We analyzed tasting comments from professional brewers evaluating Vera, a new USDA hop variety (technically, it’s a cultivar). This NLP analysis characterized Vera’s sensory profile for variety registration and marketing strategy. Tropical fruit descriptors dominated both dried hop and finished beer evaluations, with fruit, tropical, and citrus as the top terms.

This research was conducted in collaboration with USDA-ARS hop breeder Kayla Altendorf and was published in the Journal of Plant Registrations.

Describing a new hop variety

The USDA hop breeding team collected sensory evaluation data at professional tasting events over years they spent developing Vera. The brewing industry uses a standardized sensory framework where evaluators select from broad flavors like floral, citrus, tropical, pine, onion/garlic, herbal/grassy, woody/earthy, and stone fruit. Tasters choose what applies to each sample and enter it in a mobile app called Sample Ox by DraughtLab. The benefit of this is that it standardizes flavor terms and makes results easier to compare over time.

The tasting evaluations also collected free-form comments with richer qualitative information. This captures more nuanced language that brewers and hop buyers use. Comments like complex and clean, Dole pineapple juice and mango nectar, or pleasant rose/rose hop flavor aroma with a juicy finish provide complexity about the sensory experience that categorical data cannot.

Sensory comments from professional brewing events

We analyzed the free-form comments collected at professional brewing events between 2022-2024, including the Craft Brewers Conference, Hop Research Council meetings, and Hopsource. Participants were experienced brewers, hop buyers, and industry experts evaluating experimental varieties for potential commercial use. The dataset includes 268 sensory comments from dried hop rub evaluations and single-hop experimental brews.

Most comments were concise. Dried hop comments average 13 words, while beer comments average 27 words. This brevity actually makes NLP analysis more challenging since there’s less context per comment.

Simple keyword frequency was most useful

We started with simple keyword counts to identify the most common terms in Vera’s sensory profile. Text was cleaned up and lemmatized, then we extracted unigrams (one-word keywords), bigrams (two-word keywords), and trigrams (three-word keywords). The top words show Vera’s fruit-forward character. The top word for both dried hops and the beer data was fruit, and fruit-related terms dominate.

The consistency between dried hop rub and finished beer is good to see. Hop varieties can lose their distinctive characteristics during brewing, but Vera’s fruit and citrus profile translates well into the final product.

Part-of-speech tagging for descriptive language

We used spaCy part-of-speech models to identify adjectives and adverbs in the comments. Adjectives were descriptive and useful for analysis. The adverbs were generic intensity modifiers like very, too, and slightly that we didn’t end up using in downstream analysis.

Grouping flavor expressions

We grouped related terms using regex patterns to quantify how prevalent different flavor expressions were. For example, tropical fruits matched any mention of tropical, pineapple, mango, passion fruit, papaya, or guava. Citrus fruits includes orange, grapefruit, lemon, lime, and tangerine. The table below shows the proportion of comments that mentioned each category. Across dried hops and beer comments, tropical and citrus fruits are the most common flavor groups.

The drop in onion/garlic mentions from dried hops (10%) to beer (6%) is commercially important. This is an undesirable flavor that appears in raw hop evaluation but diminishes in finished beer, so it doesn’t impact final product quality.

Topic modeling was noisy

We tried topic modeling and it wasn’t that useful. We used BERTopic to cluster comments. The short comment length made this difficult, and the topic cohesion was limited. The largest topic clusters all describe variations of tropical and citrus fruit (clusters like balanced tropical/stone fruit, sweet fruit, dank citrus) that keyword analysis already captured well.

Some of the smaller topic clusters were interesting even if they are not defining for Vera. A subset of clusters identified off-flavors (sulfur compounds, oxidation) and others pointed to mouthfeel cues (crisp, light). These smaller signals may be useful for discovering innovation edges or spotting quality issues, but they don’t describe Vera’s core profile. We relied on the keyword frequency and flavor groupings to describe Vera.

Go-to-market messaging

Our NLP analysis of professional tasting notes directly informed Vera’s variety registration and commercial positioning. Below is our guidance on how to market this hop.

Market positioning: Vera delivers a juicy tropic-stone fruited citrus profile that fits modern IPA demand. Across the tasting notes, fruit-forward descriptors dominate, while traditional American hop markers like pine, herbal, and earthy show up far less often. This positions Vera in the modern juicy hop category that dominates craft brewing.

Core descriptors:

• Consistent tropical and citrus fruit character from raw hop to finished beer
• Strong stone fruit (peach, apricot) notes that differentiate Vera from other fruit-forward varieties

Brewing advantages:

• Excellent for fruit-forward IPAs and other hop-driven styles
• Tropical character pairs well with other modern hop varieties
• Minimal onion/garlic off-flavors reported in finished beer

Agronomic traits:

• Powdery mildew resistant to the most complex PNW isolates tested
• Soft/fluffy cones with greater openness, so they can shatter if over-mature
• Lower year 1 yields if established late; strong yields from year 2 onward

Vera Charles

Vera is named after Vera Charles, one of the first women to be appointed as a scientist at the USDA in 1903. She conducted foundational work in plant pathology and mycology. You can read her biography in Pioneering Women of Plant Pathology. Disease resistance was a focus for this hop variety, and the naming honors Charles’s work in plant disease research.

Media coverage

Here’s a handful of recent media about Vera hop. Talk about a good product launch! The brewing industry is excited about this:

• USDA Tellus - New “Vera” Hop Variety Makes Brew-tiful Beers
• Brewers Association - This New Hop Variety Represents a Huge Win for Craft Brewers. Here’s Why.
• Craft Brewing Business - Vera hop debuts with bold flavor, public availability and GABF spotlight (here’s everything you need to know)
• Washington Beer Blog - There is a New Hop in Town and Her Name is Vera
• Hop Notes - Hop Notes 24: Meet Vera
• Brilliant Stream - New Vera Hop hits WV market

Where to find Vera

New and small-batch beers with Vera are popping up all over. You can buy Vera hops from retailers like Yakima Valley Hops.

Beer releases:

• Burgeon Beer Company (Carlsbad, CA) - Vera Nice
• Highland Park Brewery (Los Angeles, CA) - Fresh Friends: Vera
• Clandestine Brewing (San Jose, CA) - Norm!
• Cloudburst Brewing (Seattle, WA) - Vera Nice to Meet You
• Dru Bru (Snoqualmie Pass, WA) - Veracious
• Kulshan Brewing Company (Bellingham, WA) - Pump Track Pale
• Tidal Creek Brewhouse (Myrtle Beach, SC) - Vera IPA
• Diatribe Brewing (Asheville, NC) - Vera (HRC-003)
• Weathered Ground Brewery (Cool Ridge, WV) - Vera Good
• The Coastal Brewing Company (Forster, Australia) - Showoff

Thank you to Kayla Altendorf for reading an early draft and providing feedback.