Stan Hieronymus shares the three keys to brewing successfully with wet hops and the four “rules of hops” that you should understand.
Trevor Holmes, head brewer at Wadworth Brewery in the south of England, surely was not the first to add freshly picked hops to a batch of beer—that likely happened hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years before Holmes made the first batch of Malt ‘n’ Hops in 1992. However, his beer begat the first Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale in 1996, which in turn begat hundreds of beers variously described as wet hopped or fresh hopped.
The two aren’t necessarily the same. Brewers sometimes describe hops right out of a drying kiln as fresh, so “fresh-hops” beers may be brewed with either dried hops or unkilned hops. Wet hops are never kilned. The difference matters in the brewing kettle just as much as in the glass.