Columbus, Tomahawk and Zeus (CTZ): A hop by any other name…

Why would the same hop have a bunch of different names? Well it’s the kind of story only a hard core hop-junkie or patent / intellectual property attorney would find interesting.

The abridged version is that in 1979 Chuck Zimmermann was working for the USDA hop program in Washington State when he left to go to work in private industry at a company called Hop Union and then onto Yakima Chief. Hop Union called the hop strain Columbus; Yakima Chief called it Tomahawk. After some legal action all the parties mended their relationship and each company sold the hop using their own name for it.

A few years later a third company, S.S. Steiner, came up with a very similar hop and called it Zeus. It must have been different enough to get past the Hop Union patent (I know nothing about agricultural patents), but it's similar enough that everyone says its indistinguishable from the other two in a finished product.

Since you’ll get the same results from either hop brewers began abbreviating all three names to CTZ. So now you know.

Brewing Qualities

Who wants dry, harsh grapefruit? No? Okay, no grapefruit...

Because this is a hop with the potential for rough edges, it is used almost-exclusively for bittering (Stone uses it in most of their beers for just that very purpose). Not many commercial examples of it as a sole-use flavor hop.

However. Pyramid Brewing is doing an unusually-good job of implementing CTZ in a production, smooth, year-round beer. If you take one thing away from this article, make sure it is the desire to check-out their Thunderhead IPA. Flavored with nothing but CTZ.

But, in general, because of the common usage as a bittering hop, this is a hop that can be used in almost every style.