Hops have been grown as a commercial crop for the brewing industry for many centuries in many countries in the world. The first documentation of the mention of a hop garden is the year 768 in the will of Pepyn III, the father of Charlemagne. The first breeding of different hop varieties took place at Wye College in Kent, England by Prof. E.F. Salmon in ca. 1907 when he brought out the varieties "Brewers Gold" and "Northern Brewer". There are around 80 varieties in commercial use around the world, and considerably more in development/trials.
For brewers and drinkers of craft beer, hops are not a minor ingredient! Many popular beers that spend money on Super Bowl advertising rather than ingredients use hops sparingly, like a quick dip of a tea bag in nearly colorless rice soup. They must use chemicals to produce foam on the top, to replicate real beer. Fizzy yellow beer is for wussies.
Hops are not added just to make beer taste bitter. The role of hops in beer is to balance the sweetness that is produced by the grains. More malt requires more hops. Many people don’t know that hops were not an ingredient in making beer at its beginnings. There are odd stories about why hops were introduced. The most funny (to me) is that hops were believed to reduce the sex drive.
Another reason is that hops act as a preservative for beer. The higher-hop bitterness of the ale style known as “India Pale Ale” was developed with large hop amounts to preserve it for a long journey. That chemistry proves true. When alpha acids found in hops are boiled, they create iso-acids that kill certain bacterias. The degree of isomerization and the amount of bitter flavor produced by the addition of hops is highly dependent on the length of time the hops are boiled. Longer boil times will result in isomerization of more of the available alpha acids.
The cache owners are lupomaniacs. We’re talking about using a massive amount of hops to balance with an equally large amount of malt to produce complex-flavored ales. We have a bottle of Stone Brewing’s “Ruination” painted on our wine cellar floor. They describe it as “A liquid poem to the glory of the hop.”
Do you wonder why craft ales usually list several different types of hops were used? Brewers choose different hop types with significantly different flavors. Hops contain different levels of acids that produce different effects when added at different times. Hops added early in the wort's boiling stage maximize the effect of alpha acids that provide beer's signature bitterness. Hops added at the end will maximize the effect of beta acids that provide most of the aroma. Brewers take great care (and experiment a lot) to select the perfect combination of hops for each role. This website can teach you more about hop varieties: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/101/hops/
You can find the cache at
N 47 51.ABC and W 122 16.DEF
The answers to these questions will provide the missing decimals:
A. The scale from zero to 100 developed by the European Brewery Convention in co-operation with the American Society of Brewing Chemists to measure the bitterness produced by hops is known as:
5. HPV - Hops by Volume
7. Alpha acid as % of hop weight
9. IBU - International Bittering Units
B. The beers consumed by most Americans measure between 5 and 10 on that bitterness scale. What bitterness scale measurement does Ruination promise:
1. 30
2. 70
3. 1000
4. More than the maximum of that scale.
C. Which hop variety would a brewer choose at the beginning of the wort boil to produce the most bittering effect:
1. Centennial
2. Simcoe
3. Summit
4. Saaz
D. The hop variety named Bor originated in which country:
5. Germany
6. Sudan
7. Netherlands
8. Czech Republic
E. Hops have been developed in international competition by careful, but sometimes unintended breeding. The Germans developed the hop "Hallertauer Magnum" by mating their stud with the American bastard daughter of Brewer's Gold known as:
3. Liberty
5. Galena
7. Columbus
9. Warrior
F. Which American hop variety would a brewer choose at the end of the wort boil to produce the most hop aroma:
1. Ahtunam
3. Saaz
5. Fuggle
7. Brewer's Gold
You can check your answers for this puzzle on GeoChecker.com.