Gather around, my fellow hopheads. Time to tell you about my favorite kind of beer—and I say “kind” because it’s not a style. It’s a seasonal delight, exhibiting the agriculture of its ingredients more effectively than nearly any type of beer. And while it can pop up nearly anywhere or anytime these days, it’s ubiquitous during a certain time of year in the Pacific Northwest—where you’ll find the most examples, and the best ones, and a lot of fellow drinkers ready to join you in trying them all.
I’m talking, of course, about fresh-hopped beers.
To experience their ubiquity, you need to be in Oregon or Washington, where an unambitious brewery may make only two or three. Six or eight is common, and some breweries make a dozen or more of them each year. Portland’s StormBreaker, this year, will make 17. Breweries in the Pacific Northwest make a lot of them—and they complain that distributors and retailers won’t buy anything else in the weeks following the harvest.
The reason is self-evident: Fresh-hopped beers are exceptional creations. The character of an unprocessed hop is as different from a conventionally kilned one as fresh basil is from dried. Fresh hops can add a delicate zingy note to a lager or Belgian-style ale, or they can unleash a flavor tsunami in an IPA.
They deserve the frenzy because they’re so vivid and alive—and so fleeting.
Fresh Hops, Explained
The moment they’re plucked, hops are 75 to 80 percent water by weight. Gathered together in a bale or other mass, they would rot almost immediately. So, instead, the farms dry them in kilns with warm, gentle air—a process that reduces their water content down to 8 to 10 percent. At that point they go into bales and, if stored cold, will keep for years.
If a brewery happens to be near a hop field, however, they can intercept those fresh, unkilned hops directly from the fields and rush them back to their kettles, whirlpools, or conditioning tanks. In Oregon, Washington, Idaho—and, increasingly, in other hop-growing areas across the United States and around the world—that’s exactly what they do.
I’d love to go into detail about the chemistry behind fresh hops—sometimes also called “green” or “wet” hops—and what accounts for their distinctive flavors in beer. To my knowledge, though, no one has conducted focused research to analyze and describe what sets those flavors apart. With other botanicals, drying the plant changes its chemical composition. Likewise, kilning hops may drive off some certain volatile aroma compounds that account for the unusual flavors of fresh-hopped beers.
Oregon State University’s Thomas Shellhammer, one of the leading hop researchers in the United States, says he hasn’t been able to subject fresh hops to a rigorous study. Yet he agrees that something’s going on.
“You bring up a great question about what makes green hops smell and taste grassy and ‘green,’” he says. “While I have not studied it personally with our instrumentation at OSU, I believe, fairly confidently, that the green aroma comes from an aldehyde called hexanal.”
Inevitably, perhaps, Shellhammer and other researchers will dig deeper into the chemistry. For now, we can use our noses, our palates, and make educated guesses about why fresh-hopped beers smell and taste different from others. Anyone who’s spent much time sampling them knows, via their own natural instrumentation, that they do indeed have their own character.
Pick a Side: Hot or Cold?
Over the 15 to 20 years that these beers have been around commercially, brewers in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere have developed divergent views on how best to make them.
In brewing, that’s relatively unusual. Best practices tend to spread quickly around the industry—often driven by the processes behind beers that sell well or win awards—and breweries tend to coalesce, sooner or later, around a narrow band of techniques for each style.
Not only does that not happen with fresh-hopped beers, but it actually appears as if different schools of thought are developing. This year, the first three brewers with whom I spoke about it each started by announcing their affiliation:
“Hot-side hops for life!” says Shaun Kalis of Portland’s Ruse Brewing.
“Cold-side fresh hops are the way to go,” says Rob McCoy of Portland’s Great Notion.
“We go all hot side on our fresh hops,” says Steve Luke of Seattle’s Cloudburst.
It’s possible to use fresh hops on both the hot and cold sides, but—because those additions would be days apart—it requires two trips to the fields. More commonly, a brewery chooses where in the process to add whatever they’ve brought back from the farms. Adding them to the whirlpool is one choice, but it means a longer lag time before the beer goes to market. Dry hopping, on the other hand, means they’re in customers’ hands and mouths within a few days.
“We see deeper, resinous, heavy polyphenol flavors on the hot side,” says Ruse’s Kalis, a hot-side partisan. “You get more of that watermelon candy, melon-heavy flavor from the cold side.”
Fellow hot-sider Luke at Cloudburst also favors the “leafy, chewy, chlorophyllic flavor” this method produces. “You need some chew,” he says. “You need a little piece of leaf in your teeth.” (He is being poetic—no leaves make it into a can.)
