I thought it would be helpful to create a heat map view of the composition of hop oil for the different varieties of hops to better spot differences. Most of what I have seen are stacked bar graphs or tables which while useful make it hard to spot differences or compare. So I grabbed some YCH hop data available from http://scottjanish.com/2014-hop-harvest-data/ and created a heat map in the enclosed view. I find it helpful. I hope it helps others.
Yeah, this is pretty cool. I shared it with some buddies of mine who just opened a brewpub in town. I think it will be really helpful as we keep moving forward with recipes. Thanks!
I love info laid out for easy comparison like that. Thanks for taking the time to do that and posting it. Just looking briefly at it I find a couple of surprises. For instance, I would certainly have expected Chinook to come up high in the piney and resiny categories, yet it is rather low.
Well, it gets super interesting when you lay side-by-side with the following chart which gathered human’s impressions of smells and they did a correlation chart. I am still taking it all in but it is clear that there is a lot going on between organic compound composition and also human perception and neither is completely definitive. Oh well, I guess I will have a beer and keep pondering ;D
Interesting. I see that the hops are listed in alphabetic order, but I can see that that may not be the best way to list them. I’m assuming that the chart was created in Excel. I’m betting that the hop varieties could be better sorted using a combination of the column values to possibly help illustrate varieties that are more similar or distinct. Could you use the Data Sort feature to re-order the varieties to show that for us or provide the Excel file?
Stay tuned. I am going to see if I can add in some missing cultivars and wild genotypes…
Update - Not having success finding the same level of oil composition data for other Hops. Not common to report out concentrations of B-Pinene, Farnesene, Geraniol and Linalool and Other Oils. Anyone have any leads? Tnx.
I contacted YCH Hops for data. I will let you know if they can help…
There are many compounds. Like the sulfur compounds in hops, that are much less than 1%, but since we may be able to pick those up in parts per trillion, they have a big influence to the aroma.
Thanks for posting this, Jeff. The connection between the sulfury thiols and tropical character in low levels and ribe or catty character in high levels is pretty interesting. And they’re just beginning to scratch the surface of hop knowledge at this point!
Measure and compare the compositional differences of essential oil among three hop cultivars ('Centennial’, ‘Citra’ and ‘Nelson Sauvin’),
Identify the odor-active aroma compounds in three varieties of hops and
Investigate the behavior of hop-derived aroma compounds in beers prepared by dry-hopping approach with three hop varieties.
The major compositions of essential oil of three hop varieties (‘Centennial’, ‘Citra’ and ‘Nelson Sauvin’) were determined."
