I was in Mammoth this weekend skiing. I was at the happy hour at Whiskey Creek restaraunt, which is also the home to Mammoth Brewing, with some friends. I happened to be wearing a More Beer "Got Beer?" tee shirt. I got a tap on the shoulder and a "Are you a home brewer?" I turned around to see Dustin, one of Mammoth Brewing's brewers, who I had previously met. He's always eager to talk about his work and brewing in general. We got to talking about the hop shortage. Previously I'd heard about the experiments they were doing to find a good replacment for the Crystal hops they use for dry hopping their IPA. This time we talked bittering. He said that in the testing they hade done, they found that they could freely substitute bittering hops without any perceptible change in the finished beer as long as they maintained the the same total bittering. Very interesting.
On another note, Dustin also mentioned that Mammoth Brewing, who just introduced a few of their beers now packaged in cans, is container (bottles and cans) conditioning all of their brews. They are filtering the beer and then krausening with fresh wort and yeast at the time of packaging. He said that they sacrifice a little clarity, but got an improvement in finsihed product flavor. Too cool.