Ella was released by Hop Products Australia in the early 2010s under the working name "Stella," a reference meant to evoke its bright, distinctive character — but the name ran into a trademark conflict with an already-established Belgian beer brand, and the hop was renamed Ella before it reached wide international distribution. Both names still occasionally surface in older brewing literature and recipe archives, which can confuse brewers encountering references to "Stella hops" without knowing they're reading about Ella under its original working title.
Real bitterness capacity, reserved for aroma instead
At 13-16% alpha acid, Ella carries genuine bittering capacity, but its distinctive aroma profile means most recipes reserve at least a portion of the hop bill for late-boil, whirlpool or dry-hop use, where the mint and black currant notes that define the variety actually come through.
Aroma character
Black currant and mint together form an unusually specific combination — few other hops pair a dark-fruit note with a genuinely cooling, minty quality in the same variety, and the effect reads as more complex and less straightforwardly "fruity" than most tropical-fruit-forward Australian and American hops. Stone fruit rounds out the profile, adding a sweetness that keeps the mint from reading as sharp or medicinal on its own.
A supporting note, not the headline
Hazy IPA and Australian-style pale ale both use Ella, often as a supporting hop alongside a brighter, more citrus-forward variety rather than as the sole aroma component, since its mint character is distinctive enough to dominate a beer if it's not balanced against something else — a heavy-handed dry hop of Ella alone can read closer to a minty herbal tea than a conventional IPA, which is why most recipes treat it as an accent rather than the whole aromatic story, reserving the bulk of a dry hop's weight for a more conventional citrus or tropical variety and letting Ella contribute a smaller, supporting fraction of the total charge. It's also occasionally used in darker styles — porters and stouts looking for a black-currant-adjacent fruitiness — where its dark fruit note complements roasted malt character in a way a purely citrus hop wouldn't.
Substitutes
Galaxy is the more available substitute when Ella isn't in stock, though it lacks Ella's specific black-currant-and-mint combination entirely, reading as a straightforward passion-fruit-forward hop instead. Summer, another Hop Products Australia release, is the second substitute, sharing Ella's Australian lineage with its own distinct citrus-floral character rather than a close aromatic match. Its moderate-high alpha range is worth confirming against the IBU calculator before sizing a bittering charge around it.
A name change worth knowing about
Because "Stella" was Ella's original commercial name for a period before the trademark issue forced the change, older grower catalogs, forum threads and even some early commercial beer labels reference the hop under that name — a brewer researching a recipe that predates the rename may encounter "Stella hops" and reasonably wonder whether it's the same variety being described here. It is. The character, the breeding origin, and the plant itself never changed; only the commercial name did, which is a reminder that a hop's trade name is a marketing decision layered on top of its genetics, not a fixed part of what the variety actually is — the same lesson the Styrian Golding and American Tettnanger naming histories teach from the opposite direction, where an old name survived even after later research complicated the story underneath it.