Is Citra America’s top hop? Well that depends on what you consider the biggest/best/most important.
The trade organization Hop Growers of America tells us Citra and Mosaic were numbers one and two the year before last. “In 2022 the top two varieties Citra® HBC 394 and Mosaic® HBC 369 commanded nearly a third of hop acreage,” which is a lot of hops.
But what’s a lot of hops when you’re on pace to use around 80,000 lbs of Citra this year? Well, that’s where the Other Half Brewing Company team finds themselves. And right on time as they release a number of beers for Citra Week.
As a passionate purveyor of better lager I was particularly interested when I heard Citra Snaps was coming online. Based on Poetry Snaps, Citra Snaps is a hop-forward pale lager brewed with rice. With the same malt base as Poetry Snaps and the rest of the Snaps series, Citra Snaps gets three varieties of Citra: T90 pellets, Cryo, and Incognito Citra®. If this terminology means nothing to you, we’ve got a primer!
Ben Little, head brewer at Other Half DC, tells me the goal is to get as much flavor and hop saturation as possible, meeting his teams’ expectations and the expectations of customers.
He tells DCBeer:
“We get all of our Citra from 2 providers, YCH [Yakima Chief Hops] and Haas. Sam (our co-founder/brewmaster) [Sam Richardson] has a very specific idea of what he’s looking for in our Citra. We typically see it come across in our beers with profiles of tangerine/sweet orange, lychee, and various tropical fruits (think pineapple, papaya, guava). These are often balanced by a trace backdrop of spring onion, which helps provide a serious bright pop to the fruit notes.”
Richardson adds, “one of my favorite Citra Week beers is triple dry hopped All Citra Everything.” He believes Citra is “one of the best hops to make a single hop IPA.” So the question in my mind is, is it also one of the best hops to make a single hop lager? I plan on getting to the heart of that question as Citra Week Starts. Anecdotally, I’ve had a number of Citra Pils, Citra Helles, and Citra-exclusive lagers over the years and their quality has varied widely. Some were good, some were bad, and a very small number were great.
One piece that often gets lost in our endless obsession with hops is the labor. This piece will not speak directly to labor, but not acknowledging the labor would be a huge shortcoming on my part. As the video for Sesiones del Migrante says, “No migrant labor, no hops. No hops, no beer.” Considering the appearances in this video is the work of Sesiones del Migrante cofounder Victoria Garza, Latin America Sales Manager at Yakima Chief Hops in Yakima, Washington, who was in DC in November at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. If you missed the event, “Last Call: American Beer in a Changing Climate,” you can watch it here.
In addition to the labor that goes into harvesting hops, there is the work of selecting hops. Little tells us he and Richardson and their teams “are on a pace to use ~80,000 lbs of Citra this year, so the pure amount does give us some advantages when it comes to selecting our lots. YCH and Haas already know our habits, so they come prepared with a list of lots that they think we will like. They start us off with 5-7 lots and we narrow it down while bringing in more and more lots (think 20+) and narrow it down accordingly. At this point, we also have a small amount of folks who know how those recently dried hops will show in our beer.”
Little describes the process: “We break them up and give them a good rub, often multiple times as we go around the table. We take some notes and when everyone is done, we give our opinions. There are often ones that can leave the table/conversation immediately. We continue to bring more in and move more out until we get down to our final selections. As the lots leave and as they stay, the folks at the hop suppliers ask for feedback and try to bring in more selections based on our feedback and matching if the size of the lot meets our needs. I want to say that we took roughly 3 hours alone selecting Citra.”
Little notes that there are a number of larger US craft breweries that use Citra, but few of them have Citra as a part of their brand identity the way Other Half does. As Richardson tells us, Citra has been in use in the Other Half breweries (when once there was only one in Brooklyn, there are now breweries and tasting rooms in upstate New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and the District of Columbia) since the beginning of the company.
“We use so much Citra that it’s part of our Brand Identity and there’s a consumer expectation of what Citra from us shows up as,” Little tells us. He writes, compared to “a brewery like Troegs, who has a very different need from Citra in a beer like Perpetual IPA. At that point, smaller breweries are often choosing from lots leftover. I know that some suppliers do offer the ability to ask for lots with certain characteristics whether they are contracting or buying on ‘spot.’ Even then, they are just choosing from what is left.”
Worry not, fans of more, ahem, traditional lager: last year Germany actually surpassed the US for the number of hops grown. This is the first time Germany has held the title since nine years ago, the German Hop Growers Association reported. Citra Week starts today. Other Half DC is likely your closest bet, but if you’re one of our readers in KY, NH, NY, OH, OR, PA, VA, or VT, lucky you as OH can ship these beers!
