The greatest invention you'll ever taste

Continual hopping

To think it all started with a bowl of soup and an electric football game

Continual Hopping

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One of the things Dogfish Head is known for is brewing with exotic ingredients – raisins, honeys, strawberries, scrapple, oranges, brown sugar, and even human saliva. If you can name it, odds are we’ve brewed with it. But there is one old world style Dogfish has embraced, tweaked and reinvented … the hop-forward India Pale Ale.

Hops are the go-to spice for beer. They add bold aromas and flavors – notes of pine, citrus, earthiness, floral and tropical fruit. Traditionally many brewers make two hop additions – one big dose of hops early in the boiling process for flavor and they add another bunch at the end for aroma.

Here at Dogfish, we like to take a more … continual approach.

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Yep, soup & football

Well see, it all started with a bowl of soup and a vibrating football game. Back in the mid-90s, we started messing around with extreme and super hoppy IPAs. We would put foolhardy quantities of hops in these IPAs, and while people loved the pungent hoppiness of these beers, they had a really pronounced bitterness that seemed out of balance. Not quite what we were after. We wanted a really hoppy beer that wasn’t crushingly bitter.

One day while brewing at our original brewpub in downtown Rehoboth Beach, Del., Dogfish Head founder & brewer Sam Calagione caught a few minutes of a cooking segment on the TV above the bar. The chef was describing a method of adding small pinches of fresh-cracked pepper to soup in equal increments the entire time the soup boiled. The idea was simple – the method would bring more complexity and evenness to the spice of the dish than adding the whole volume of pepper at the same time. Insert an ‘aha’ moment … continual hopping was born!

What is continual hopping?

Sam tracked down an old school vibrating football game invented by Norman Sas and duct tapped a bucket to the top of it to help feed the beer a continual stream of hops. Sure enough, the vibrations caused the hop pellets to drop out of the bucket, down the game and into the boiling beer. A few weeks later, the beer went on tap and this time … it was a hit. The continual hopping made it outrageously hoppy without being crushingly bitter.

While that original football game only lasted a few brews (the steam killed the electronics), much more sophisticated contraptions have taken over our continual hopping process, but the theory and execution are essentially unchanged.