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Type a hop name, narrow by region and purpose, or pick aromas to hunt by character. Click any hop for its ranked substitutes, oil fingerprint, and the swap ratio for equal bitterness.
How the matching works
Hop substitution charts everywhere else are lists of flavor words — “both are citrusy,” and good luck. This one is anchored in two things that aren't a matter of opinion. First, the oil fingerprint: the proportions of the four aroma terpenes — myrcene, humulene, caryophyllene and farnesene — compared as a profile, so a high-myrcene citrus hop matches other high-myrcene hops and a humulene-rich noble matches other nobles. Second, breeding pedigree: a hop that is a parent, child or sibling of another is genuinely related, and that lineage carries real weight in the score. Aroma descriptors ride on top of that backbone rather than carrying the whole match.
The weighting shifts by what you're replacing. For an aroma hop, oil and descriptors dominate and alpha barely matters. For a bittering hop, alpha proximity and cohumulone — which shapes how harsh or smooth the bitterness lands — carry far more. Dual-purpose splits the difference. When a hop is on another's published substitute list, that outranks any computed match and is marked accordingly; a confirmed pedigree link is marked too.
Every match shows a swap ratio — the weight to use for the same bitterness, since trading a 12% alpha hop for a 5% one is not a like-for-like by weight. It's the alpha-acid ratio; dial late-addition aroma by taste from there.
Each substitute also carries a sensory overlay — its aroma plotted against the original on a twelve-axis wheel in the style of the Yakima Chief Ranches profiles, with a figure for how closely the two shapes agree. Where a variety has a recognized published profile its wheel follows it; the rest are approximated from this database's own descriptor tags and marked ▲. The overlay never moves the ranking — it's there to show at a glance where a sub leans more citrus or more pine than what you're replacing. The measured oil fingerprint, not the panel's nose, is still what drives the match.
This is pass one: a working palette of the most-used hops. Alpha, oil and cohumulone figures are typical published values from BarthHaas, Hopsteiner and Yakima Chief variety sheets — they swing with crop year, so treat them as representative; pedigree and character are cross-checked against Stan Hieronymus's For the Love of Hops. Entries where the oil breakdown is estimated rather than published are marked ▲ for review. Discontinued hops stay searchable so an old recipe still resolves, but are never offered as a substitute — you can't buy them.
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