Here’s the plan

Welcome to the website created to support the upcoming book, “For the Love of Hops” (subtitle to be determined).

My name is Stan Hieronymus and I’ll be the author. Right now I’m in collecting mode, gathering information you tell me you’d like to find in the book, seeking answers to your questions, investigating what I figure needs exploring, and listening to stories because I think stories are at the center of understanding why and how people do things.

Later — and it will be later because the book won’t be published until September of 2012 — the focus will shift. The site will preview what is in the book, even answering some of your questions before pages roll off the presses.

I’m interested first in your questions, but I hope occasional conversations break out as well. I’ve set up three basic categories, for commercial brewers, for homebrewers and for everybody else. Don’t sweat where you post an idea or question. You’ll notice the introductions are all the same, the categories created only to facilitate conversation.

This book is one in what will be a series from Brewers Publications focusing on beer ingredients. The first, “Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation,” comes out in September. Others will feature water and malt.

Several years ago I wrote a story for All About Beer magazine headlined “For the Love of Hops: Birth of a Beer Style,” examining the then emerging style called Double (or Imperial) IPA. Don’t let that make you think this will be a book for hopheads only (otherwise it would be called, “Brew Like a Hophead”). You only have to wait until September of 2011 for the IPA book. Mitch Steele and Steve Wagner of Stone Brewing are hard at work on a book about India Pale Ale (and the various stronger spin offs).

In general, “For the Love of Hops” will explore culture and agriculture; history and the future; chemistry and what’s in the glass; aroma and flavor; process and philosophy; just about anything you’d expect to find in the ultimate guide to Humulus lupulus. There will be science, but if we all hold hands tightly I think we can understand it together.

As the photo at the top illustrates it’s not always easy being a hop . . . but there’s a lot of love.

(The photo was taken during the 2008 Poperinge Hop Festival, held in the Belgian town of the same name every three years. The town literally shuts down during the parade, with children dressing up as hop cones, marching in the parade and riding on floats. Now that’s hop culture.)