New Brewing Hop Products with Max Shafer – BeerSmith Podcast #322
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Max Schaefer joins me this week to discuss innovative new hop products. This is Beer Thrift Podcast number 322.

This is the Beersmith Home Brewing Show, where brewing great beer is our passion. If you want to take your brewing to the next level, visit beersmith.com, where you can download a trial version of our Beersmith software, subscribe to the newsletter, and get dozens of free articles on home brewing. And now, your host and the author of Home Brewing with Beersmith, Brad Smith.

This is Beersmith Podcast number 322, and it's late March 2025. Max Schaefer joins me this week to discuss innovative new hop products.

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Today on the show, I welcome Max Schaefer, brewmaster at Roadhouse Brewing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Max was previously the brewmaster at Grand Teton Brewing. Max sits on the Hop Research Council. He's an Idaho ambassador for the Hop Quality Group, a Brock Brewer for New Zealand Hops, and an associate member of the American Malting Barley Association. Max is also a graduate of the Seibel Institute.

course in Munich and has 10 years as a pro brewer. Max, it's great to have you back on the show. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me back, Brad. I really appreciate it. Always a pleasure. So what have you been up to the last year out there in Wyoming? It's been a great year for us. We've been playing with some new recipes, launching some new beers. We just put an amber Mexican lager into production out in our core brand, which we're really excited about. We took...

took silver in the American light lager category at Great American Beer Festival for our family vacation, which we were really, really proud of. That's really cool. Yeah, thanks. So we're feeling good about some of our lager program, and we've definitely turned our sights onto honing in some of our IPAs and playing with a lot of new hot products and some experimental hot varieties and all that good stuff. Now, have you guys been doing a lot of work with lagers? I know lagers have had a bit of a resurgence, I guess, in the last few years.

Yeah, we have been playing a little bit with Lager. We've had a core Pilsner, a single decocted Pilsner in our lineup now for...

probably five years or so. And so that's one that we've been really passionate about. And as certainly as we've seen that resurgence in lager, we've pivoted a couple of our brands. Family Vacation, for example, that actually used to be a light ale. It was like a golden ale, a blonde ale. We had it labeled as all sorts of things. And then we decided to try fermenting it on our lager yeast. And that worked out pretty well for us. We were pretty excited with that. And

And then with the release of the Toad, which is that amber Mexican style lager that I was alluding to, we're pretty proud and happy with our lager program and seeing some pretty good growth with it. That's great. Yeah, I think lagers have seen, craft lagers have seen a lot of growth the last couple of years. Been great.

Anyways, you're on several hop panels, including the Hop Research Council, and I named a bunch more in the introduction. But I wanted to talk today a little bit about new hop products. And I thought we might start with the basic hop extracts, like the CO2 bittering extract that are used primarily for bittering. Can you talk a little bit about those and how those are made and how they're used?

Yeah, for sure. The way we use them across our breweries, whether we're trying to get some nice smooth and clean bitterness, we can use them to enhance some aroma and some flavor depending on how we use them. We're using a lot of salinity.

CO2-derived extracts, not too much pre-isomerized stuff. That pre-isomerized stuff is really fantastic. It helps for consistency as well. You can dose that into your product throughout the process. Since that pre-isomerization has occurred, you can get that bitterness into your beer using those products.

um, pretty quickly and wherever you'd like. Um, so, but we don't use many of those. We use a lot of the CO2, uh, extracts. Um, we play around, uh, with a lot of the Dynaboost, which is Yakima Chiefs varietal, uh, or a product, um, which can be varietal specific. So we use a lot of, um, Centennial and Simcoe, Columbus, Citra, um, a lot of those hops that, uh,

historically we've used in our kettles in a T 90 form. Uh, now we're able to use it in a liquid form, which has been really fantastic. We love the oil saturation, uh, and the composition that we get from these products into our beers. Uh, we definitely still use a little bit of T 90 hops to, to compliment those, those oils. Um, as for how they're made, I don't have much info. Unfortunately, they keep those things pretty, uh, pretty, pretty locked up, uh, you know, a lot of proprietary and trade secrets, uh,

But, you know, using high, I do know through some basic conversations and personal research, you know, there's high pressures used sometimes, you know, to extract those resins, those oils, and of course those alpha acids. And then depending on the flowability of those products as well, there's certain things that can be added to them or not added to them to make them each kind of their own special sauce, if you will. Yeah.

