A confession, dear reader: Though I’ve explored the beer world pen-in-hand for more than a decade—and though I nurture an unslakable ardor for the bitter, pungent brews brimming with the acids, terpenes, and thiols of humulus lupulus—I have yet to witness the sacrosanct labor that affords brewers these most prized materials.
By all accounts, the hop harvest is a bustling and hurried endeavor, where the intensity of the farmers’ efforts to clear the bines of their plump green treasures is matched only by the intensity of their aroma (uh, the hops’ aroma, not the farmers’).
Everyone who tells me about the harvest—whether it’s the Old World hopyards of Czechia, the far-off isles of the Southern Hemisphere, or the tidy rows of the Yakima Valley—mentions the smell. Thick, heavy, and penetrating, the green, resinous scent blows off the trestles and billows from the kilns as the growers pick, clean, and dry the bounty.
In my mind’s eye—or nose, rather—the odor is inescapable and kaleidoscopic, shifting from pine to citrus to the dank musk that hopheads love so much. I imagine it as palpable, nearly stinging the eyes and rousing a desperate thirst in the throat.
Oh, how I’d long to sink into the haze of volatile organic compounds.
One day I’ll make that pilgrimage to Washington or Oregon or Idaho to smell the smells for myself. Thankfully, however, those of us who haven’t ticked that box have ways to vicariously experience the harvest—from far away and year-round.
For not only does the hop harvest provide another year’s supply of a precious commodity. It also provides bold brewers an opportunity to capture the time-and-place of the harvest in liquid form. And while they’ll always be a celebration of the season, fresh-hopped beers themselves are less and less confined to a few parts of the world or a few weeks on the calendar.
The Mystique
Fresh-hopped beers exist on the boundaries of quantitative methods and sensory experience, and it’s challenging to talk about them without getting a little spooky. Even pragmatic brewers will casually drop words like “ethereal” and “transportive” when describing what makes them special. So, please excuse the effusive and florid language on my part—expressing the nuance that differentiates these elixirs from workaday IPA requires a heavy hand.
As one of craft beer’s biggest “if you know, you know” predilections, the fresh-hopped IPA must be sipped to be understood. Done right, there is arguably no better way to showcase hop flavor and aroma. When picked at their peak—and used before the slow but inevitable entropy of organic decay—hop flowers dazzle. They draw a straight line between agriculture and industry—staking beer in the land.
Yet fresh hops are tricky to work with, inefficient, and—above all—fading by the hour.
“Hops are like wilting petunias,” says Tom Britz, founder and CEO of Glacier Hops Ranch in Whitefish, Montana. A pile of hops, he says, becomes a “brown composting mess” in a matter of days—or less. “You have to dry them or they rot.”
Fresh-hopped beers are not big moneymakers for breweries. The challenges of working with wet hops—unkilned, with high, just-off-the-bine moisture content—constrict a brewery’s already-thin margins and stress production schedules. Thus, it’s another of those labors of love that defines craft. From the growers and suppliers to the makers and the entrepreneurs, those who value the audacity of fresh hops are compelled to evince the magic to more drinkers.
The Fresh-Hops Toolbox
So, how do brewers leverage the distinctive but fleeting impact of fresh hops?
The best tool in the box for acquiring the wet hops is brute force—or rather, sheer speed. Be it Sierra Nevada’s convoys of refrigerated cargo trucks, FlyteCo Brewing’s private flights to Colorado harvest, or cheating the clock with technology and ingenuity—more on that below—modern logistics push the boundaries of how far a brewhouse can be from the hopyard. Of course, the economics are challenging to balance.
The next-best tool stops the clock on the degradation of wet hops. Flash-freezing tech developed for other delicate crops with brief harvest windows, such as blueberries, does a brilliant job of preserving the ephemeral essence of freshness in hops. However, it requires super-chilled distribution channels, and it’s tricky to handle in the brewhouse (at least until some brewer perfects “ice hopping”).
“It’s like Play-Doh when it starts to thaw,” says Sam Tierney, Firestone Walker’s innovation brewer at the Propagator near Venice Beach in L.A. “There’s a narrow window when it’s workable.” (Blaze Ruud, Yakima Chief’s VP of brewing innovations, calls it “the sticky-icky.”)
