Abstrax's Extracts Are on the Nose

I‘d like to open by issuing Abstrax’s national sales manager, Barbara Stone, an apology. In discussing the brave new world of smell and taste wrought by Abstrax’s 100% plant-derived terpene extracts—a terpene being the aromatic compound found in all plant life and notoriously central to the world of cannabis—I provincially asked if dosing cannabis products or beverages with such hyper concentrated extracts is analogous to Lance Armstrong winning the Tour du France seven years in a row due to his use of performance enhancing drugs. Conventional thinking knows that Armstrong would’ve been a world-class cyclist sans steroids, but almost assuredly couldn’t have won the grueling bike race without taking PEDs (in part because the cyclists who placed second through ninth were also possibly juicing). Regardless, I’d been thinking about these extracts through the wrong lens. The products Abstrax creates and sells aren’t remotely illegal or even immoral. In fact, they’re U.S. Food and Drug Administration registered, Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau approved, and even certified organic and kosher. They are, to echo the company’s slogan, “made by nature, perfected by science.”

What they do, in the simplest of terms, is make stuff smell and taste good. Moreover, these all-natural extracts make stuff smell and taste like the genuine article, even when not employing the real deal.

When Abstrax Tech launched in 2017, it was primarily aimed at the nascent legal cannabis industry. It’s headquartered in California where weed went legal in late 2016 (two years after Oregon). In 2023, it branched out with Abstrax Hops focused on revolutionizing the beer industry. It already boasts a wealth of hop and beer industry royalty who collectively wield over a century of expertise. The team is led by Jim Ringo, formerly the VP of sales and marketing for John I. Haas, part of the world’s largest hop supplier. That’s where Abstrax lured Stone from, too, after she’d worked at Oregon’s Ninkasi Brewing. There’s Tom Nielson, director of brewing and beverage innovation, who helmed Sierra Nevada Brewing’s R&D and raw materials. Craig Thomas, the national sales director, not only was a sensory research analyst for Firestone Walker Brewing, one of the world’s most decorated brewers of hop-forward beers, but is one of only 28 Master Cicerones in the world making him among the most vaunted of certified hop experts. Which brings us to Bendite Nathan Smith, the senior VP of sales.

Smith was born and raised in England, where he dreamt of being a professional rugby player, but now with more than 20 years in the flavor game under his belt, he’s more than happy snowboarding, mountain biking, and spending family time in the mountains and on the lakes. I’m guessing he also finds it easier to explain the science of flavor and aroma than it is the rules of rugby, but luckily, he’s got a professional audience that is not just aware, but champing at the bit, to learn more about the hop extracts he’s offering. A handful of Bend breweries has become early adaptors from the oldest and largest, Deschutes Brewery, to the newest launched just a couple months ago, UPP Liquids.

Feeling Flavor

There have been “flavor houses” for centuries. Smith’s first job in the field was with Firmenich, the Swiss fragrance factory founded in the late 1800s. Just as perfumes may have the effect of getting you in the mood, Abstrax’s AI Mood line is designed to alter your mental state 21st century-style. They can make you feel energized, inspired, or peaceful.

Stone says, “To get to go into this field first you have to have a love for flavor.” Smith is obsessed with it. When most people discover something that they love the taste of, they simply crave more. Smith dives into what it means for something to taste good. And why it does so.

Smith says his “pops” also worked at Firmenich for 32 years, “Working in flavors, part scientist, part sales leadership legend, pioneer of taste modulators. (And also) my hero and favorite drinking buddy.”

In his pursuit of discovering what makes something “literally tickle your taste buds,” Smith notes that whatever the reason, “Often we will find it is deeply rooted in a strong tie to memory… Taste and smell are the closest thing we have to time travel. A mere smell can take us back to being five years old, waiting by the kitchen table to lick the spoon of grandma’s cake mix, the house teeming with the smell of baked vanilla, hints of cinnamon, brown butter. The sounds of the wooden spoon on the metal bowl. (It’s) a portal back to the past that is uniquely yours, if only for a second. That’s the magic of taste and smell.”

In Stone’s words, Abstrax is, “First and foremost a technology company.” What I’ve come to accept in short order is that perceiving extracts like these as some sort of cheat code makes me look like an old man yelling at clouds. Doing such is to deny that over the 12,000 years of human civilization, every great, sociological leap forward has stemmed from academic advancements designed to enhance facets of life, liberty, or leisure (where we’ll put beer, although I might argue beer belongs to all three of those camps).

