It’s exhilarating, the idea that hops, already so vivid and potent, may contain additional, hidden aromatics—aromatics that can be unlocked under the right conditions during fermentation. To visualize the process, think of that blue butterfly pea tea that Instagram loves, which, with the addition of lemon juice, turns magenta in the cup. Or compare it to Flavor-Morph Starbursts, which change from cherry to lime in the mouth. Choose your adventure.

These chameleonic possibilities are understandably compelling. They’re also so unexplored—most experiments and studies that focus on biotransformation have taken place within the last decade—that brewers are still in the earliest phases of experimentation. Many have happened upon hop compound biotransformation empirically, accidentally: a hallmark of the recently ascendant New England IPA style is that it is frequently dry hopped during active fermentation, which would create the necessary conditions for yeast and hop compounds to intermingle and produce new flavors and aromas.

“We just kind of stumbled into it accidentally,” says Jean Broillet IV, the founder of Tired Hands. “When we opened, we kind of had to make beer faster than normal. It sounds like a cop-out excuse. We opened with a five-barrel system—at most we could crank out maybe seven barrels per batch—and sometimes we had to dry-hop three to four days into fermentation.”

For Tired Hands, necessity bred the perfect conditions for biotransformation—and the effects were evident. “We noticed early on that the hop profile and aromatic component was way more bombastic,” Broillet says. “It was almost this shortcut we had stumbled across where you get bang for your buck with this rushed product.”

At this point, there have been few attempts to educate consumers on the subject. In 2016, Cloudwater was one of the first breweries to make the topic explicitly public-facing when it released its DIPA versions 4 and 5. The two beers were brewed using the same wort, the same yeast, the same hop bill, the same fermentation time. The only difference was dry hopping: one was dry hopped while fermentation was still ongoing—when active yeast cells would be exposed to hop compounds and potentially able to transform them. The other was dry hopped afterwards.

The two emerged as notably distinct beers. As Zach Fowle wrote at the time in a piece in DRAFT, DIPA v4 was “woody, almost mossy, with notes of overripe orange, mango notes, chopped onions, fresh grass blades, and tangerine pulp,” while DIPA v5 was “lemonade-citrusy and so full of additional orange peel, orange blossom, honey, and lime notes, it should probably be planted in a verdant California orchard.” Cloudwater’s “public experiment” seemed to display compelling evidence about biotransformation’s powerful effects on flavor and aroma. There was palpable excitement about the topic at hand.