Celebrated beer author Horst Dornbusch moderates this roundtable conversation about the state of hops in Germany. While Germany is only one-tenth the area of the United States, the two nations are neck-and-neck as the world's largest hop producers (producing a combined 80% of the global hop harvest).
Horst is joined by Anton Lutz and Regina Obster scientists from German Hop Research Center, to discuss the four classic German hop landraces (Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, Spalter, Hersbrucker, and Tettnager), which have been in their terroirs for centuries, if not millennia. These German hop landraces are now severely threatened by global climate change, invasive pests, and diseases and may entirely disappear.
To preserve Germany’s substantial (and irreplaceable) contribution to the historically grown global hop supply, the German Hop Research Center is trying to breed successor varieties that are resistant to these diseases, pests, and climate change. It’s a race against time. The recently released hardy hybrids Diamant and Aurum and the forthcoming Tango are such new varieties. These are natural hop plants (non-GMO) that carry the genes and sensory profiles of the classics.
Horst Dornbusch is an award-winning brewer, bilingual beer journalist and book author, the former owner of an American craft brewery, a frequent judge at international beer competitions, a sought-after event speaker, and the founder of Cerevisia Communications LLC, a consulting firm in the international brewing industry.
Walter König is the General Manager of the German Hop Research Center, as well as of the German Brewing Barley Association, and the Bavarian Brewers Association.
Anton Lutz also works at Hüll. His main responsibility is “nurse” the Kindergarten, where he tries to “kill” thousands and thousands of new hop crossing by exposing them under controlled conditions in green houses and open-air test plots to viruses, mites, aphids, spiders, and other pests, as well as subject them extreme, artificially created weather and climatic stresses. His objective is to find the handful of individual plants that survive his brutal treatment. This elite selection of plants is then propagated further in the hopes that one of them will eventually become the foundation stock for a new, hardier commercial hop variety.
Regina Obster is a member of the scientific team of the German Hop Research Center. Her main responsibilities include the planning and execution of laboratory tests and open-air trials in hop gardens to determine the effectiveness of new pest and disease control products, as well as the tracking of disease pressures on hop plants in Germany.