Now, as I understand it, a lot of these basic bittering extracts were set up originally by a lot of the big brewers so they could store hops from year to year and reuse them. They come up in kind of a thick syrup form, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Super, super thick. Very resiny as their oils. So they definitely have that very heavy oil feel to it. So we warm them up a little bit in a hot water bucket or put them on top of one of our kettles to try and make them a little bit more flowable. But yeah, that's one of the beauties of them. A

one of the products from Haas called Flex. It's consistent year to year, which is really awesome. So you're not having to worry about growing conditions or sourcing from your favorite farm or anything like that. It's designed to be a consistent product, which we love and have applications for. However, when we look at our DynaBoost that we use from Yakima Chief, there's a little bit more variability in there, which is great for our brewing team. We can select

Centennial example is a big hop we use. And so we can use Centennial Dynaboost in different ways based on oil contents and what we're getting out of that product. So it allows us still to be a brewer while using some pretty big, big, big brewer technology. Now you also mentioned isomerized extract, which is a lot less common, also quite a bit more expensive, but

The isomerized extract has the advantage that you can add it after the beer is finished, and you can even adjust the bitterness level of the beer once it's done. Can you talk just a little bit about those products and how they might be used even by your own brewer?

Yeah, for sure. We've, we played around with those a little bit, um, as we were looking at producing some of our lager beer, um, our light lager beer and Pilsner beer at higher gravity, uh, and then, uh, doing some, uh, dilutions, whether that was, uh, water dilutions in the whirlpool or, or deaerated water additions, uh, into a bright tank. And it allowed us then, uh, with those pre-isomerized products

We could dose those back in line into a bright tank to tune them to exactly where we want it. Of course, you know, we can do all sorts of calculations with our dilutions and make sure we're adding the right amount of hops, extracting the right amount of bitterness, things like that. But something's always going to happen. And, you know,

It's nice to have that little tool in your toolkit with the pre-isomerized extracts that you can add a little bit back into a beer to get that exact IBU or bring it up a little bit more if you came in a little bit low for your dilution. So that's how we were using it. And I do really love those products. And just for the ease of using them and producing a truly consistent product in terms of bitterness, it's a great tool for brewers, big and small, to have.

Yeah, and as I mentioned, both of those products are widely available for homebrewers, which is great too. Probably the second most popular product is Luplin powder, which is sold under a whole bunch of names. Homebrewers probably familiar with the name CryoHops, for example. Can you talk about what a Luplin powder is and how it's different from some of the extracts we were just talking about?

Yeah, the lupulin powders, I guess more specifically the concentrated pellets, you can get them in all different varieties. I like to remind our team all the time that it's kind of like calling a facial tissue a Kleenex, right? It's a proprietary brand. So there's all these beautiful concentrated pellets that each one of the dealer processors produce.

Cryo being from Yak Chief, Lupomax from Haas, you get the CGX line from Crosby. Just some really, really fantastic options out there. What it is, it's a concentrated pellet and each one of them is doing something unique and different to produce those pellets. We're moving up to 50% of that green and vegetal matter into those or from the cones from maybe a T90 pellet if they have to be produced that way. So we're moving 50% of that vegetal matter

And then creating these really concentrated pellets. So if you think about, you know, a one pound per barrel dry hop with a standard T90 pellet, in theory, you could probably knock that down to half a pound per barrel of your favorite concentrated pellets, which can do such great things for yields, you know.

mainly yields is how we look at it. But at the same time, it produces such a big and vibrant aroma and flavor. So, you know, you could take, again, that one pound per barrel dry hop with a T90 pellet, use a one pound per barrel of a concentrated pellet. And in theory, you're getting like, you know, 50% more aroma and flavor because of those concentrated pellets and how much it's packed in them.

Yeah, I mean, you can get an estimate, I think, by looking at the percentage on the actual product, right? They typically have an alpha percentage that corresponds very well to the alpha percentage you would see from a regular hop, except obviously a lot of times it's double, roughly.

Yeah, absolutely. In our breweries, we use those concentrated pellets predominantly in the Whirlpool and in dry hop additions. We really source and select those to be big aroma and flavor. But we do actually turn some of our selected Columbus every year into a cryo product, and we do use that for bittering as well. Just, again, in that same vein, less vegetal matter, higher yield. It can be pretty consistent. They're such a fantastic product. I absolutely love those concentrated pellets.

