of them, they found a knife in it and were surprised to see the name of a local hop grower written on it.

In reality, the situation often wasn’t quite as bad. In January 1873, pretty much all Upper Austrian hops were already sold out in Nuremberg, showing that it must have been a popular product where demand must have outstripped supply. In January 1877, Upper Austrian hops even sold for significantly more (430-460 Mark) in Nuremberg than Saazer city hops (375 Mark), showing that the 1876 harvest must have been of even higher quality than the Saazer hops.

Not everybody only blamed Jewish hop traders, though. In one letter to the editor (published anonymously) from 1884, the anonymous author primarily blamed “Czechization” for local hops getting bought up for cheap by Bohemian hop traders, who then ship it back to Bohemia, “nationalize” it, rebrand it, and sell it back to Austrian brewers under different names instead of their actual geographic origin of Upper Austria resp. Mühlviertel.

All in all, the amounts of hops grown in Upper Austria during the 19th and early 20th century were never particularly large, and with the dominance of Bohemian hops in the Austrian and European hop trade, they never established themselves as a “big name”, while still being able to compete with their relatively small amounts through quality.

Hop growing in Mühlviertel has fortunately been revived after World War 2, but the original hop varieties are nowhere to be found. Instead, hop growing restarted with the originally English variety Malling Mid-Season, grown in Austria simply as Malling, with more varieties that were added later on. Nowadays, you can even get Upper Austrian “Golding”, which is really Fuggles because it’s Styrian Goldings with an Upper Austrian terroir, as well as other varieties such as Aurora (also brought in from Slovenia), Perle, Tradition, Hersbrücker spät, Saphir, Spalter Select, Tettnanger, Magnum, Taurus, and even more craft-y “flavour hop” varieties such as Cascade, Comet and Sorachi Ace. And unlike back in the day, marketing and direct sales are nowadays also handled by the hop growers themselves. At less than €30 per kg for T90 pellets of last year’s harvest, I’m considering directly buying Malling hops or maybe Cascade hops for a future brew.

History, Hops

Historic Saaz Hop Fraud

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In a recent conversation I had with Michel Stenzel of Schlossbrauerei Hundisburg, the topic of Styrian hops (steirischer Hopfen) came up. I didn’t know too much other than that most of the hop growing nowadays of what used to be Styria is happening in Slovenia today, while in Austria, only a small hop growing agriculture in Leutschach has survived (or rather, was reestablished after World War 2, like Upper Austrian hop growing) with as little acreage as 80 ha (for comparison: in Hallertau, the total hop acreage amounts to 17,100 ha).

What is also well-known is that the “classic” hop variety from Slovenia is Styrian Golding, nowadays more commonly marketed as Styrian Savinjski Golding, referring to the Savinja region of Slovenia. Styrian Golding started off as cultivar of Fuggle hops getting planted in the region.

Prior to that, Styria had its own native hop variety, simply known as “Steirischer” (i.e. Styrian). In his 1930 Handbuch der Brauerei und Mälzerei, Prof. Franz Schönfeld listed Steirischer as a descendant of Saazer (žatecký poloraný červeňák) hops, together with Schwetzinger, Tettnanger, Neutomischler (Nowotomyski) and Auschaer Rothopfen (red bine hops from Uštěk). This old variety was eventually replaced with the more disease-resistant Styrian/Savinjski Golding hops, I wrote about this before.

Doing a bit more research (basically just checking old newspapers for mentions of Styrian hops), I came across something interesting: Styrian hops weren’t particularly well known in the 1850s and 1860s. Nevertheless, the hops found buyers: in October 1858, a Graz newspaper reported something previously unheard: bales of local Styrian hops getting sent by train to Bohemia, the #1 hop growing region of the Austrian Empire at the time. In the middle of the 19th century, Styrian hops still had a major reputation issue: the quality was fine, and price-wise Styrian hops sold at roughly the same price as Auschaer hops, but once buyers knew they were Styrian hops, they weren’t interested anymore, even when they were packed in Saaz bags.

That last bit got me interested. Styrian hops in Saaz bags? Yes, that was a thing, apparently. In 1866, Bohemian hop traders came to Styria, bought over 800 bales of hops while outbidding local buyers, repackaged them into Saaz bags they had brought themselves, and shipped the hops back to Bohemia. Quality-wise, the hops were absolutely comparable with Saaz hops, except you needed 40% more hops (7 Pfund instead of 5 for a 40 Eimer batch of beer), indicating a lower alpha acid content.

