Hop cultivation is such a specialized trade that there are no manufacturers for hop-picking equipment. Each grower must adapt existing equipment to remove the bines.
Toward the end of August, hop growers begin to caress their crops. Like fruit, hops ripen, and a farmer can tell from the springiness and stickiness of the cone whether the hop is ready. They have sophisticated techniques to measure water content, but an experienced farmer can tell just by squeezing a hop and splitting it in half to inspect the yellow lupulin particles inside. On the day the cones are judged to be perfectly ripe, growers give brewers the call: They’re ready. Within just a few hours of harvest, while the heat of the summer sun still warms them, the hops will go into a boiling kettle of beer and become a fresh-hop ale.
Hop cultivation is such a specialized trade that there are no manufacturers for hop-picking equipment. Each grower must adapt existing equipment to remove the bines.
We call it “lupulin nouveau”—a style of beer that blossoms once a year at harvest time. Fresh-hop ales capture the essence of the green, living vegetable. Their flavors are by turns softer and wetter, more earthy and wild, than beer made using dried hops. They taste their best just days after they’re kegged, while that living essence is still at its freshest. By Thanksgiving, they’re all gone. Fresh-hop ales are the ultimate harvest beers, ones to be savored in the moment of ripeness, not hoarded and saved. ■
BREWERIES LEARNED millennia ago to brew in cool weather, and the most prized ales were made just after harvest. No reference has explicitly distinguished fresh and dried hops, but it’s safe to guess that the use of fresh hops dates back to the beginning of the hop era. If brewers did make their October beers with fresh hops in the distant past, the practice had ended by the industrial age and wasn’t rediscovered until around 1992.
American breweries may have made the first attempts—there is at least one reference to an effort by an unnamed brewery in the early 1990s—but the Wadworth Brewery in Devizes, England, was the first to make a batch we can document now. The brewer at the time, Trevor Holmes, got the inspiration while watching the autumn harvest, wondering what green hops would taste like in a batch of beer. The beer’s conceit came to him fully formed and is now the standard practice in making these beers. An employee is dispatched, predawn, to get to the farm by six to collect hops both freshly dried on the previous day and green hops freshly picked on that morning. He returns by nine-thirty so that the first of two coppers can receive the hops. This timing is critical. The current brewer, Brian Yorston, describes the process:
In 2008 I decided personally to do the hop run; I made the mistake of stopping for a coffee on the way back, only to find a posse of brewery operators standing by the gate waiting impatiently for my arrival. Such is the important timing of getting the hops on time to meet the brew.
Brewers in the United States next made fresh-hop beers around 1996. Sierra Nevada and Bert Grant both made versions, but Grant had the decided advantage: His brewery in Yakima was just a few miles from the hop fields. By the end of the decade, more breweries were making them—largely in areas around Yakima and the Willamette Valley—but it was still a rare practice.
The explosion came about five years later, propelled by festivals celebrating the harvest in Oregon and Washington. (These two states account for around 90 percent of the commercial hop acreage.) Breweries began to develop relationships with hop growers, and the number of fresh-hop ales grew exponentially. Scores of breweries now make fresh-hop ales, and they make around 200 different variations—a number that grows annually.
While the style had been focused in the Pacific Northwest, more and more breweries across the country have started to get in on the act. Initially, far-flung breweries had hops flown in from Yakima or the Willamette Valley, but this was hugely expensive and the hops spent a long time between field and kettle (sometimes overnight)—a less than ideal arrangement. A few breweries in other parts of the country started planting small plots of hops for their own use. Then, in an even bigger development, breweries became interested enough in local hops—both fresh and dried—that farmers in New York, Wisconsin, and Colorado put in hop fields. Already those fields have provided local craft breweries with fresh hops for harvest ales. Crops in other states are now in the planning stages. ■
FRESH-HOP ALES are regularly compared to Beaujolais Nouveau, but the analogy is only partially apt. Both are products of the harvest, drunk fresh lest the life seep out of them. They have about them the joy of the harvest. But there’s a big difference. Karen MacNeil, writing in The Wine Bible, said of the wine: “Top-quality Nouveau has a kind of exuberant berryness. Its charm is its innocent, not-quite-wine character. Drinking it gives you the same kind of silly pleasure as eating cookie dough.”
Fresh-hop ales are simple and lean, but they are fully evolved beers. The hops that give them their exuberance aren’t in the process of becoming—they’ve arrived, and the flavors they give are expressive and vivid, less cookie dough, more freshly baked cookies. Top-quality fresh-hop ales are revelatory; their flavors are fecund and green in a way that seems more complete. Flavors become concentrated in dried hops, and the resulting beers are more intense. But fresh-hop ales have the very delicate flavors and aromas of living things—notes as gentle as spring blossoms and as sweet as fresh berries.
They are not, however, truly predictable. Regular hops are lab tested and analyzed, and breweries know how they’ll behave in beer. (Even when breweries don’t change a recipe, they have to make adjustments to seasonal variations in malt and hops in order to keep the flavors consistent.) The flavors and aromas that come from fresh hops are unlike their dried hop counterparts. They don’t produce the same aromas and flavors, nor at the same intensities.