Yeah, I haven't heard a lot of people using it for bitterness, but I guess it would probably work because it really does take out the vegetal material, leaves the center of the lupulin cone, which then provides a lot of the bittering for the beer, right? Yeah, absolutely. But they're primarily used in whirlpool and dry hopping, right? Yeah, that's where we use them. Whirlpool, dry hop. Again, we want that aroma. We want that flavor. And so we reserve those concentrated pellets for those applications. Awesome.

Well, that covers some of the products that probably a lot of people are familiar with. But more recently, we've seen a whole explosion of a lot of new products aimed at preserving aroma oils in the hops. And many of these are meant to be used in the Whirlpool. And I'll just give you a couple examples here. I think there's Dynaboost, Incognito from Yakovachief, Salvo from Hopsteiner, and so on. Can you talk about these products, the Whirlpool ones?

Yeah, absolutely. We use all three of those products across all of our breweries. We really, really love them for more or less the same reason, reducing vegetable matter in our whirlpool, increasing yields into fermenters, and then also because of the consistency and oil saturation that we can get into our wort inbound to a fermenter.

When we look at those products, Salvo, Dynaboost, and Incognito, we do look at varietal-specific products.

products from those based on if it's a hopsteiner variety or a hbc variety um and so we do look at some of those um so we use a lot of the salvo products uh like calypso salvo is a big component of uh our flagship hazy ipa the walrus um and it's done some fantastic things for that beer with aroma and flavor uh just this incredible stone fruit

just deep oil level that that is in that work going into a fermenter is really fantastic. The Dynaboost side from Yakima Chief we love because we're able to work with a lot of our selected varieties that we purchased from Yakima Chief and compare those T90

to some of the Dynaboost COAs that we're seeing. And again, just that saturation of oil that we're getting into these beers is just really, really lovely and fantastic. We've even experimented using them with like 10 minutes to go in a boil. We've done a little bit of kind of like first wort hopping with them. We've played around...

throughout the entire brewing process with, with these flowable hops. Cause they're, they're so easy to use. Um, and so we're, we're big fans, uh, and love what it does for, for our breweries, but also what it does for our beers. Now these are proprietary, but they are a little bit different than the loopland powder. Really? Aren't they? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Much, much different. Um, we use, um, we use them in, in, you know, uh,

We'll look at some varietal-specific incognito. For example, we've got a new hazy IPA at Roadhouse called Plasma. It uses Eldorado like three or four different ways. So we use Eldorado incognito and salvo in that beer. We use Spectrum from Haas, which is a flowable for dry hopping. And then we're using some products from Abstracts as well. So we're able to use

all these different products that are varietal specific in a myriad of ways, which just provides this incredible depth of a single hop if you can use it in like three or four different applications. And so we love that. So, I mean, that's interesting. How do you go about choosing? I mean, there's all these new products on the table. We're going to talk about a few more in a minute. But how do you go about choosing which ones to use on a given product or given beer?

Yeah, it's a great question. We're very lucky. We have a couple of small pilot systems within the company, a five-barrel and a seven-barrel pilot system that we can play around with and get some pretty quick feedback through our brew pub. So we're always tinkering there, playing with some new products on that. But when I look at the development of our new beers and our new recipes, things like that, I want to make sure that we're not highlighting anything.

you know, the same hop too often. Sure, we love Citra, we love Mosaic, but we try and reserve those to just one, maybe two beers in our portfolio. So then it forces us to be a little bit

you know, more open-minded on what's out there to produce some really, really unique and flavorful IPAs. And in doing that, we always end up stumbling across, wow, I didn't know that Cascade came in this format. Let's bring it all in and play with it that way.

Um, so it's really just, uh, trying to stay open, uh, push our boundaries a little bit, play with these new, new products. Um, and yeah, just be a little, be a little different, I guess, uh, than, than the beer we made last. Now, a lot of brewers are using hop blends now, especially in the craft beer level. Are you actually considering blending some of these products as well? And do you use a lot of hop blends in your particular beers? We, um, you know, we, uh,

We do use a fair bit of the advanced hop products. We'll use like two different varieties, maybe Incognito, for example, from Haas. We'll use Chinook and Citra Incognito in some of our West Coast IPAs. So we are using blends in that regard, you know,

actual formal, like pre blended pellets. We don't do a ton with on our core brands. Um, we do play around with cryo pop, which is a cryo varietal from yak chief. And that's a blend of, of certain hops that they've selected to produce that consistent aroma and flavor. So we do, we have played around with that and some of our beers. Um, and then, you know, the, the only other real true blended T 90, uh, lots that we've used, um,

the Ales for ALS blend when we produce our Ales for ALS beer. We use that blend, the Pink Boots blend, things like that. But when it comes to the actual- But you're not taking like three or four different hops like some of the companies like Firestone I know uses a lot of hop blends and using them all in the same beer, I guess.