It does appear to be the case that more plant-like, resinous sensations come from using fresh hops on the hot side, while brighter, fruitier notes come from the cold side. But that points to different philosophies about what fresh-hopped beers should taste and smell like—and that falls to you, as the brewer or the drinker, to decide.
On the nose, that “fresh” aroma is unmistakable when the fresh hops come through. What really defines fresh-hopped beer isn’t the method but the result—and you know it when you smell and taste it.
Fresh Approaches
At Ruse, brewers turn their mash tun into a huge whirlpool, using the rakes to break up the cones. After the boil, the wort comes in around 200°F (93°C). “We do it really slow and use those rakes to help saturate our hops as much as possible,” Kalis says.
Luke at Cloudburst adds conventional pellet hops in the kettle to set the bitterness. “There are so many variables you can’t control,” he says, laughing, “at least it’s going to have 30 IBUs.” For the whirlpool, he lowers the wort temperature to about 195°F (91°C), also using his mash tun “as a giant hopback.”
At Great Notion, McCoy says he likes the cold-side additions because he worries about hot wort stripping the hops’ delicate essence—but Great Notion isn’t known for understated IPAs. To get maximum impact from cold-side additions, he says, “I like to run the hops until it’s almost unpleasant, knowing that by the time it’s canned and served, those flavors will mellow.”
When I sample their fresh-Strata-hopped Van Beer hazy IPA, it serves as an excellent character witness for the approach—full of chlorophyll planty-ness, with the hop aromas dialed up to 11. Those are the conventional approaches, but breweries have experimented with other, stranger practices. Nearly a decade ago, Portland’s Breakside began using liquid nitrogen to freeze their fresh hops. They shatter the frozen cones to expose the lupulin glands and then pack them into a conditioning tank. Some others now use the same approach.
At some point, in various places, brewers have used fresh hops at every portion of the process, starting with the mash. At least one brewery—Single Hill in Yakima—makes their own pellets from fresh hops.
Fresh-hopped beers reward experimentation—they’re emblematic of craft brewing in that way—and it seems like somebody tries something new every year.
The Regional Moment
Breweries started making fresh-hopped beers as early as the 1990s, but they didn’t start gathering momentum as a trend until the mid- to late ’00s.
Some of those beers were sublime, but many—most, if we’re being honest—were noble failures. In the best of the worst cases, the fresh hops just didn’t come through. Others had decent fresh-hop character, but the difficulty in working with that much vegetative mass led to issues with the base beer—too watery or off in other ways. Worse was a telltale “compost” flavor that came from mishandling the hops. Those were actively unpleasant.
I suspect this is why fresh-hopped beers haven’t really taken off to the same degree elsewhere, even in other states where they grow some hops, and even as new tech makes it possible for more brewers to make them. These beers are hard to brew, and breweries can’t perfect them over the course of a year—it’s one and done until next year.
In the Northwest, brewers have learned over the years how to avoid the pitfalls. Luke, for example, adjusts the beer’s gravity to offset the moisture that the hops introduce. He also adjusts his pH down to 4.9 to brighten up the hop flavors, helping to keep them from getting washed out.
Beer is—as my friend, economics professor Patrick Emerson, always tells me—an “experience good.” You have to taste these beers to appreciate them. Summer travel is over by the time these beers hit the market, so most tourists are gone. Every year, I bang the drum about how awesome fresh-hopped beers are, but the interest outside the region in coming to find out seems limited.
We often lament that there’s no regionality left in American craft beer—it’s the same tap list, no matter where you go—but fresh-hopped beers are a delightful exception. Sometimes I wish I could get more people out here to taste them.
Other times, I think maybe we should just keep them to ourselves.
“It’s always a shitshow for a few weeks,” Kalis says. “You’re always happy when it’s over. But then you reflect, and you think that it’s so fucking cool you live in the Pacific Northwest.”
A Final Word on Nomenclature: Fresh or Wet?
Because fresh hops contain so much water, some insist on calling them “wet hops.” In my view, that’s wrong. For one thing, it sounds gross. For another, it’s misleading.
When you handle a fresh hop, it’s not “wet”—it’s like any other plant. You wouldn’t walk into a grocery store looking for “wet basil”—you’d go to the produce section to find it fresh. Furthermore, some breweries have used “fresh” to describe freshly kilned hops, but that’s marketing gloss.
If they’re made with unkilned hops, call ’em fresh.