Once Styrian hops were sold under their own name, they actually fared really well. This happened first in 1875, and the German Hop Association considered it to be the best hop variety right behind Saaz city hops (meaning the Saaz hops were grown on city ground and not somewhere in the surrounding district). Besides its fine qualities, it also went to market earlier than other hop varieties, which was a great advantage and got Styrian hop farmers to achieve some of the highest prices.

The virtual equality of Saaz hops and Styrian hops also shows in 1877 pricing, where Saazer, Spalter and Styrian hops all sold for the same price, though in that year, neither of these varieties were the most expensive ones.

Still, the fact that Bohemian hop traders would repackage Styrian hops and sell it as Saazer hops seems like a dubious business practice. They probably did it because they knew that the quality was perfectly fine, that customers would not be able to smell or taste the difference, but they basically arbitraged by misrepresenting the origin of the hops. Due to the poor (but unwarranted) reputation of Styrian hops, this misrepresentation was material to the price that could be charged for them. In my book, that’s fraud.

Interestingly, this is not even the first time I came across accusations of fraudulent misrepresentation of hops. In his 1818 book Das Bamberger Bier, Johann Seifert claimed that he had witnessed how hops had been bought in Amberg (east of Nuremberg), brought over the border into Bohemia, and then reimported into Bavaria with a Bohemian hop seal on the bales. He was very critical of a supposed superiority of Bohemian hops, and tried to get brewers to use cheaper local hops of the same quality instead of potentially getting defrauded with “Bohemian” hops that were actually grown near Nuremberg.

History, Hops

Historic Vienna Lager: More Findings

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During my preparations for #BeeryLongReads2018, I found more information regarding my historic Vienna lager. In particular, I found more information about one topic that has been quite difficult to find anything out about: hopping rates. I blogged about the hops used in Vienna lager previously.

In the book “Die Theorie und Praxis der Malzbereitung und Bierfabrikation“, published by Julius Thausing in 1888 (previous, less comprehensive editions, e.g. from 1877, are available), the author lists typical hopping rates for Vienna lager beers. The amount of hops varied depending on the original gravity:

  • 10.5%: 1.8 – 2.2 – 2.5 g/l
  • 11.5%: 2.5 – 2.8 – 3.0 g/l
  • 12.5%: 3.0 – 3.3 – 3.6 g/l
  • 13.5%: 3.3 – 3.6 – 3.8 g/l
  • 14.5%: 3.6 – 3.8 – 4.0 g/l
  • 15.5%: 4.0 – 5.0 – 6.0 g/l

Low-gravity beer was generally brewed with an OG of about 10% and sold after 6 to 8 weeks, while the regular Lagerbier was brewed with 13% OG and lagered for 4 to 8, sometimes even 10 months or more. This hopping rate is a bit lower than what I had found in other sources before, which prescribed a hopping rate of 4 g/l for Vienna lager.

Of course, with the absence of any information regarding alpha acid, the actual bitterness still remains a big miracle.

In the years 2006 to 2015, the alpha acid content of Saazer hops varied between 2.1% (2015) and 4.0% (2011); the average 3.15%, the median 2.9%. At a hopping rate of 3.6 g/l in a 13°P wort and 90 minute boil time, this can mean a bitterness between 19 IBU and 37 IBU! Most likely, the answer lies somewhere in-between, so for hops with 3.15% alpha acid, this would mean 29 IBU, which seems absolutely reasonable and is close enough to some of my previous estimations of 27 IBU. I take this as a confirmation that a hopping rate to achieve a bitterness of around 27 IBU to 30 IBU seems appropriate for Vienna lager, at least from a historical point of view.

History, Hops

Styrian Hops in the 1920’s

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Recently, I came across “Handbuch der Brauerei und Mälzerei”, published as three books from 1930 to 1935 by author Franz Schönfeld, who some of you may know as the author of “Die Herstellung obergähriger Biere” from 1902 and its updated version “Obergärige Biere und ihre Herstellung” from 1939.

This “manual of brewing and malting” is more technical, and focuses on beer ingredients (first book, published in 1930), malting (second book, published in 1932), and brewing (third book, published in 1935). When going through all three, I found a list of common hop varieties and their distinction which I think reflects hop varieties around that time quite well.