Oh, yeah, we certainly do that. We don't like to push much more than three or four varieties into a single beer. Three is kind of my limit. I think it allows you to get a taste of each one of those hops. So, yeah, we do a fair bit of blending of our hops in our beers, very few single hop beers. In fact, even our light lager, we use like two or three hops in that beer as well just to give it a little bit of depth despite it being a light lager.

How do you use these Whirlpool products? Have you had good results using them overall? Have they produced the flavors and the variety that you want out of it? Because obviously Whirlpool has limited survivability sometimes.

Absolutely. Absolutely. We've had incredible success with using these varieties in the whirlpool or using some of these products in the whirlpool. I briefly touched on the Walrus, which is an 8.3% hazy IPA. We make it roadhouse. And the only hops that beer sees hot side is salvo in the whirlpool. It sees one kilogram per 30 barrels of salvo.

That's it. That's all we're doing in that beer hot side. That beer has been growing like mad for us. It's been a hard brand for us to keep up with from a volume standpoint. When we were able to go full-time to Salvo a couple of years ago, we saw anywhere from two and a half to three and a half barrels of wort recaptured out of the whirlpool. When you're doing four turns to fill a 120-barrel fermenter, that anywhere

anywhere from 8 to 12 barrels a word is worth its weight in gold to put into a keg or a can just to keep a supply chain going um so we we loved it from that standpoint um and we absolutely loved uh the aroma and the flavor we were getting out of out of the salvo um you know those products seem to store a little bit better so we weren't super worried about carrying over crop year from the

from the previous year or maybe even from several years back, we found that those tinned products that the salvo is produced in, they come in like a baked bean can type thing, your standard tin can. We found that those stored very, very well and maintained really beautiful aroma and flavor throughout the entire year and even sometimes a year later than it was produced.

That's kind of interesting because obviously hop products have a very short shelf life. And even a lot of IPAs have a very short shelf life, as you know. What have you found with some of these? I mean, obviously they use, for example, the bittering hop extracts. I know they store those for many years in many cases. But how about these aroma oil things? Have they held up well on the shelf or not?

Yeah, they have. We're very proud of our shelf lives. We watch those quality control points throughout our process, DOs and things like all those basic things that folks should be looking out for. And as we've switched over from T90s or concentrated pellets into more liquid-related things, we have started to see a better shelf life in our beers, an even better shelf life in our beers overall.

I might attribute that to, you know, not opening up a tank to add dry hops to, you know, adding a liquid. You know, you can add a small one liter bottle in line with some beer, finished beer or whatever, as opposed to whatever, however many bags that might take.

whether you got him in eleven pound sacks twenty two pound sacks or forty four pound sacks. You know so it's a lot of opening and closing a tank dumping bags and CO2 O2 what's happening in that whole process- and so you know I definitely believe that the introduction of these advanced hot products and liquid form- have allowed us to maintain a much more controlled environment to reducing our deals.

obviously, reduction of vegetal matter as well into our products. And we've seen some even more increased shelf life with our beers. That's awesome. And I assume you get less wastage too, right? Because, I mean, you go put...

Several pounds per barrel and you're losing a lot of beer, right? Yeah, absolutely. You're losing a lot of beer. And so that's been a big thing that certainly our finance team loves when I explain what we're doing with some of these hop oils and how much more beer we're getting out of a fermenter and then the yields we're getting. That makes a lot of people happy. Yeah. Well, I wanted to move on to some of the aroma oil products that are actually used post-fermentation.

And some of them you can even add to a finished beer. And so I want to walk through some of these because some of these are really are kind of new and cutting edge, I think. So let's start with SubZero Hop Keef, which is a concentrate that's used for dry hopping. It can even be used in the dry tank. What's been your experience with that product?