Straddling the line between flash-frozen hops and hop extracts is Yakima Chief’s trial product known, for now, as YCH 301. An isolated lupulin dust made from flash-frozen, whole-cone wet hops, YCH 301 brings an aroma impact that’s “as close as possible to being in the field,” Ruud says.
The tech is out there, but the marketplace and supply chain still need to catch up before flash-frozen, whole-cone wet hops are widely available.
That brings us to arguably the most accessible way for smaller brewers to capture fresh-hop character—by dispensing with all that pesky, perishable plant matter. Hop extracts are common and well-established in modern breweries. They’re also developing fast, and there are a variety of ways to approach the extraction equation from a different direction.
The Science (and Art) of Extraction
The most-used method for creating hop extract—that is, separating the oils and various aromatic compounds from the cellulose, tannins, and water that comprise most of the hop cone—is supercritical CO2 extraction. It’s efficient, the liquid carbon dioxide makes for a superlative beer-friendly solvent, and there’s no thermal degradation of the hops. However, it really works only with hop pellets. The hop material must have less than about 12 percent moisture content for the extraction to work—and freshly picked wet hops are 75 to 80 percent water.
Normally, hop farms dry the cones to about 10 percent moisture before pelletizing them for increased efficiency. However, the kilns do more than drive off water—they also drive off some aromatic compounds.
“I tour a lot of kilns, and it always smells amazing,” Ruud says. “But what you’re smelling is all the stuff you’re losing.”
One way to try to capture that stuff is steam distillation, a traditional method for extracting “essential oils”—the aromatic compounds such as terpenes and thiols—developed by Arabian and Persian perfume-makers more than a millennium ago. Steam vaporizes the volatile aroma compounds in, say, roses, before the fragrant vapor recondenses into rose water. Then, it’s a matter of separating the essential oils from the cooled water.
Mint is another crop prized for its aromatic compounds. Montana’s Flathead Valley was once home to dozens of farms growing spearmint and peppermint, and they were processing their harvests into pungent oils using on-site steam-distillation rigs. However, the Montana farmers couldn’t compete with cheaper imported mint. By 2014, there were only one or two mint farms left.
At Glacier Hops in Whitefish, Britz saw an opportunity in those dormant distillers, and he began to work on an extract made from his wet hops. Branded as Hopzoil, this extract is meant to capture the farm-fresh fragrance of the hopyard at harvest.
“Steam distillation is a closed loop,” Britz says. “We capture everything, and the flavors are very complex and round.”
It takes as many as 1,000 pounds (about 450 kilos) of wet hops to produce just one liter of extract—but Hopzoil is potent stuff. Glacier recommends starting with just 5 milliliters per barrel to replace half a dry-hop charge. (Hopzoil is only for the cold side.) A much lower rate—just one milliliter per barrel—is good for adding a “top note” to lagers. Britz says that dosage rates can bring out different sensory qualities: “Brewers can dial in the dose to match their exact vision.”
Another method for making cold-side additions is the solventless extraction process developed by New River Distilling in Boone, North Carolina. It’s the tech behind the Hop Kief products from New Zealand’s Freestyle Hops, and the plan is to apply it to fresh hops in the near future.
New River founder Daniel Meehan started working with a homemade steam-distillation setup, but he soon decided that the downsides—thermal exposure to the hops and the looming threat of catastrophic lab accidents—outweighed the benefits. After a few years of R&D, he landed on a solventless extraction method that captures the full spectrum of aromatic compounds while leaving bittering acids and plant material behind.
Meehan is vague in describing how their solventless extractor works—it is, of course, proprietary—but the idea is to manipulate temperatures and pressures while agitating the biomass in a certain way, to coax volatile compounds in the hops to vaporize. The terpene vapors then condense into a sticky fluid, which is blended with ethanol to improve its stability and usability. Brewers can then add this extract to beer after fermentation, to boost hop character.
New River started by extracting hop pellets provided by clients—offering flexibility to breweries that may have over-contracted for hops or that need more space in a cooler. Today, its biggest client is Freestyle Hops in Nelson, New Zealand.