What particularly caught my eye was the list of hop varieties that were derived from Saazer hops, which in this book is described as one of the finest hops, what is nowadays known as “Saazer Formenkreis”. According to these list, it includes the following hops:

  • Schwetzinger (from Schwetzingen in Baden-Württemberg)
  • Tettnanger (from Tettnang at Lake Constance)
  • Neutomischler (from Nowy Tomyśl in Poland)
  • Auschaer Rothopfen (from Úštěk/Auscha in Bohemia)
  • Steirer (from Styria, in particular Lower Styria in Slovenia)

The last one was particularly interesting, because it solved a big question that I asked in 2016, what hop varieties used to be grown in Austria (and formerly Austrian lands) before Styrian hops were replaced with Styrian Goldings due to an issue with hop disease, and before Upper Austrian hops were uprooted.  As it turns out, the hops grown in Styria were simply Saazer with local terroir!

There’s still another question surrounding Styrian hops, and that is when the change from Saaz-derived Styrian hops to Fuggles-derived Styrian Goldings due to an alleged hop disease issue happened. Many source say in the 1930’s, and at least major cases of downy mildew can be corroborated through the Joh.Barth&Sohn-issued annual hop reports: in the 1934/35 report, Poland and Yugoslavia are mentioned as two countries who have been indifferent about Peronospora (downy mildew) in the past and now have to pay the price for it through crop failures. But (Styrian) Goldings are mentioned in earlier issues of the same report: the 1931/32 report mentions both Goldings and “late hops” being picked in Slovenia. The 1926/27 report mentions both varieties, with the “late hops” only being grown on 90 hectares (ha) of a total of 1150 ha of hop gardens in Slovenia. The “late hops” suffered from Peronospora, while the quality of the Goldings was good. Earlier Barth reports give no insight into which hop varieties were grown.

So what we do know from these reports is that the change from the old Styrian variety to the newer Styrian Goldings variety must have happened in the years before 1926/1927. During that time, Slovenian hop farming went through huge changes: where Styria grew 1788 ha of hops in 1914, that area had shrunk to just 855 ha in 1917, and to a mere 400 ha in 1919. From then on, the hop acreage grew dramatically to 850 ha in 1924 and reached its peak of 3000 ha in 1928. In 1930, it took another drop to 1380 ha, but slowly recovered to 1850 ha in 1937, roughly the size before World War I. During these many ups and downs, it is very likely that new hop gardens were planted with Styrian Goldings, whereas old hop gardens that were abandoned were more likely old Styrian hops. But this is more speculation on my side, so that question when this change really happened is still unanswered.

History, Hops

How to build up the Prussian hop industry for 3 decades and implode it within a few years

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Prussian king Frederick the Great was apparently very interested in the state of hops in Prussia. He noticed that most hops that Prussian brewers used in brewing was imported from surrounding hop growing regions like Bavaria, Franconia and Bohemia. Self-sufficiency was apparently an important economic principle at that time, if you could grow it locally it meant you didn’t need to spend time to import it from somewhere else.

So in 1743, Frederick the Great gradually ordered the various regions of his kingdom to start planting hop gardens and grow more hops: first Pomerania, then Saxony was ordered to become self-sufficient and if possible, export any surplus hops. In 1751, he ordered that experiments with Bohemian seedlings shall be undertaken in the regions of Altmark and Kurmark, as these hops were more popular on the hop markets due to “their greater strength and power”.

The Seven Years’ War stifled further initiatives, but in 1770, new orders were sent out to further promote growing hops for self-sufficiency. Hop poles were sold to new hop farmers for a very cheap price, and even a contest was started, with a cash prize of the farmer with the greatest hop production at the end of the year.

In 1775, hop gardens were introduced in Western Prussia, and the king’s chamber director was ordered to expand the hop gardens around Potsdam as the existing ones still couldn’t cover to demand from brewers in Berlin. In April 1776, imports into Prussia were completely prohibited due to a substantial surplus production of 2600 Wispel from 1775, about 1420 hecolitres in modern units (it is unknown whether this was in pressed or unpressed form), and enforcement of this law was supervised by the king himself.

There’s a story where allegedly Frederick the Great on one of his carriage rides through his kingdom noticed a carriage with a delivery of hops. Realising that from that particular street, it could have only come from Dessau, he suspected that the hops may have been smuggled in from the adjacent Principality of Anhalt. He immediately started an investigation that eventually found out that the hops were indeed contraband and illegally imported from Anhalt.