Sub-Zero Hopkeep is a really, really awesome product. We've started exploring that a little bit more recently, and we absolutely love it. My experience with it, the first time I ever used it, we won

a silver at the world beer cup for the beer that we introduced it into. So, uh, it spoke for itself pretty quickly on the aroma and the flavor that, that subzero hopke produced in this beer. It was a kind of a New Zealand inspired Pilsner. Um, and we use some Nelson subzero hopkey from that. It's just fantastic. Um,

I love the way that we use it. We have our standard dosing rate for the hopkey for any of these other finished beer products that we add into our beer. We know how much we like to add of each one of them, X amount of milliliters per barrel type of a deal. And then we're always adding these in.

to fully carbonated on the beer. We usually like a little bit, we like to carbonate it a little bit afterwards, mainly just to kind of like re-rouse the tank, make sure everything is fully homogenized in the tank. But we want to make sure we're adding it at proper

pretty carbonated just so we don't blow off any of those volatile aromas uh as we're carbonating our beers so i mean you're literally adding this you're literally adding this product to bottling then right yeah exactly exactly um you know in most cases the subs sub-zero hop keef uh and a couple other products we add those like the morning that we're going to package uh the beer

It's great and we love it for that reason. It's just so easy to add even more aroma and flavor using natural hop-derived products. And what's nice too is if we don't think it's achieved enough aroma and flavor, we can add a couple more mils and see if we can get it into that exact like big bursting, juicy, hoppy aroma and flavor we were after.

Now, as I understand it, that product is actually derived from the hops, right? It is. It's pulling the aroma oils out of the hops, right? It is. It absolutely is. You know, I'm not super well-versed on how they're doing it. There's all sorts of, you know, being able to fraction off certain ingredients

aroma and flavor compounds. Um, what, what we're really excited about is, is the prospects of, of using some of our selected lot, lots of some of our hops, um, and in having the folks, uh, who, who produced this product, uh, make some of these, um, varietal specific subzero hop keeps for us, which, uh, which we were pretty excited about. We're hoping to be doing that sometime here later this spring. Um, so yeah, we, it's all a hundred percent hop derived. Cool.

Well, Abstracts is another leader in aroma oil extracts, and they have a terpene extract line, which I assume they're using terpene to actually do the extracting, but it's called their Omni line.

they actually derive some of that from botanicals and duplicate a given aroma or hop profile chemically to give consistency. I find this very interesting because here we're getting away from, in many cases, the actual hops, right? And they're creating these flavors by sort of deconstructing the hop aroma oil and then reconstructing it with individual compounds.

So can you tell us a little about your experience with that line?

Yeah, absolutely. We use a lot of Abstracts products. Initially, we were turned on to the Abstracts team through their cannabis-inspired terpenes, not produced from the cannabis plant at all, but again, produced from other select botanicals. Yeah, it strikes me if I'm wrong, but I think that's how the company started, right? They were originally producing a cannabis-like aroma compound.

Uh, that didn't actually contain any cannabis, right? Yeah, that's correct. Um, you know, the, I think the, the brief, I don't, I, I'm, I don't need to speak completely out of turn with them, but I think the way abstracts began was very much in the cannabis sector and sphere. Um, and then through all the technologies they had and producing higher, uh,

or more aromatic, more flavorful, um, things used in the cannabis, um, world. It seemed pretty easy to apply that to cannabis's cousin or sister, the hop plant. Um, and so that's where a lot of these, um, new hop varieties and things have, uh, have come out of from abstract. So, um,

Yeah, we produced a terpene-inspired hazy IPA and fell in love with it. The product we purchased from Abstracts, that's called their Brew Gas line. Really cool. If you really know your cannabis strains, you can hone in on what cannabis strain you like the most because they try and produce…

cannabis specific strains just like hot varieties which is pretty cool. So we picked some that we liked. It gave some really nice dank resiny that you know frankly just that like fresh bag of weed smell when you cracked this can of beer open and it was pretty cool which then turned us on to some of their other products. The Omni line is a pretty cool line.

You nailed it. It's produced with other plant botanicals, terpenes from other plants and things to replicate some of those hop varieties that people really like. I mean, one big advantage of that is you have consistency, right? Yeah. From year to year.

