TGIF: Fresh hop beers
Last week The Bistro in Hayward, Calif., hosted a “wet hop” festival and Nov. 5 Tornado in San Francisco will host another. These festivals reflect the fact that more breweries are producing wet (or fresh) hop beers.
The premise is simple. Rather than including hops that have been dried - and perhaps dried and pelletized - brewers use hops picked straight from the vine.
This presents logistical challenges. First, getting the hops fresh from where they are harvested, since most American hops are grown in the Northwest.
(Interestingly, Anheuser-Busch brewers brought a fresh hop ale to the Great American Beer Festival earlier this month. It was brewed with Saaz hops - a treat - from the company’s hop farms in Idaho, and served from bottles with a simple black and white printed label that read “Hometest Fresh Hop Ale.” Don’t look for that one in your local A&P any time soon.)
Second, because wet hops are wet they contain a lot of moisture that would be removed during the drying (kilning) process. The bottom line is that it takes a lot more wet hops to deliver the same amount of bitterness as dry-kilned whole flower hops or pellets. For instance, Great Divide Brewing in Colorado uses between four and five times the hop volume in its Fresh Hop Ale compared to pelletized hops.
Alas, not only are fresh hop beers still uncommon, many are available only on draft. Two bottled versions - Hop Trip from Deschutes Brewery in Oregon and Great Divide’s Fresh Hop Pale - that recently shipped should reach a wider audience. Great Divide’s beer is a little stronger, at 6.1% abv vs. 5.5% for Hop Trip and far more bitter at 55 IBU vs. 35 IBU, but they share several similarities.
You can smell the hops from several feet away when a glass is poured, and the hop flavor is stronger still when you take that first sip. The disconnect for those of us who get in the habit of drinking India Pale Ales is that the hop rush is not followed up with as the strong malt flavors (sweetness, caramel, alcohol) and hop bitterness as an IPA. This perception is relative - 99% of the world’s population would likely call these beers very bitter - but for those who’ve grown to appreciate the nuances in hops these beers are, at a minimum, educational.
To produce Hop Trip, Deschutes added about 5.5 pounds of fresh Crystal hops from Doug Weathers’ farm outside of Salem to dry-kilned whole flower hops also in the brewing kettle.
Hopunion boxed up three varieties of wet hops for Great Divide, shipping them to Denver via second-day freight. The morning of the scheduled hop delivery, Great Divide’s brewers began making Fresh Hop Pale Ale and were ready to hop the beer just as the fresh hops were delivered.
“That beer is a lot of work!” said Great Divide founder Brian Dunn without making it sound like a complaint.