But the tides turned: due to a bad hop harvest in 1777, the king didn’t decide to allow imports, but he instead also forbade exports, to prefer the local market. And not just temporarily to deal with the hop shortage, no, this export ban was permanent, and the Prussian hop market was insular. Hop prices crashed, and by 1779, many hop farmers gave up the crop completely. The French period and the German campaign of 1813 didn’t help with developing Prussian hop gardens, either. Only in 1860, when Europe was hit by a terrible hop crop failure, Prussia had a temporary surge in new hop gradens: the Hallertau was the only region with a good harvest of high-quality hops, which sold for 6.5 times the normal rate. Farmers again started looking into hops as an attractive cash crop. By the end of the 19th century, much of the hop growing had shifted to Posen/Poznań, while both the acreage and the yield in the rest of Prussia steadily decreased: in 1898, Prussia only harvested a miserable 4.6 Zentner per hectare, while Bavaria reached 10.6, Baden 13.6, and Alsace 16.8.

If Frederick the Great had been more forward-thinking and less focused on self-sustenance, the current German landscape of major hop growing regions may have looked differently.

History, Hops

When did hop alpha acid become relevant in recipe formulation?

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This is one question that itched me a lot is the matter of hops and their contribution of bitterness in historic beers: when did the alpha acid content of hops become relevant in beer recipe formulation?

While the topic of bitterness in beer and the various contributing factors is a complex one to be discussed at another point, it is universally recognized that iso-alpha-acid, the isomerized form of alpha acid, is a major contributor to the overall bitterness of a beer. This isomerization happens when boiling the wort with hops. Even the quantification of bitterness in beer, often noted as IBU, International Bitterness Units, is essentially a determination of the amount of dissolved iso-alpha-acid by employing spectrophotometry.

One conclusion of the observation of the relationship between iso-alpha-acid and bitterness is that the higher the amount of alpha acid in a particular crop of hops is, the higher the contribution of bitterness will be in the resulting beer, assuming the same boil times and all. Brewers nowadays take the amount of alpha acid in hops into account when formulating beer recipes, and using formulas like Tinseth, Rager or Garetz, attempt to approximate the expected bitterness. Of course, this is very much only an approximation: lab analyses have shown that the calculated IBU can diverge quite a bit from measured IBU, in particular in amounts that are beyond the maximum solubility of iso-alpha-acid in aqueous solutions.

But what does this have to do with historic beer? Quite a lot: due to the lack of analytical methods to determine the bitterness contribution of a particular hop crop, it was essentially unknown how bitter a beer would end up with a new crop until it was brewed and taste-tested.

Depending on various factors like the weather, crops of the same hop variety grown in the same hop garden in different years can yield different amounts of alpha acid.  Chinook hops from 2016 can have e.g. 11.6 %, while the 2015 crop has 12.8 %, the 2014 crop 12.0 %, the 2013 crop 13.7 %, and so on. This aren’t just made-up numbers, I took these from the historic data of Chinook hops as provided by a German online homebrewing store.

When looking at the relative variability of the alpha acid content, you roughly get a +/- 10 % variation over the course of several years, which would also reflect the same in the overall bitterness contribution.

Now, in the context of historic beers, this variability is a lot more dramatic: early hop varieties and local land races are usually low in alpha acid. If we had the same absolute variability in alpha acid content in a land race as with Chinook in the example above, the impact on the relative variability would be much greater. Let’s look at another example: Hersbrucker Spät from 2016 with 3.2 % alpha acid, 2015 3 %, 2014 2.3 %, and 2013 a staggering 1.8 % alpha acid content. In terms of relative variability, this is more in the range of +/- 30 %.

In pretty much all historic recipes from the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century, hop dosage is usually specified in weight per resulting beer, for example gram per hectolitre or pounds per barrel. If I were to brew a simple Munich Lagerbier according to typical first half of the 19th century gravity and hopping rates, a variability between 1.8 and 3.2 % alpha acid makes the difference between 27 IBU on the low end and 47 IBU on the high end. That’s about the difference in bitterness between e.g. a malty brown ale (e.g. Sam Smith Nut Brown Ale allegedly has 31 IBU) and an aggressively hopped Pilsner-style beer (Schönramer Pils allegedly has 45 IBU).

