Glossary
Hop pellet
Hops milled and compressed into pellets for storage and handling — T90 being the standard whole-cone equivalent and T45 or cryo formats being concentrated in lupulin.
Also called t90, t45, pellets, cryo hops, lupulin powder.
Pellets keep far better than whole cones because compression excludes oxygen, and they are easier to dose and to separate from the beer. T90 contains the whole cone; concentrated formats remove much of the leafy vegetal material, which allows heavy dry-hop charges with less grassy character and less beer loss.
"Cryo" is a trade name for one manufacturer’s cryogenic lupulin-separation process, not a generic category, though it is widely used as one.
Related
- Dry hopping — Where concentrated formats matter most.
More vocabulary
Adjunct · Aroma hop · Base malt · Bittering hop · Black malt · Brettanomyces · Candi sugar · Chocolate malt · Crystal malt · Dextrin
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.
Evidence
What BeerHQ knows about this, and how. Every statement carries the state of the evidence behind it rather than being presented flatly as fact.
Pelletising hops is a preservation measure as much as a handling one: in a two-year storage trial, pellets retained more of their beta acids than whole cones did, and exposure to air mattered more than temperature.
Checked against the source
Source: Rutnik et al., "The Stability of Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) Resins during Long-Period Storage" (2023), Section 2.2, Beta-Acids (Plants 12(4):936)