491: Brewing Scientists Tom Shellhammer and Cécile Chenot Are Changing How We Think About Older Hops

491: Brewing Scientists Tom Shellhammer and Cécile Chenot Are Changing How We Think About Older Hops

From Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast by Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine

July 10, 2026 · 1h 13m · Episode 491

About this episode

Tom Shellhammer and Cécile Chenot discuss the impact of aging on hops and its implications for brewing.

Over the past two decades, the amount of hops sitting in cold-storage warehouses has more than doubled . While the volume of those stocks is inching back down from its peak in 2022—and while it’s important that the industry has a buffer against climate challenges and bad harvests—a fundamental question remains: Just how useful are those hops two, three, or four years after harvest? Through a series of research projects and resulting papers, professor Tom Shellhammer and postdoctoral researcher Cécile Chenot of Oregon State University have been working to understand how age impacts hops, and how factors such as temperature, oxygen, and even hop variety drive not just changes in chemical analysis over time, but also have a real sensory impact in finished beer. The results? Surprising, to say the least. In this episode, Shellhammer and Chenot discuss: the myth that fresh is best, and that brewers should use a last-in, first-out approach to hop lots pinpointing the chemical markers in hops that actually convey in finished beer quantifying the range of variability in hops due to fixed factors such as soil, and to changing factors such as water stress or insect and disease pressure how…

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Guests: Tom Shellhammer, Cécile Chenot

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Organizations: Oregon State University

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