“We’re extracting hundreds of kilos of New Zealand hop pellets every day, Monday through Friday,” Meehan says. Yet the logistics of shipping all that Mosaic, Riwaka, and Nelson Sauvin from the Southern Hemisphere to Long Beach, California, then using refrigerated trucks to move the hops to North Carolina, is absurdly arduous. That’s why New River and Freestyle are partnering to build a solventless extractor on Freestyle’s New Zealand farm in 2024.
“It’s hard to get wet hops in North Carolina,” New River co-owner Kiever Hunter says, “and it’s tough to grow aroma hops here.”
“You get out what you put in, and we’ve definitely made some bad extract with locally grown wet hops,” Meehan says. There just isn’t enough material available to dial in the variables for wet hops. So, the team is excited to perfect their methodology on the other side of the world.
Clockwise from top left: Seven-week-old Mosaic hops from a RipeLocker storage chamber; fresh hops awaiting a flight back to Denver with FlyteCo; Glacier Ranch Hopzoil in a beaker. Photos: Jamie Bogner
The VIP (Very Important Produce) Treatment
Besides freezing wet hops, there are other ways to handle the delicate cones. The trick is to treat the hop cones like fresh flowers.
As with flash-freezing tunnels, engineers designed RipeLocker’s tech to help get blueberries and other fragile produce to market. Instead of stopping the clock on rot, RipeLocker slows down time.
The RipeLockers themselves are hermetically sealed, pallet-sized pressure vessels that hold fresh crops in a controlled, low-pressure environment designed to retard decay. The tech is popular with flower farmers, but growers of hops—which are flowers, after all—are taking note.
Growers can seal hops picked at their peak intensity in the RipeLockers, pump the oxygen out of the container, and walk away. The containers regulate humidity while balancing oxygen and carbon dioxide to prevent oxidation, locking in freshness. Parameters are specific to each crop, monitored by on-board sensors that link back to RipeLocker’s techs, who manage the state of stasis.
Selynn Vong, RipeLocker’s marketing director, likens the process to the cryo-sleep that Ellen Ripley endures between the Alien and Aliens films. “When the locker is popped open, the hops are still at their best,” Vong says—even after 60 days.
Extending the viability of wet hops from a day or two to a month or more is a big deal, and not only for shipping considerations. Sure, brewers a few days’ drive away from Yakima can order a RipeLocker full of wet hops and slow-freight them to North Carolina, southern Florida, or New England. However, even brewers closer to the hopyards, and well versed in the production rigors of working with wet hops, are excited by the new possibilities.
“We make a lot of fresh-hop beer, maybe 10 or 12 every year,” says Max Shafer, brewmaster at Roadhouse Brewing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Roadhouse has long leveraged its proximity to the hop fields of Idaho and Washington, but Shafer calls the RipeLocker “amazing tech” that’s changed how they approach designing fresh-hopped beers.
“What if you wanted to make a beer dry-hopped with wet Mosaic and wet Idaho 7?” he says. “That used to be impossible, but we can make that beer now.” He explains that Idaho 7 typically hits peak ripeness three or four weeks after Mosaic. The RipeLocker nullifies that difference.
RipeLocker’s controlled storage provides flexibility to brewers, not only in recipe design but also on the brewing schedule. No need to interrupt production for the arrival of time-sensitive wet hops. “It extends the working time,” Shafer says, “and makes my life much easier.”
Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
There’s an undeniable romance around fresh hops, and why shouldn’t there be? It’s impossible to overstate the impact of freshness in beer. Yet it’s no simple thing to harness the bewitching splendor of beer’s signature ingredient picked at its peak. Farmers and brewers are racing the clock—racing against nature itself—and it takes considerable passion and dedication to bring the fresh-hopped beers to market.
Fresh hops further premiumize an already-luxe product—but in a hop-saturated market, intensity of flavor is a valuable distinction. Extracts made with wet hops add to the arsenal available, and wet cones are more attainable farther from the fields. At a time when beer culture seems to languish in a hazy doldrum, a fresh take on IPA’s evolving flavors may be just what we need.
And it will be harvest time again soon, with more reasons than ever to get excited.