I actually haven’t found much evidence how brewers used to counteract these problems, but I have two theories:

Bavarian brewers employed blending methods prior to lagering their beer: several batches of beer were fermented one after the other, but were then evenly split up between a relatively large number of lagering barrels. This was done for consistency reasons, and would have allowed the brewmaster to adjust the hopping rate of the different batches according to the outcome of the first batch or first few batches.

To a certain extent, brewers also had a relatively good understanding how hops brought preservative qualities to the beer. In some literature, e.g. Ausführliches Lehrbuch der Bayrischen Bierbrauerei mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Dickmaischbrauerei by J.S. Schorer (published in 1863), different hopping rates and blends of hop varieties were proposed depending on how long the beer was to be lagered, and how late in the year the beer was to be served, in order to compensate for the slowly warming beer cellars (this was before modern refrigeration, when beer was still lagered in ice cellars). Some of these hop blends suggest blending hops from the latest harvest with older hops from previous years. Old hops still provide preservative qualities, but due to the degradation of the alpha acid content, don’t contribute nearly as much bitterness as younger hops. This effect is used even nowadays in Lambic brewing, where relatively large doses of aged hops are used.

But this still hasn’t answered the original question. So I went out and searched a bit. To cut this a bit short, I was not able to find a proper answer. I was not even able to find out when alpha acids were discovered, or when iso-alpha acid was first recognized as contributor of bitterness. But I was nevertheless able to at least find something:

An early analysis of different hop varieties regarding their alpha and beta acid contents (back then often called “alpha resin” and “beta resin”) are the two papers called “REPORTS RECEIVED FROM BREWERS ON RECENT BREWING TRIALS WITH CERTAIN NEW VARIETIES OF HOPS” by Prof. E. S. Salmon and H. H. Glasscock, M.Sc. (published 1944) and “REPORTS RECEIVED FROM BREWERS ON RECENT BREWING TRIALS WITH CERTAIN NEW VARIETIES OF HOPS; II“, by Prof. E. S. Salmon and Dr. A. H. Burgess (published 1947). These papers refer to analyses going back as far as 1932, and not just of new varieties as the titles would suggest, but also Fuggles from Worchestershire and Mid-Kent and Goldings from Mid-Kent and East-Kent. In case you’re wondering, “new” varieties discussed were hops like Brewer’s Gold, Quality Hop [sic!], Brewer’s Favourite, Bullion, Fillpocket, and Brewer’s Standby.

From what I could see from scanning the literature of that time, the analysis of different types of alpha acid was still an active research topic and the 1950’s and probably beyond that. It have not been able to find a definitive point in time where the relationship between iso-alpha-acid content and bitterness contribution was discovered or picked up as a tool to determine hop dosage sizes. So unfortunately, this question remains unanswered as of now.

History, Hops

Hops used in Vienna Lager

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Two  years ago, I did some research to put together a recipe that was meant to closely match what a Vienna lager in the 19th century would have looked and tasted like.

About a year ago, I also discussed the state of Austrian hops and how the hop growing industry had changed over time. In that article, I mentioned that Kleinschwechater Brauerei used to own land in Michelob in Bohemia, close to Saaz, where the brewery grew barley and hops. Due to the geographical closeness, I made the point that most likely Saaz hops or a very closely related landrace would have been grown there.  But so far, I did not have any conclusive proof that Kleinschwechater (later Schwechater) Brauerei indeed brewed with Saaz hops.

That changed a bit when I visited the Schultze-Berndt library located at VLB and curated by the Gesellschaft für Geschichte des Brauwesens (society for the history of brewing technology) a few weeks. When doing some research for my English-language book on homebrewing historic beer styles, I stumbled upon a Festschrift regarding 100 years of brewing Vienna lager, aptly named “Schwechater Lager”. While not having that much content, it still had some bits and pieces that gave away some information, including the beautiful water colour illustrations.

One image in particular contained something very interesting: pictures of huge stacks of hop bales. 

These hop bales clearly show the marking “SAAZ”. Assuming that this picture accurately shows the hop storage facilities at Schwechater brewery, we now have a direct connection showing that Schwechater has been using Saaz hops. The text around it mentions that the brewery has been covering their demand using hops from Saaz, and praises Saaz as one of the best hop growing regions in the world. Unfortunately, no time frames are mentioned, so while all this information was certainly true for their brewing in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, we cannot yet make the direct connection that Vienna lager in the 19th century must have used Saaz hops.

