There is a big focus on hops in North America right now as the 2024 harvest is in full swing. But there are more than just pellets and whole cones available to brewers. Jeff Daly, the sensory manager at John I Haas spoke to All About Beer editor and ProBrewer contributor John Holl about the company’s new product, Euphorics.
Dailey oversees the company’s sensory panel, and is involved with research and development, harvest, quality, readiness, and developing new varieties of hops for HBC.
Expert Topic sponsored in part by Abstrax Hops
Abstrax Hops delivers advanced research, products, and services, pushing brewing innovation with authentic flavor solutions, and next-gen hop products, ensuring top safety, quality, and regulatory adherence.
John Holl: Let’s start off simple: Tell me what Euphorics is.
Jeff Dailey: If you want the five second pitch, the real the marketing tag, it’s flavors by brewers, for brewer. It’s an all-natural flavor that is comprised of hop extract and other botanical extracts blended to create target flavors, rather than variety specific outcomes, that work with beer. They’re flavors for beer, not flavors that you put on top of your beer.
John Holl: OK great. Now go deeper on what that means.
Jeff Dailey: So instead of, say, a peach flavor from a company that mostly deals in soda flavors, one of our flavors, is a peach flavor – Peachy Keen – that really blends into beer, much in the same way that you’d get from using purees. It’s natural because of the complex chemistry that is brought from the hop oils. It fills in all of the small aromatic gaps that you might get with any other sort of natural flavor. Those other flavors can be perfectly good, but they’re comprised of [a lot of] compounds to get something that’s very peach.
Our intention with the combination of the target distilled hop oils from different varieties and the natural botanical extracts that are cleaned up via distillation is to get something that is more like the target outcome and plays well with the hops that you’re already that our customers are already using.
John Holl: Did this develop over time? Was there a call for this or is this just part of innovation in the space?
Jeff Dailey: It really was a natural development of innovation. The project started around the time that I started in 2019 where we are in the early stages of developing Hop Kick, which is that variety specific water-based hop oil extract. And we were noticing, as I was setting up experiments for beyond beer use, putting Hop Kick into things like hard seltzers and hard teas of the time, we were seeing these aromatic synergies from the complexity of the hop oils. Hop Kick was amplifying and naturalizing the flavors that were being used by these beverage producers, and we wanted to move further in that direction.
We have been really focused on innovation in the area of sustainability, and so the circular economy of waste stream valorization, to throw a bunch of buzzwords at you, means that we’ve got some high-quality oil that’s bound up in byproducts from our other extraction systems.
So we’ve got these advanced products like pre-isomerized Alpha acids and then have barrels of this oil rich extract. We wanted to find a way to use that oil, and so we teamed up with Intrepid Brewing because of their work using botanical extracts and precision distilling to create the flavors that are used in their in the vape world.
We provided our brewing insight and my background in flavor, chemistry, and sensory, to refine the flavors that they were working on. Vape flavors are very different. It’s something that you’re inhaling, something that’s hot. We wanted flavors by brewers for brewers, so we took something that was not intended for beer and used our expertise to make it specifically work with beer.
John Holl: Does this replace Hop Kick?
Jeff Dailey: No, they’re two very different things. In fact, I really like combining them. The thing about Hop Kick is that it is as clean as you can be. It is water and variety specific hop oil. It’s awesome. For hop waters, you just put, you know, 300 milliliters per per 100 liters into the tank, and you carve it up and you’re good to go.
John Holl: How do you suggest using Euphorics?
Jeff Dailey: The real target application is a traditional cold side addition into the bright tank. That’s where it’s at its best. That’s where the flavor really integrates into the beer. And you get that flavor, like I was talking about the flavor in beer. It’s fun to do the taproom demonstration. It’s practical in that way, where it’s a little bit of sleight of hand, a little bit magic. That could be a value add, but it’s a different, a very different aroma and flavor experience when doing it that way, we really do recommend using it on the cold side.
John Holl: Has reception has been positive?
Jeff Dailey: reception been incredibly warm. This was a five-year process and we were showing off prototypes at the Minneapolis CBC in 2022. We used a number of events like that to garner feedback from brewers about what they needed. We might have moved a little bit slower than some competitors, but we were very deliberate in developing the product from the perspective of a brewer’s need. So shouldn’t have been surprising how strong the reception was, but it was really nice to get it. Sales have been strong. We’ve been seeing a lot of iterations, a lot of rebuys, repurchases, from our early prototype users.
One of the surprising things is it is being used at rates that we never really anticipated. We were looking at use from a very restrained perspective of three to six milliliters per barrel. And we’ve had craft brewers being craft brewers and doing double, or triple that and really creating these very punchy IPAs.