The armchair anthropologist in me notes that the history of beer completely dovetails with the history of human society beginning with transitioning from nomadic hunters to settled agrarians specifically for the purpose of harvesting grains required to make beer. Since then, every societal breakthrough has been applied to beer. It’s a straight line from inventing the wheel to beer delivery vehicles. From Louis Pasteur discovering microorganisms to brewers propagating yeast. From artificial refrigeration to beer fridges keeping our ales and lagers stable (and tasty). Everything we’ve achieved as a species has essentially been done in the name of optimization. And the extracts from Abstrax Hops is designed to optimize beer.

Nathan Smith and his “pops” enjoying some quality beer time. Credit: Nathan Smith

From GC to Juicy

There really is a job title called “flavorist” that is otherwise called a flavor chemist. Smith calls these folks “master tasters.” They’ve trained their senses—typically over the course of a decade or longer — “to detect taste and smell at the most granular chemical level possible.”

To achieve the desired results, labs like the state-of-the-art one at Abstrax use comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography. When you’re in the industry, you simply call it “GCxGC.”

Please don’t make me get technical. Think of GCxGC as a CT scan of aromatics, as a way to create a 3-D map of flavor.

“That is how you decode what is inside an orange. What is a lemon?” Smith muses. “GC flashed off all those volatiles and captures it. So you’re trying to look at every nook and cranny and that’s what we are then recreating or decoding to be nature identical.”

I’m going to put on my Cicerone cap. When I’m drinking beer, I do that geeky thing beyond identifying if an IPA is brewed with grapefruity Cascade or guava-like Mosaic hops. I take a deep sniff to allow the beer to convey its essence so my nose tips off my tongue. If my first thought is, “Ooh, smells like stone fruit, I try to go deeper! Apricot? If so, tangy California or sweeter Turkish apricots? Is it ripe or underripe, or more like dried pluots” Wine enthusiasts expound beyond a Syrah being peppery: is it whole white peppercorns or cracked black pepper? Scholarly stoners decipher if flower is simply skunky and gassy or is it actually sulfuric like shaved Walla Walla onions or fried black garlic?

The chemists at Abstrax take that level of geekery to a whole ‘nother level by breaking flavorants—a subclass of aroma chemistry—into alcohols, esters, phenols, mercaptans, heterocycles, and sulfuric thiols. This might sound cool, but it means virtually nothing to someone whose nose doesn’t have its own Ph.D.

Vern Johnson, pilot brewer for Deschutes Brewery, became interested in Abstrax hop extracts from the jump. Having worked at Deschutes since 2014 and now conjuring up test batches, he pointedly stated that it’s not his job to brew what he likes, but rather what the customers may want. When dialing in something so unknown, it helps to know exactly what you’re dealing with. “Not every Citra is created equal.” Citra happens to be the most popular hop varietal in craft beer, but, being an agricultural product, there are countless variants from farm to farm, even acre to acre, and year to year, etcetera. “What that means is that some lots are better than others.”

When Russian River Brewing, creators of the iconic Pliny the Elder Double IPA, formulated its STS pilsner, it selected a French hop varietal called Aramis. So to help ensure a reliable supply of this delicate hop with less demand, it called on Abstrax to create a highly specific extract to capture it, which Abstrax now offers as Aramis Quantum Brite, found in the Quantum series of hop-derived terpenes.

Ironically, while all of Abstrax’s cannabis terpenes are 100% plant derived, they are not extracted from the cannabis plant, although sniffing it you’d insist otherwise. Incidentally, botanically-speaking cannabis and hops are cousins, so some overlap in terpenes is not unexpected.

It’s this pious dedication to nailing specific sensory evaluation in its hop offerings that Johnon admires about Abstrax, specifically calling out Tom Nielson and Craig Thomas’s involvement and backgrounds as reasons why these extracts are so reliable and only increasing in value as their technology improves.

As for terpene applications, Silver Moon Brewing brewer Jordan Hunt created Cross Joint IPA. It’s a beer I’ve had several iterations of since it debuted at the pub last year. It is already their new flagship, available in cans year-round.

“Abstrax helped us innovate beer and stand out from the crowd with something unique in this competitive beer space,” says Hunt. “We first used the Pineapple Express terpenes in an experimental batch…and have dialed in our usage of the terpenes and matching hops that blend well with them to make an incredible IPA.”

To sip Cross Joint is to undeniably get a sense that you’re drinking the dankest of beers. I call it, “like drinking bong beer, in a good way.”

Adds Hunt, “What I like most about it is the intense aromatics we can get from the terpenes while not overwhelming the beer or making it out of balance on the palate.”

