New Zealand: Largest hop growers have some tricks up their sleeve to be at forefront of global beer game

Clayton Hops have a patent pending on technology they’ve developed that could reduce the amount of plant material brewers need to add to the mix.

Using a cryogenic system to freeze “all the goodness that the brewers are after” was something Clayton Hops chief executive Brian Clayton said was being done by only two other hop producers around the world currently.

“This is another first for New Zealand, it’s the first for the Southern Hemisphere actually,” Clayton said.

The technology meant that hops could practically be put in one end of the system, and out the other end came concentrated hop pellets made up of frozen Lupulin glands – the part of hops that contained the bitterness and oils that brewers wanted.

“It effectively allows us to produce hop pellets that are double the concentration of normal pellets,” Clayton said.

“This is all about massive boosts in flavours and aromas, cutting down on transportation, storage ... less plant material, because it’s doubly concentrated, so better beer yields.”

Clayton Hops’ other product launched alongside the pellets as part of their ‘Amplifire’ range on October 5 was fresh hop oil – which was even more distilled.

“With the liquid product, it’s really easy to use for brewers, and because it’s so concentrated and it’s in bottles instead of big cardboard boxes for hops, packing and stuff, it’s a more environmentally sustainable product as well,” Clayton said.

“With oil as well ... in the brewing process, it dissolves straight into the beer, because there’s less plant matter, and so plant matter, when you think about it, and when you’re sticking hops in, they’re full of plant matter, green material, that sucks up a lot of beer,” he said.

Most of their customers were located “offshore, by a long way” and as Clayton was on the road a lot of the time, showcasing their Tasman produce around the globe, he said the hop company had started to “really see the emergence of the liquid product space” particularly in the United States.

“We thought ‘we want a piece of this’, that was probably two years ago ... so that’s peaked our interest there,” he said.

But Clayton Hops was keeping the finer details of how they made their brewing additives under wraps for now, particularly while their patent for their cryogenic tech was still pending.

“I can’t say too much, in kind of that sense that we want to kind of keep a bit of mystique around the process we use,” he said.

“It’s so satisfying seeing this now turn into a reality, because for the last two and a half years, there's been so much due diligence and so much time and effort and trial and error, so to see it come to fruition ... it’s just massive.”