The Future of Hops: New Varieties and Technologies from Clayton Hops

[00:00:00] Justin Kendall: Heading to CBC? Kick things off the day before at Brewbound's meetup at Love City Brewing in Philly, Sunday, April 19th from 5 to 7 p.m. Connect with beer industry leaders, grab a drink, and catch up with the Brewbound team. It's free to attend and walking distance from the convention center. Head to Brewbound.com slash lovecity.rsvp. And don't forget to catch the Brewbound team at booth 956 during CBC. Clayton Hops was founded by three brothers and their partners, and it has since scaled to four farms in the Tapawera region of Tasman, New Zealand. Joining me now to share the latest Brian Clayton Hops Brian Clayton, CEO About Clayton Hops. Thanks for being here, Brian. Justin, our pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks very much for having me. Yeah, I'm happy to chat with you. So for those who may not be familiar with Clayton's amplifier hop oils and your concentrated pellets, fill us in on the advantages of those products.

[00:01:00] Brian Clayton: Yeah, sure. So basically, we installed a new processing facility about a couple of years ago now. And in there, we started producing T90 pellets, but then we actually started diversifying, getting a bit more innovative, and we put in separate line that's a cryogenic processing line and out of that we get our enriched amplifier pellets and we created a separate line again to make our amplifier oil. Now as the name suggests these products are all about you know boosting flavor and aroma in brews but they have some other great benefits as well like Both of the products you can yield better with your brews. There's environmental benefits as well, less storage, less kind of transportation requirements. Actually the oil is quite amazing in the sense that it has a super low carbon footprint because the raw ingredient we use is a wet hop cone. So we take the wet hop cone from the field, same day as harvest, and we extract the oil. So unlike the vast majority of other products which use hop pellets, we don't dry the hop cones. So that has a big knock-on effect in terms of sustainability and lowering carbon footprint. So they're really about boosting flavour and aroma, but there's some really great other benefits as well.

[00:02:22] Justin Kendall: Where are those hop oils best deployed? What kind of products really benefit from those?

[00:02:27] Brian Clayton: So they're best on the cold side, so there's no, it's a flavor aroma product, it's not a bittering product. And so people use them differently actually. Some people will use them to substitute some of their hop pellets during dry hopping, and that will help boost their yields, their brewing yields. Whereas other people tend to use it as kind of a flavor or complexity enhancer in the bright tank. It's super easy to use, it's water, beer soluble, that's a big benefit as well. But it's a cold side product, flavor aroma product. And they really hit well in hop waters and non-alcoholic beers as well. Oh, they do, yeah, yeah, good point, yeah. So as well as beer, absolutely hop waters, non-alcoholic beers. In New Zealand, there is soon being released an RTD with our oils, and it's a combination of three of our oils, Motowaka, Reroka, and Nelson Sovereign. And I was drinking a lot of it over the summer. I was lucky enough to get early access to this brew and it's fantastic. I was quite shocked by the flavour. You can smell a bit of hoppiness on the nose, but it tasted like a beautiful, soft, tangy lemonade. I love a good lemonade. It is beautiful. So I certainly consumed a little bit of that over the Christmas period back at home.

[00:03:45] Justin Kendall: Everybody loves talking about hops and the trends there. So what are the trends that you're watching and seeing and what brewers are really seeking right now?

[00:03:55] Brian Clayton: So there's definitely been a lot of interest in the Amplify lines, mainly because of the increased beer yields that you can get by using these products. With the hops though, I think with New Zealand, we offer something different in our hop varieties. And so we have our own plant breeding programme. So at our stand, we're showcasing a couple of our new hop varieties. So we will be bringing them to the market next year. The interest in those is high. I think it's a classic, you know, craft brewers are often looking for something new. and these hop varieties bring kind of classic Kiwi kind of flavours and aromas but something different at the same time. So you know Brian Clayton Hops we're always about kind of innovating. It could be the products themselves or in this case we're innovating in terms of new plant varieties. And I should acknowledge our partners in crime there, which are Plant and Food Research. So they're essentially a government controlled organisation. They've got a wealth of experience in breeding hot varieties, have been doing so for many decades. So we've teamed up with them to bring these new hot varieties to the market, which we're, you know, as you can probably appreciate, we're super excited to bring these. Because they kind of complete the picture, you know, we're the farmers, we're the processors, we've now got our own plant varieties, and obviously we're a merchant as well. So we're kind of ticking all the boxes for that kind of more sophisticated, large-scale operation in New Zealand. Is that a 2026 product, those new hop varieties? Yeah, so this year we're actually releasing a very small amount of it to just a small number of brewers, simply because we don't have much of it this year. But definitely next year we will be at commercial scale with these two new products. You know, it takes time to scale these things at a farm level, but next year we will be good to go, which is really exciting actually. That's awesome. New crop for 2025 is arriving soon? Yes actually we're loading out very soon our first reefers coming into America. So they will probably be here I would say within the next four to six weeks the first reefers hitting stateside. Which is good, but we're sending hops all around the world and so the team is working back at home. The logistics side of things is in full swing at the moment. We've got a lot of hops going out over the next four to six weeks, through all different parts of the world. Another innovation that we're actually doing is for our standard product, the T90 hop pallets. We have got a catchphrase, faster, fresher, better. Our processing is very high capacity, state-of-the-art, and this year we finished harvesting our hops. End of March, by 7 April, all of our hops were into T90 pallets, which is incredibly fast. It usually takes many months. to do that. So in itself, that is a big innovation. I can't think of anyone around the world who's doing that at scale, anywhere close to kind of finishing that within seven days of harvest. So we're pulling them out of the packet at the moment, you know, here at the conference and they're just banging these hops. They're just super fresh. So that's quite highly innovative in itself, actually.

[00:07:12] Justin Kendall: You mentioned the logistics side of the business, and right now we're seeing trade policy in the headlines everywhere. How are you navigating those things at this moment?

[00:07:24] Brian Clayton: So at the moment, it doesn't really affect our logistics that much. New Zealand hops have been I guess hit with a tariff coming into America. So it becomes more of a commercial decision and challenge in the sense that there is added cost and where is that cost kind of sucked up basically. So that's what it comes down to really. But There are other things in play as well. It's not just as simple as that. It might be like the foreign exchange rate at the moment is making New Zealand hops relatively affordable compared to back in 2021 when the Kiwi dollar was a lot stronger against the US. So it's not just one consideration. There are a number of considerations in play here. And I mean we can kind of probably feel relatively fortunate that we've only ever had the 10 percent. So we're just playing through that. It's not a logistical effort. It's really just a commercial call that needs to be made. Well Brian, where can folks find out more About Clayton Hops? Best is to come to our website Clayton Hops.co.nz and they can reach out to me as well. So I'm the CEO, I kind of get my hands quite dirty in the business. I'm full on doing many different aspects of the business so they can always reach out to me, Brian Clayton. But the website's the best, and our hops, as I said, they'll be arriving in Yakima pretty soon, which is where we warehouse our hops. We also actually have a live e-commerce site now, so people from the States can actually jump on our website. If they prefer not to talk to us or get in contact, they can just simply order online and the hops will turn up. So it's relatively simple these days. It's a social business, who wouldn't want to talk to you? Exactly. Exactly. Thanks for doing this Brian, really appreciate it. My pleasure Justin. Thanks very much for the opportunity, we appreciate it.