Hops comparison table

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sweetcell

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Hi folks,

I put together a spreadsheet to help me choose which hops I should start growing. The idea was to create a central repository for my hops research. I was tired of jumping around from website to website and not being able to compare their info. I hope you find this useful.

- View spreadsheet online: Go to Google Docs
- Download Excel XLS: Download Excel

The research is based on several online sources, noted at the bottom of the table. I don't consider this to be a final version, there are a few varieties I should add. Please contact me (PM, or sweetcell-at-gmail) if you have any suggestions, edits, comments, critiques, praise, etc.

A few miscellaneous notes:

Why isn't every hop known to humankind included in this list?
I concentrated my efforts on hops that can be bought, and grown, in North America. I ignored European varieties, and proprietary (registered) plants that are not currently available to the public. Please let me know if I've missed any that fit the above criteria, I'll be happy to add them.

Wait, there are two values/answers in one cell! And they don't agree with each other!
This simply indicated that there isn't a consensus in the literature. Essentially, two authors disagree. Since I'm not an expert I thought it best to include both points of view. I've tried to separate information from different sources by putting them on different lines (soft breaks).

Why are your AA% ranges bigger than what that I've seen elsewhere?
My numbers represent the widest range I came across. For example, if one source said 7-10%, and another said 9-12%, I would put down 7-12% (lowest and highest of both). Chances are good that any hops you grow will fall within that range.

What's the deal with the "Yes" and "No" in the Resistance section?
"Yes" means that the variety has resistance, "no" means that it is susceptible to that disease. Yes = good, no = potentially bad.

Why do some entries have question marks after them?
A question mark indicated that the information is implied, but not explicit. For example, a variety might have "good disease resistance" - this implies that it is likely resistant to powdery mildew, but there is no guarantee that it is. Consider a questions mark as a "probably".

Why are some cells blank?
Because I couldn't find any information on that topic, for that variety.

Shouldn't you be working?
Shouldn't you be picking out which hops to grow, instead of asking me awkward questions?

This spreadsheet shouldn't be your only source of information during the hops selection process. Even more valuable are the insights of others who have grown hops, especially those who have done so in your region. Just because some agricultural egghead has said that it can't be done, doesn't mean that you can't show him he's wrong. However, sometimes those eggheads have good advice - like in the Field Guide for Integrated Pest Management in Hops.

Happy growing, and may it lead to happy brewing!

- View spreadsheet online: Go to Google Docs
- Download Excel XLS: Download Excel


REVISION NOTES:
20120122: Original version.
20120123: Added some details to hops and stopped using the term "varietal".
20120124: Added Santiam. Removed aroma notes from Misc Notes and put into its own column. Added "Climate" column. Added a lot of information from Freshop's USDA description page.
20120207: Big update: removed Palisade and Athanum (both are proprietary), added Vojvodina. Added "Substitution" and "Traditional beer styles" (I don't personally find these very useful, but they were requested). Filled in various bits of information on disease resistance and storability as I came across it.
20120302: added Cluster (per 4x4jeep74's request) and Summit (previously proprietary, now available to the public - thanks MarkT). Added HSI% to storage column. Added various aroma and beer style notes. Removed PDFs as attachments to the forum due to size limitation, PDFs now stored by DarkBrood (thanks buddy!)
 
i've just updated the spreadsheet with some new info. i'll add revision notes to the first post, so you can track if/when changes have been made.

if y'all could do me a favor and "prost" this thread, i'd appreciate it. i think this could be very useful to folks trying to select what to grow, so i'd like people to take notice before the thread sinks away into oblivion.

thanks!
 
big update published: i added new columns, plugged in some USDA info, added a variety, etc. see first post for new version of the spreadsheet, all links have been updated.

this is likely the last major update i'll make on my own, at this point i'm pretty happy with it. i certainly welcome your comments/suggestions on how it might be improved.

hope you find this useful. happy growing! :mug:
 
This is awesome! I was in the middle of doing something very similar to this as I was trying to figure out which hops varieties I want to grow this year. My very first batch is in a secondary now, so I have very little brewing experience so I was struggling where to start with picking a few hops varieties.

To try to figure out what I wanted to grow I was going through recipes (and kits) and of course of all the styles I want to brew all have wildly different hop additions. I then started to look at substitutions that people recommend out there to see if I could consolidate a bit.