Yeah, absolutely. A lot of consistency on that. I believe it's a slightly less expensive product as well, which I think draws a lot of people to the Omni line. Don't quote me on that, but I think that's the case. The one other thing that was hard for us with

With the Omni line, the Citra that we were getting from the Omni line wasn't quite the same as the Citra that we select for some of our beers, which then opened our eyes to the next line of Abstracts products, which is called Quantum Bright. The Quantum Bright is 100% hop-derived extracts.

Love those. Yeah, I had that one on my list too. I guess they're using some kind of a process to cold extract the aroma oils out of the actual hops, right? Yeah. Again, that's called the quantum line. Yep, yep. So what's your experience with that?

We love it. We absolutely love that product. We use a lot of it. We actually – Columbus is a big component of our breweries, and so we actually sent some of our Columbus off to the Abstracts team to custom toll into a Quantum Bright for us. We use Columbus in our double IPAs, our West Coast-inspired IPAs, to really –

uh, bring out that dankness, uh, in those beers. Uh, we, we like our Columbus to be a little bit of that OG, but we definitely look for some of that early pick Columbus, uh, uh, tropical juicy fruit. Um, some of those notes. So, uh, we use it as a little spice, just like a little salt and pepper addition in some of our beers to compliment the other hop varieties that are playing, uh, you know,

line one and two for for the star of that show and that columbus uh quantum bright is helping just to like bring out a little bit more of that uh that hop expression a little bit of that dankness and of course uh we're not adding vegetal matter into the beer with that columbus we can add the uh the quantum uh into that as well um great all of their products as i understand you can add it bottling if you want right

Yeah, absolutely. That's absolutely the beauty of those as well. We add those just like I was mentioning with the Sub-Zero Hop Keef. The Abstracts is the other product. The Quantum Bright is the other product that I keep in our coolers just for a little bit of that je ne sais quoi, just to add a little bit more into our beers. Using some Quantum is a great tool and great.

really fantastic. We've started playing around with it in some other applications, maybe some mid-firm dry hop applications. We've even in one case added it in with our dry hopping as normal just to see if we still get that carryover of that extract through centrifuging and carbonating and things like that. So we're playing around with it to see where we can best optimize these products.

Now, another one you have is the Abstract Skyfarm series, which I think is a little bit more fruit-focused, right? Oh, yeah. Very fruit-focused, very cool stuff, and I'm a big, big fan of the Skyfarm's products. What have you made with the fruity flavors, I guess?

Yeah, with the fruity flavors, we've, um, all sorts of things. We, um, gosh, I can think of three really cool projects that we've just started doing, uh, with Sky Farms, actually four. Um, uh, I'll, I'll give you highlights on a couple that I really like. One was Hopwater, um,

We make a hop water for one of our tap rooms just as an NA option. Anyone on our staff can add it and I keep, can make it. And I make some of those, I keep some of those Sky Farms on hand so people can pair. I've been getting into pairing like pineapple with Citra. And so we can, you can really get these really cool flavors. So I love it for the hop water standpoint. But from a beer standpoint,

One of our International Women's Day beers brewed by the ladies of Pure Madness Brewery Group, Melvin and Roadhouse, was a Pog Kettle Sour, so a passion orange guava fruit, or passion.

passion fruit, orange guava. Uh, and we brought in some sky farms of each of those, uh, and added that into the beer. Uh, the beer also got huge additions of, uh, the pog, um, uh, fruit purees, but that sky farms just made like, took it to like one level above. Um, another place that we're using a lot of it, uh, is in our hazy IPA, the walrus. I've talked about that a few times. Um,

Maybe there's a good little theme there. It's such a high-growing volume beer for us that we have to really look into it all the time to see how we can make it more efficient, more consistent. So you're actually adding fruit to that particular beer or what? Yeah, so Walrus gets fruit additions, a fruit puree of peach and...

Peach and tangerine. And that's great. You know, we certainly just as all agricultural products, we see a lot of variability between suppliers, between crops. Is it a really big, juicy expression of peach? Well, stone fruits tend to ferment out too, as you know.

