Lupulin Shift?

Do beer drinkers build up a resistance to hops? In 2005, Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River Brewing [Santa Rosa, California] coined the phrase “lupulin [threshold] shift,” and the brewery later decorated various wearables with a complete definition.

Two years later, the term came up during a question-and-answer session at the First International Brewers Symposium. Following a presentation detailing results of research related to bitterness quality, an attendee explained the concept of “lupulin shift” to Tom Shellhammer and drew an analogy to spicy food. “When you get used to hot food, you have to put in more and more spice to get the same perceived spicy heat; the same analogy applies to beer and bitterness, in my opinion,” he said.

Shellhammer answered: “I use the same analogy to describe temporal and qualitative effects of bitterness. For instance, the heat from ginger is different than the heat from chili peppers. But in regard to what you described as lupulin shift, we don’t see a shift in how the panelists perform over time.”

However, human olfactory psychophysics, the study of how humans perceive odors, indicates that the impact of an aroma may change. Andreas Keller and colleagues at Rockefeller University discovered that the perceived smell of an odor at a given concentration changes over time and depends on prior experience. The phenomenon is called adaptation and is caused by repeated or prolonged exposure to an odor, typically leading to elevated thresholds for that odor. Although this does not completely apply to nonvolatile bitter components, it was shown that the brain, smelling hoppy aromas, expects a more bitter drinking sensation.

Excerpted from For the Love of Hops, by Stan Hieronymus, Brewers Publications 2012