Do you think you could add a substitution column? There may be some arguments as to the quality of substation, but as a starting point it would be good to get close. I was using the following sources:
http://www.brew365.com/hop_substitution_chart.php
http://www.hopunion.com/17_HopVarietyHandbook.cfm?p3=open

Also, a few more from googling:
http://byo.com/resources/hops
http://www.kotmf.com/articles/hopslist.php

Again I don’t have any knowledge to know what is a good substitution and what isn’t. Also, since I am making requests… another nice addition might be to add the examples from Palmer’s book for each of the varieties that he lists. Although that could get out of hand quickly to try to get too much information in there.

Thanks,
flips
 
This is an impressive compilation. It just makes me wonder are you an engineer, accountant or just a naturally anal retentive individual? Please, take that as the compliment it was intended to be.
 
Dan:

I work with tons of engineers and they are not....well ok yeah they are. But really that is some nice info, good job.
 
This is an impressive compilation. It just makes me wonder are you an engineer, accountant or just a naturally anal retentive individual? Please, take that as the compliment it was intended to be.
worse: i'm an IT consultant :D

hops are something i intend to buy only once so i thought it worth the time to invest in picking out the best ones for my needs, location, etc - only way to make this decision was to have all the info in one place. i got tired of flipping between several websites with this info and i kept forgetting why i thought one variety was better than an another. and this forum has provided me with so much valuable information, i guess this is my attempt to give a little back.

now y'all go have yourselves a great weekend :ban:
 
Great spreadsheet, thanks for taking the time to put all of this together in one place. This is useful in so many different ways!
 
As an alternative and/or addendum to this, I have been putting together a data spreadsheet on hops as well although more from the angle of an extendedBeerXML entry with the specs from each supplier. While I don't have the spreadsheet quite polished up, I have the datasheets posted on my page at Dark Brood - BrewXML. Not too exciting at the moment, but it's a solid data source on the word straight from the suppliers.
 
major update posted. please see first post of the thread, all links point to the new version. among other changes i've added columns for "substitution" and "traditional style usage", per requests that i've received.

due to silly file size limitations, i've had to cut the PDFs in half. if you want to download a PDF version, be sure to grab both halves ("Letter" parts 1 & 2, or "Legal" parts 1 & 2). might be best to download the XLS and format it yourself.

happy growing!
 
Sweetcell, you can host the file elsewhere and link it here if file sizes are getting in your way.
 
Sweetcell, you can host the file elsewhere and link it here if file sizes are getting in your way.

yeah, but i couldn't come up with anywhere to host them. i don't have any permanent web storage space of my own (bad geek, bad!) and most of the free services i know of have limited storage times.

please feel free to suggest a place for me to stash the PDFs online. i think mediafire doesn't delete files, i'll look into that tonight.
 
I use photobucket all the time... I believe they allow for .pdf formats, i know i had a .psd on there that is like 25x the size of whatever you are going to put up. (we are talking a pdf size of like a gb)
 
this is great, thanks for putting this together sweetcell.

Spreadsheet is getting printed out and tucked into my copy of Homebrewer's Garden
 
yeah, but i couldn't come up with anywhere to host them. i don't have any permanent web storage space of my own (bad geek, bad!) and most of the free services i know of have limited storage times.

please feel free to suggest a place for me to stash the PDFs online.

If you're stuck, I can host the file for you on my site. I can't offer you a personal upload login (or maybe I can...never looked into it, to be honest), but if you want to email me any future updates, I can update the hosted files...

Here you go: http://www.digitalgibson.com/beer/data/hops/HBT-sweetcell/index.html
 
There is a lot of good info. here. I will download that spreadsheet when I get home, I plan on growing hops this year where the tomato garden is (was). I read that hop growing started here in the northeast, but later moved out west because of disease. It's great there is more tolerant vairietys now. If anyone in the New Hampshire area had good sucess with a certain variety, I would like to hear about it.
Bryan.
 
bryan - keep in mind that large farms, with hundreds or thousands of plants, would have more disease problems than a small grower like yourself with under a dozen.

disease resistance is something i was quite concerned about when i selected which hops to grow. my area has all sorts of wilts and other nasties in the soil. our tomatoes suffer from fusarium every year and UMD's agricultural extension service informed me that verticillium wilt is a known issue. here's what i ended up ordering:

just put in my order last night: i got one each of nugget, sterling, santiam, spalter select and centennial from greatlakeshops.com. my choices were based mostly on disease resistance (we have both bugs and wilts here), ability to grow in heat, flavor/use profiles (i.e. looked for a variety across my selection) and storability. varieties that didn't make the cut only because of lack of space (i.e. could have been on the list) - chinook, vojvodina, wye challenger, and newport.