Yeah, big time, big time. It's a very small bit. We have to put it on the label, obviously, for the TTB to tell them there's fruit in the Walrus. But if we didn't tell you, you probably would just think it's hop-derived. It's such a small component of fruit in this beer. But now, as we've been looking at the consistencies in our fruit purees, and sometimes –

Are we liking what we're getting out of the fruit puree? Is the citrus too acidic? Do we get too much citric acid out of it? Are we getting – with ripe stone fruit, I get acetaldehyde. I hate acetaldehyde. It's like for me it comes off as that raw pumpkin and raw squash. I'm not – I wish I got green apple. I just get that like nasty –

Halloween jack-o'-lantern that's been sitting on your porch for too long. And sometimes I get that from peach. I get that from overripe stone fruit. And so batch to batch on the walrus, our lab will verify it through our spectrophotometer and other equipment that we use to quantify acetaldehyde. Our director of quality always gives me a ton of flack for it.

he's like, there's no acetaldehyde in this. It just must be a pretty bad lot of peach or something. That's the best I can chalk it up to. So the Sky Farms has been a great addition, helping with that consistency, this really beautiful, bright fruit flavor in the IPAs, and of course, Yield. Coming back to Yield, which is like my buzzword of the year. Not adding fruit puree into the hazy IPAs is really helping get a couple more barrels into bright beer.

Now, I mentioned Hopps survivability earlier, but a lot of Whirlpool additions, Yakima Valley, I think you're probably familiar with the Yakima Valley survivability study, but a lot of Whirlpool additions do a very poor job of actually adding aroma oil into the finished beer. They're not super efficient. Do you think these new aroma oil extracts are really changing the way pro brewers think about aroma in the beer?

I think so. I have conversations with people across the industry, some who are incredibly nerdy, incredibly geeky about hop oil and saturations. Our head brewer at Melvin, his name is Eli Pashuk.

incredibly, incredibly passionate about the oils and the survivabilities in our Whirlpool editions of these products and has really championed the Dynaboost. So we're definitely looking at that study and thinking about some of those compounds found in hop varieties that we use and how we can kind of tailor the amounts used in

each process just to make sure that we're getting as much survivability in there as we can. I think other folks in craft beer are stoked to have another tool in their toolkit and they're stoked to make really big, bold IPAs and are just really, really happy to be using these new products and are achieving really, really great results and having good success with them. That's awesome.

Well, Max, can you tell us where Roadhouse Brewing is located, where you can find your beers, tasting room, and so on?

Yeah, of course. Roadhouse Brewing Company. We're located in beautiful Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We have a brew pub with 30 draft beers and a really fun menu located on the historic town square in downtown Jackson, Wyoming. You can't miss it. It's right there on the square. So come by and see us there. And then we have a production facility a little bit south of town that has a small tasting room that's open Monday through Friday from about four o'clock until close or

So you can find our beer at the Intermountain West in cans, on draft, in California, parts of the Midwest, and in Texas and Florida as well. And Max, could you provide your closing thoughts on some of these new hop products?

Yeah, I couldn't advocate for them more. I think it's a really great way to stay relevant, to keep pushing forward. IPA made with the same three varieties of hops that you've been doing for the last year or two or maybe even five or more. That might be a great IPA, but you can make it, I believe, even better by incorporating some of these new advanced hop products into your beers just to provide a bigger expression of depth, flavor, and aroma in your beers.

And I've actually been encouraging homebrewers to use it as well because a lot of these products, you know, you can put it in a dropper and you can literally add a drop or two to the beer and change the entire character of the beer, uh,

I've done this at a couple of homebrew meetings and so on. It's kind of fun to do, actually. Oh, big time, big time. We produce a little over 40,000 barrels of beer a year. And, you know, that's still how we bring in these new advanced hot products. We get a one liter sample off of a bright tank or a fermenter. We get an eyedropper out. We just start going to town. So, you know, big or small. I know that's how we all can can hone in these products and get a good introduction to them. Well, Max, I appreciate you coming on the show today. Thank you so much for being here.

Brad, thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Today, my guest, the one and only Max Schaefer, brewmaster at Roadhouse Brewing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and graduate of the Seibel Institute. Thanks you again, Max. Thank you, Brad.

Well, a big thank you to Max Schaefer for joining me this week. Thanks also to Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They've recently added a new collection of more than 500 beer recipes from pro brewers to their site, and most let you download the Beersmith recipe file. The new Craft Beer and Brewing recipe site is at beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes. Again, that site is beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes.

And Beersmith Web, the online version of Beersmith's brewing software. Beersmith for the Web lets you design great beer recipes from any browser, including your tablet or phone. Edit recipes on the go with access to the same full suite of recipe-able ink tools as our desktop version. Try Beersmith Web today by creating a free account at beersmithrecipes.com.

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