So let’s go a bit further, into the less colourful but more number-laden territory of raw statistics. In 1891 (that’s the earliest that I could find), Bohemia had 10317 hectares of hop growing land, producing an annual output of 77540 Zentner (1 Zentner = 50 kg in Germany, therefore 3877 tons). At that time, the total hop growing area of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was 14850.5 hectares (divided into the regions of Bohemia, Galicia, Styria, Upper Austria, Moravia and Carinthia), and the total annual output was 117534 Zentner (5876 tons). So for the whole of the monarchy, Bohemia produced almost 66 % of all its hops, on almost 70 % of its acreage allocated to hop growing.

This trend of Bohemia being the dominant hop grower within the monarchy continued in the years after as late as 1918, and Bohemia’s dominance even grew larger as other hop growing areas declined further: in 1913, Bohemia’s hop output was 73.8 % of the monarchy’s total output, with 75.8 % of the total hop acreage, while in 1914 it was a staggering 87.7 % (85.2 % of the total hop acreage). The stark increase in share in 1914 is due to a complete failure in Galicia for that year, most likely due to World War 1 and Austria-Hungary losing the Battle of Galicia.

So, just by looking at the pure numbers, we can deduce that there was a very high likelihood that most breweries bought their hops from Saaz. Again, this is not definite proof, but it points even more towards the direction that hops from Saaz were used by Schwechater brewery, and possibly most other breweries at that time, especially since Saaz hops were the highest priced ones in Germany and Austria at that time.

On a side note, the hop production of Bohemia at that time up as late as the late 1930’s was so strong that Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 pretty much doubled Nazi Germany’s acreage and overall amount of hops produced.

History, Hops

The Demise Of Upper Austrian Hop-Growing

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In a previous article, I discussed the history and current state of the hop-growing industry in Austria. Recent finds in the Upper Austrian state library allow me to expand on this topic, in particular on hop agriculture in Upper Austria, in particular in Mühlviertel.

Hop-growing has a great industry in Upper Austria. The earliest mention of hop-growing dates back to 1206, and there’s always been hop-growing all over the country, but especially so in the Mühlviertel, the northern-most part of Upper Austria, and the Innviertel, the western-most part which used to belong to Bavaria until 1779 and was heavily influenced through the hop-growing industry there. Even though Austria was always overshadowed by the much larger hop-growing regions in Bavaria and Bohemia, Upper Austrian growers managed to produce good quality that at least was able to satisfy local demand, and export to a certain extent. One source mentions during the time of the American Civil War, hop exports from the US to England essentially ceased, which allowed some Upper Austrian hop growers to enter the English market at least temporarily.

But the dominance of Bavaria and Bohemia got bigger and bigger, while the crop areas in the Mühlviertel kept shrinking quite massively: while in 1927, there were still 307 ha of hops being grown, it was a measly 32 ha in 1936. Attempts to counter this in the 1920’s failed due to lack of funding, and also due to difficulties to compete with Bavarian and Bohemian hop products.

In the previous article, I mentioned that in 1939, the remaining hop gardens were ordered to be uprooted by Berlin. Without context, it may seem nonsensical to just get rid of a local agricultural industry, but there’s actually a geopolitical reason behind it.

After the “Anschluss” of Austria, the Upper Austrian hop-growing industry actually hoped to be able to revive and increase the acreage of hops with the help of the German beer industry. But in October 1938, the Sudetenland, the then mostly German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia, were annexed by Nazi Germany after the Munich Agreement. Since this included the hop-growing regions of Saaz/Žatec and Auscha/Úštěk, Germany suddenly had an absolute over-abundance of high-quality hops for its beer brewing industry.

This was the demise of hop-growing in Mühlviertel: with the vast majority of European hop-growing regions under German control, it made at that point no sense to further invest into the Mühlviertel, and so it was decided to end hop-growing altogether there.

In some ways, the Munich Agreement was the demise of Upper Austrian hops. With it, the land races of that area were lost. Only after World War 2, hops were reintroduced, but this time, English and later German varieties. Nowadays, Malling, Styrian Golding, Aurora, Perle, Tradition, Spalter Select and Saphir are being grown there.