just thought i'd share in case anyone was looking to make a choice and wanted some input. then again, maybe i took way too a scientific appraach to this decision. many people have said "just grow what you like", so YMMV.
along with disease resistance, i also gave heavy weighting to heat tolerance since summers in the DC area can be brutal. that might be a little less of a concern for you in NH so it might open up the selection a little for you. i remember that i rejected Perle, Ultra, Crystal and Mt. Hood because of their heat sensitivity.

and definitely heed my "YMMV" warning. just because a variety isn't known for having a resistance doesn't mean that it automatically become an issue. the agricultural extension informed me that while my area has verticillium, it's only a problem after heavy rains and in poorly drained soils - depending where you plant it, a verticillium-sensitive hop might do just fine around here.
 
Having problems with fungi? I use potassium bicarb, cell wall rupturing ensues and I am happy and the plant gets foliar fed with potassium for awesome fruits and flowers. If you are in a rush and don't have much spare cash a little baking soda goes a long way.
 
sweetcell said:
attached are the two PDFs. please upload and send me the link, whenever you get around to it. no rush :)

also attached is the original spreadsheet (in legal format) in case you wanna slice n' dice it according to your needs.

Here are the hosted files: :mug:

http://www.digitalgibson.com/beer/data/hops/HBT-sweetcell

Or for direct links:

http://www.digitalgibson.com/beer/data/hops/HBT-sweetcell/Hops Comparison 20120207_LETTER.pdf

http://www.digitalgibson.com/beer/data/hops/HBT-sweetcell/Hops Comparison 20120207_LEGAL.pdf

http://www.digitalgibson.com/beer/data/hops/HBT-sweetcell/Hops Comparison 20120207_LEGAL.xlsx
 
Excellent job, been trying to figure out what hops to grow in place of my second Cascade....this will difinitely help. thanks
 
sweetcell, I was going over your spreadsheet and seeing what was available out there, and found that Hops Direct have one thats not on your list. It's called Cluster, and that it grows well. with AA% 5.5 - 8.5 and duel purpose .Just thought you would like to add it.
 
Thanks for sharing. It was very helpful for determining which hops the add this year. Adding Centennial, Magnum, and Willamette to the hop garden.
 
update time! the links in the first post of this thread have been updated to point to a new version of the spreadsheet, so please replace any copies you currently have with the new one. changes:

20120302: added Cluster (per 4x4jeep74's request) and Summit (previously proprietary, now available to the public - thanks MarkT). Added HSI% to storage column. Added various aroma and beer style notes. Removed PDFs as attachments to the forum due to size limitation, PDFs now stored by DarkBrood (thanks buddy!)​

So, any support for making this thread a sticky? :mug:
 
Thiis is some excellent info. Definately should be a sticky in the hops growing section so the info stays on top and available to the new members like me. I wish I had seen this before I ordered my Rhizomes, but even though I was shooting from the hip in the dark I came out OK probably. Eventually I would like to have a large quantity of different varieties to do some experimentation with. Hops have such a flavor changing character and many different properties that an empiriscist (SP?) like me could spend a lifetime catalougeing and documenting the outcomes of even minor adjustments to time, quantity and base variety. I have plenty of room and have started my hop fields already, just gotta keep em going and add to it every year till I get all the current and noble varieties that are available and viable in my neck of the woods. Mods. How bout a sticky?
Regards,
Crippled Bob
 
+1 on the stickey. Great job on the spreadsheet. Not sure if it warrants anything but after 5 years of growing centennial I can say most insects leave em alone. Not many beetles, and since my ladybugs moved in I have had no mite or aphid problems.
 
Looks like a nice thread...about to download the spreadsheet! I purchased my crowns from GLH also and went with Brewers Gold (a freebie), Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Columbus, Magnum, Mt Hood, and Nugget and hope they all make it here in NC! I'm not really sure what bugs and disease are bad around here....any info appreciated!


Oh, and all my hops are up except the Chinook and Mt Hood...hope they are just late starters!
 
I'm not really sure what bugs and disease are bad around here....any info appreciated!

i don't have any specific info about pests in NC. i would call the local agricultural extension services, and the agri/forestry/botany/etc department of universities in the area. they might even have info online.

i'm lucky in that i have UMD's Home and Garden Information Center (http://www.hgic.umd.edu/) who are great about answering questions. it might even be worth calling/e-mailing them and asking if they know about a similar resource for NC.
 
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