A love letter to Riwaka

They named you after a valley.

A village at the top of New Zealand's South Island, on a river the Māori call Riuwaka. Riu, the interior of a canoe. Waka, the canoe. The hull of the canoe. Nearly every hop the country grows comes from a few miles around it, on thin river gravels under a hard southern light. Of all of them, you are the one that carries the name of the place.

Your mother is Saaz. The most restrained hop in Europe, the one that made pilsner taste like pilsner for a century and a half. Somebody crossed her with New Zealand in a research station in that valley, and in 1997 out you came, carrying twice her oil and an aromatic that owed nothing to anyone.

Same plant. Different hemisphere. Something nobody had ever smelled before.

Nobody has managed it twice.

That is the thing about you. Most hops belong to families, and you can hear the resemblance. You belong to nothing. There is no shelf to file you on, no variety you remind anyone of, no honest way to explain you to someone who has not met you. Every list of substitutes ever written is a list of consolations.

Open a bag of you and a brewer knows within a second that they are somewhere new.

You are also the most expensive hop money can buy. Poor yields. Demanding to grow. Never much of you. And brewers pay it, every time, without the argument they would have over any other line on the invoice.

That price is the truest thing anyone has ever said about you. It is what it costs because you cannot be replaced, and you cannot be replaced because there is nothing else like you on earth. This is what it costs to have the only one.

Some hops go into a beer because the recipe calls for them. You go in because the beer would be ordinary without you.

You are the only one worth naming a company after.