“What’s the hoppiest beer you have?,” someone asked.

I have no idea. I don’t think anyone knows. We don’t keep track of hoppiness here, not in the sense of boasting about IBUs and alpha acid percentages. The brewers at Pilsner Urquell told me that their beer has 40 IBUs, but most brewers here wouldn’t be able to do much more than guess. It’s simply not an issue. Beer here is supposed to be good, that’s for sure. But it’s not necessarily supposed to be terribly hoppy.

However, high levels of hop bitterness and aroma seem to get a lot of attention among American beer fans, and the question got me thinking: what would it be like to take a perfectly great Czech pale lager and crank the hoppiness up a notch?

Thus my second experiment in beer hacking. The first involved dosing a Czech Baltic porter with Orval yeast dregs. In the comments for that story, Jake from Northern Table suggested “getting your hands on some hop pellets and dry hopping a few bottles.” But by that point, my dry-hopped Bernard pale lager experiment was already well underway.

For my dry-hopping hack, I didn’t use pellets. On my desk I had a single cone of Angus hop as a memento from my trip to the Budweiser Budvar hop room. So I cracked open a Bernard sváteční ležák bottle — chosen primarily because of its resealable swing-top cap — and just dropped the bud into the brew.

I resealed the bottle, covering the top with packing tape just in case, and put it in the fridge. Today — about a month later — I opened it along with an untreated bottle of Bernard sváteční ležák and poured two wine glasses to compare.

Here’s what didn’t happen. Contrary to my expectations, the dry-hopped bottle didn’t go flat: like any other swing-top bottle of Bernard, it opened with a reassuring pop. The two glasses in front of me have virtually identical amounts of carbonation and head retention.

Thankfully, it also didn’t sour or spoil. The aromas and overall flavor profiles are nearly the same. There is no trace of infection.

But what is different is just a whiff of more grassiness in the nose. And in the mouth, there’s a slight increase in the bitter, peppery notes. When you go back to the undoctored Bernard, you get much more of the grainy malt and sweet corn flavors. When you try the dry-hopped version again, you might think you’re tasting black pepper and pot resin. It’s actually not that much of a change, but if you focus you’ll probably notice the difference.

(However, there is one point at which you can’t help but notice the change. With apologies for any lack of decorousness, I have to say that the dry-hopped version burps far hoppier than the regular Bernard. How is it that a beer is only slightly different in the mouth, but wildly different upon belching? Good Lord, it’s like burping up the entire Budweiser Budvar hop room.)

As I drink the last sips, the differences are becoming more clear, probably due to the warmer temperatures. The dry-hopped bottle smells like high-grade weed; the unadulterated beer has yeast and bready notes instead. (Bernard sváteční ležák is a kvasnicové pivo, or yeast beer, which commonly has bread-like aromas.) There’s also much more citrus coming through with the dry-hopped version, as well as a touch of peppermint.

In the end, my single bottle of dry-hopped Bernard may in fact be the hoppiest beer in entire the Czech Republic. But does it matter?

That’s what some people don’t seem to get about hoppiness. To put it another way, my version certainly is hoppier. But I’m not at all convinced it’s any better.

That picture shows how I knew it was working: a bit of brown liquid had blown through the rubber gasket on the swing-top. At the height of activity, the bottle was hissing like an asthmatic cat, releasing built-up carbon dioxide as the yeast did its work. It meant that my first experiment in beer hacking was successful, at least as a proof-of-concept. What remained to be seen was how it would taste.

What I started with was originally straight Pardubický Porter, a Baltic Porter from the Pernštejn brewery here in the Czech Republic. I liked the beer plenty, but sometimes I thought it was too sweet. And I wondered if I could change it using a minimal amount of effort. In particular, I wondered what it would taste like if it was inoculated with brettanomyces. So I filled a couple of swing-top bottles with draft Pardubický Porter and dosed them with the dregs from a bottle of Orval, which I knew should contain some brettanomyces.

I called it “beer hacking,” meaning “modifying a commercial beer to suit your own tastes.” The idea got some attention. Jeff Bell commented that he didn’t think it would end well. William Brand wrote in to note that Orval actually has two yeasts in each bottle, so I’d be getting regular ale yeast as well as brett. And some dudes on Reditt started debating if it would work or not.

Oh yeah. It worked.

My original thought was that the yeast in the Orval bottle might be dead, so all I would end up with would be the effects of autolysis. But when I found the bottle spitting and wheezing in the beer room, I knew there was enough life for the beer to undergo a secondary fermentation. I let it sit upright at winter room temperature for five months, and then opened it at the end of a recent kitchen table tasting.

It spewed like Champagne.

Once the gushing stopped, we poured four good glasses. Instead of coffee and cocoa sweetness, the nose had loads of horse-blanket and barnyard aromas. There was a tack-like leatheriness in the mouth, with a lovely tannic structure. It was sour — not lambic sour, but sour-sweet like a Flemish red. And the mouthfeel was quite different for me: the hacked beer gave the impression of being more substantial, vinous and heavy in the mouth.

If you put it in stemware and gave it to an unknowing guest, he’d probably ask what kind of wine it was.

I’ve still got one bottle left, which I’ll try again in a few months. And another project with a different beer — a simple hack of a standard Czech pale lager — is currently underway in the refrigerator right now, which I’ll report on in a few weeks. I still plan to age Pardubický Porter in an oak barrel someday, or at least put it on oak chips. The possibilities for beer hacking are endless.

Of course hacking a beer is not the same as brewing one. But at least it’s slightly more involved than the basic, open-bottle-pour-in-face type of beer consumption. Not every experiment in beer hacking is going to land butter-side-up: my attempt to make an Eisbock last month resulted in two very flat, very unfrozen, very ruined half-liters of Czech strong lager. But it is all in the name of science.

Our thoughts are with Bill Brand. We’re raising a glass of hacked beer to him tonight.