Hops

The State of Austrian Hops

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DoldenEspecially when discussing historic Austrian beers, obviously Austrian hops, or to some extent, Cisleithanian hops, are often discussed. A lot has happened in terms of hops over the last 100 years in Cisleithania (the Austrian part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire after 1867), and I’d like to give a bit of an overview about it.

Historically, hops were grown only in certain regions of Cisleithania. The largest of these areas were the Saaz (which now belongs to the Czech Republic), the Mühlviertel (part of Upper Austria), the Waldviertel which lies in Lower Austria and is adjacent to the Mühlviertel, and Lower Styria, which now mostly belongs to Slovenia. In the nowadays Austrian part of Lower Styria, only in Leutschach there is still a hop-growing industry.

Each of these areas had their respective land races of hops. A land race is simply a variety of hops that was growing locally and was eventually domesticated, and they’ve traditionally been named after the respective local regions. Hence Hallertauer, Hersbrucker, Spalter, Tettnanger, Saazer, and so on.

Wait, why do only Saaz hops appear in that list of land races, but none from the Mühlviertel or Lower Styria? Because, as far as I was able to find out, Saaz hops are the only land race left of all the local hop varieties that were grown in Austria in the 19th century.

The first “victim” were the hops in Styria. The main hop variety for quite some time now is Styrian Golding resp. Savinjski Golding, which was introduced to Styria only relatively recently. The book “For The Love Of Hops” by Stan Hieronymus (p.167) claims this was in the 1930’s after Slovenian hop fields were destroyed by a disease and that the replacement was Fuggles misidentified as Goldings. slovenianhops.si claims that Styrian Goldings is a descendant of Fuggles and that it was introduced in the early 19th century. This seems highly unlikely, as Fuggles was isolated, categorized and named only in the 1860’s/70’s. But what seems to be secured is that the local land race in Styria was not resistant to a hop disease (some say powdery mildew), while the imported Styrian Goldings were, and thus completely overtook the local industry.

What I keep reading, most of the time without any source, is that Styrian Goldings was Anton Dreher’s favourite hop variety. This is total bollocks, as Anton Dreher died in 1863, before Fuggles was even released to the public. Also his son, Anton Dreher the younger, died in 1921, before Styrian Goldings started to be grown.

Hop growing in the Mühlviertel goes back several hundred years, with the first historic mention in 1206. The peak of hop production was in 1880. But in 1939, the hop industry came to a stand still, as Berlin ordered all hop farmers in Mühlviertel to destroy their plants. The hop industry was dead in the Mühlviertel until after World War 2. The “reforestation” of hops was initially done with English hops. That’s how the Malling hop variety made it to Austria, where it is still grown to this day. Later, Styrian Golding and Aurora were added, as well as Perle, Hersbrucker, Spalter Select, Saphir, and Tradition. The original land races don’t exist anymore, and aren’t grown commercially anymore. The same also goes for the Waldviertel, as it is geographically adjacent to the Mühlviertel, and both regions hop marketing and sales efforts have been combined since the early 1950’s.

That leaves the Saaz hops. Unlike the two previous regions, the local land race of hops was never destroyed by hop diseases or ordered to be removed. Due to its rather unique aromatic qualities and the widespread use in Czech beers, Saazer hops are still widely grown and have soared in popularity world-wide. It’s the only Cisleithanian hop land race left that is still commercially available to brewers, and in my opinion, the only good choice for historic Austrian beers.

This may seem counterintuitive at first, as you wouldn’t immediately associate Czech hops with Austrian beer, but there’s a very direct connection between Saazer hops and Austrian beer: Anton Dreher and the Kleinschwechater Brauerei. This brewer, well-known for the invention of the Vienna lager, a very early and (for that time) pale continental lager beer, used to own land in Michelob near Saaz, where he’d grow hops and barley to stay independent from the then relatively volatile market. It is safe to assume that the hop variety grown there is the local land race, and that he’d use the self-grown hops in his own beers. A year ago, when I tried to retrace the history of Vienna lager and the appropriate ingredients, I used Saazer hops as well, and their spiciness worked quite nicely in combination with the Vienna malt. Even a modern Austrian commercial recreation of that historic beer, Ottakringer’s “Wiener Original”, uses Saaz hops.

In any case, it would nevertheless be very interesting to learn whether any of these older land race hops have somehow survived in the seed bank somewhere around the world. If they do, then reviving them, like the historic English Farnham White Bine hop variety, would certainly be possible.