In the ten years breweries have made fresh-hop ales in substantial numbers, they’ve discovered that some hop strains lend themselves to the practice, while others really don’t. When they don’t work, they can give off gassy, grassy, or even compost-like vegetal flavors. Over time, brewers have settled on a relatively small group of old reliables. For instance, Cascade, Centennial, and Crystal hops have found their way into between one-third and one-half of all fresh-hop ales in recent years. Amarillo, Willamette, and Nugget are only slightly less common. All other varieties make up between one-quarter and one-third of the rest. ■
WHEN HOPS ARE HANGING on the bine, a great deal of their weight comes from water. In most cases, that moisture will be removed before the hop is packaged for storage. The plant is harvested whole: After being severed near the root, a specially outfitted truck comes by, clips off the plant from the top of the trellis, and loads it in the bed. From the field, they’re taken directly inside to a processing plant where the cones (or if you’re feeling pedantic, strobiles) are separated from the stems and leaves. If the hops are being dried, the final stage is putting them in a kiln—which actually looks like a massive warehouse with a swimming pool of hops—set to 140°F. After nine hours, the hops’ moisture will have dropped to 8 percent, and they’ll be ready for baling.
In kilns like this one in the Willamette Valley, hops piled three feet deep scent the air with an intensely green aroma.
In fresh-hop brewing, strapping young gents from the brewery show up before the hops go into the kiln and hustle them back to the brewhouse where a boiling kettle stands ready to accept them. That’s the ideal, anyway—and when hop fields are nearby, breweries can pull it off. Timing isn’t just about the poetry of the occasion—the longer a truckload of wet hops sits, the more their most delicate qualities erode in the hot air. That’s why if the hops are not being made into fresh-hop ale, growers like to get them into the kiln immediately.
The actual brewing is straightforward, and the only real question is the hopping schedule. When breweries use wet hops for bittering, it takes at least five times more wet hops to achieve the same level of bitterness as with dry hops. Instead, many breweries use a bitter charge of dry hops at the beginning and then use wet hops throughout the boil. Both methods produce beers with distinctively green, fresh-hop goodness, but beers with initial dry-hop charges have a cleaner bitter note. All-fresh–hop beers, because they have so much hop material in the boil, are much softer and more vegetal; these beers may also be more susceptible to the strange and unpleasant flavors that sometimes come from green hops. Can you dry-hop (add the hops to the conditioning tank) with wet hops? Yes. Mark Tranter, who brews a fresh-hop beer at Dark Star in Sussex, England, bitters with conventional Simcoe hops (piney to grapefruit when dried) and then uses freshly picked Targets (fruity marmalade to light citrus when dried). “We get them picked and down here the next day, put them in the hop tank we use for dry-hopping and let that circulate for a few days. It tastes like some kind of tropical fruit thing. For some bizarre reason, Simcoes and Targets work well together.” ■
THE FRESH HOP phenomenon coincided with a change in the relationship between farmers and brewers. Even ten years ago, craft breweries didn’t have close relationships with hop farmers. In earlier decades, growers did all their business with the huge lager companies, which purchased hops purely for their bittering potential. Their substantial hop purchases made growers a de facto branch of their business, and they grew the high–alpha acid varieties the big companies wanted.
When fresh-hop ales came on the scene, craft breweries began forging their own special relationships with farmers—relationships that have had mutual benefits beyond the small fresh-hop purchases. This is particularly true in the Willamette Valley, where growers have less connection to the multinational companies than those in the Yakima Valley. Fresh-hop ales built a bridge, but now farmers and brewers are working together to plant other crops used in craft brewing. Knowing that craft breweries are willing to buy aroma and flavor varieties (especially Cascade and Centennial) has encouraged farmers to plant more of them, and growers and brewers occasionally even collaborate on developing new strains.
Fresh-hop ales are for the moment celebrated more enthusiastically in the United States than anywhere, but New Zealand isn’t far behind. English breweries are also beginning to follow Wadworth’s lead, and around a dozen now make fresh-hop beers. Because lagers aren’t an ideal fit for fresh hops, Germany hasn’t shown signs of taking advantage of its own bounty, but you never know. Unlike many innovations, fresh hops are Reinheitsgebot-compliant. ■
Fresh Versus First. When is a fresh-hop ale not a fresh-hop ale? When it uses freshly dried hops instead of freshly picked ones—a distinction some breweries are happy to blur. Fresh hops are hard to work with, their character is fleeting, and they can produce unpredictable flavors. So instead of messing with them, some breweries use the first hops of the year, but ones that have already been dried. The difference is not incidental; consider the difference between fresh and dried herbs. To clarify what they mean, some breweries label their beer “wet hop”—an unambiguous term. But there should be no confusion—fresh basil is not served dried, and fresh-hop ale should only ever be made with freshly picked, undried hops.
AN EVER-GROWING NUMBER of breweries make fresh-hop ales—Sierra Nevada, Great Divide, BridgePort, and Deschutes are some of the more established brands. I would caution against buying bottled fresh-hop ales, though. When fresh-hop ales are very fresh—less than a month old is critical; two weeks or younger is ideal—they retain their essential liveliness. But they are the most evanescent of beer styles, and after a few weeks they tend to become dull and lifeless. I’ve never encountered a bottle of fresh-hop ale that did real justice to the hops. On one occasion I sampled a draft pour of fresh-hop ale at a brewery, but when I tried the bottled version of the same beer—no more than a week in the bottle—at home later that day, I found it lifeless. The draft was miles better. The best way to sample these beers is fresh from the brewery, ideally at their source in the Pacific Northwest, which becomes a fresh-hop bacchanal every October. There are websites that track the pub locations of fresh-hop ales as they become available in Seattle and Portland, and Yakima and Hood River have annual festivals celebrating these rare seasonals. Like the turning fall leaves of New England, they have their moment for just two or three weeks before they fade away into the winter darkness. ■