Over at Deschutes, Johnson’s pilot brewery never stops testing and tinkering, even with established brands. “The cupboard is always open. Fresh Squeezed today is a lot different than it was when it was introduced (in 2013).” When Tropical Fresh IPA debuted two years ago, it was exclusively made with hops “but now has incorporated extra extracts from Euphorics,” the advanced hop product line from Haas. To achieve the pineapple and other tropical fruit notes, those botanicals are used. Whereas Deschutes’ double IPA line, Symphonic Chronic (chronic being slang for premium weed) reaches for Pineapple Express extract from Abstrax’s BrewGas series of canna terps.

Several companies have come up with concentrated flavor extracts that can propel your favorite beer to another level. Credit: Abstrax

Beer Purity: Past, Present, and Future

Smith and Stone sat down with me with a plethora of miniscule bottles that hold 5ml each of extracts. Keep in mind an ounce is just under 30ml. But a single drop offers a world of aromatics. A few drops of the clementine flavor in a can of soda water transports you to a Florida citrus grove. One whiff of the Blackberry Kush extract and you’d swear you’re at a Snoop Dogg concert. Likewise, dosing soda water with the Cascade hop extract conjures up memories of the first time I had Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the beer that made Cascade hops world famous.

And here’s the kicker. When I’ve taken a swig of, say, White Claw Black Cherry, it offers a suggestion of black cherry, but isn’t evocative of cherries. (And I don’t say that to slag Smith, whose past work indeed impacted that hard seltzer sans laws.) But with the advances made by Abstrax, the high-tech equipment coupled with the flavorists yields lifelike results backed by both human palates and digital displays.

“Taste is entirely subjective,” acknowledges Smith. “A flavorist or someone passionate about flavors wants to know what is specifically driving the tonality and, subsequently, the like-or-dislike.”

We’ve already heard about Smith’s nostalgia for his childhood memories of his grandmother’s baking. He’d also mentioned, “As a small boy, I would obsess over cooking and watched hours of cooking shows instead of the cartoons playing on the main telly downstairs.” Remember, he’s English. It’s like that lyric from the Twenty One Pilots song, “Stressed Out.”

Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young.
How come I’m never able to identify where it’s coming from?
I’d make a candle out of it, if I ever found it.
Try to sell it, never sell out of it.

Abstrax is the company that could identify it and capture it for use in candles (or cannabis or beer). There have long been methods to mimic and attempt to replicate tastes and scents, especially ones evocative of, say, grandma’s baked goods. It’s a fact that a “natural vanilla” flavor was (and still is) extracted from beavers called castoreum, so called because it emanates from castor sacs, which—there’s no delicate way of saying this—is located in a beaver’s taint. To contrast and reiterate, every Abstrax product is derived organically from plants. So, unlike castoreum, they are vegan and much cheaper. You can see why beaver gland, as a food flavoring (if not as a perfume ingredient!), has fallen out of favor.

Abstrax hop extracts are increasingly used in beers from Bend to Anheuser-Busch and are increasingly tested and employed world-wide. The Dutch brewery Moersleutel calls its brewers beer engineers and its new West Coast-style IPA is engineered with Abstrax. The reason it’s notable is that the brewery is situated 150 miles from the German border where the Bavarian Beer Purity Law, known as the Reinheitsgebot of 1516, dictates that beer can only be made from malts, hops, and water (and later amended to include yeast, thanks again to Pasteur). Once such advanced hop products enter Germany, more than 500 years of brewing regulations will become revolutionized.

UPP Liquids co-owner, Tonya Cornett, the research and development brewer responsible for many of 10 Barrel Brewing’s awards before being unceremoniously let go by the brewery’s new cannabis-industry parent company, Tilray, says, “I am constantly experimenting with new hop varieties and new recipes. Occasionally hop saturation doesn’t turn out as planned. I began using Abstrax after one such occasion when the beer I was working on needed a boost in aroma and flavor. It turned an OK IPA into a top seller.”

UPPlift West Coast IPA utilizes Simcoe Quantum. As a value-add, Cornett points out that “We have seen an extension of shelf life in these beers in addition to the aroma, mouthfeel and flavor boost.” Cornett mentions another value-add. “I have made many terpene beers. They are tricky because too much is undrinkable. A little bit goes a long way.”

Whether a brewer is looking for a way to add a pop of, say, pineapple essence and reaches for pineapple from the SkyFarm series, Simcoe hops (Quantum series) which throws pineapple notes or Pineapple Express (BrewGas series), Smith and the team from Abstrax have our local brewers covered.

“It’s a tool in our toolbox,” concludes Cornett. “It doesn’t work miracles. You still need a great beer to build upon.”

This article appears in Source Weekly July 31, 2025.