Fresh hop frenzy: How Northwest brewers capture a fleeting flavor

Sharp-eyed observers on Snoqualmie Pass might have witnessed a strange convoy in late August and September: Vans and trucks from Washington’s breweries, laden with green and pungent cargoes, racing to their brew kettles as rapidly as possible. This annual occurrence is the first, urgent step in the fresh hop beer season, one of the Northwest’s most aromatic harvest-time traditions. It doesn’t last long — it’s over by the holidays — and as harvest traditions go, it’s practically brand new. The notion of putting green, fresh-picked hops in beer didn’t even occur to anyone until the early 1990s.

That’s when a British brewer looked at his region’s hop fields and asked himself what would happen if he picked a pile of hops and dumped them in his kettle without the standard drying and processing steps first. The answer was: a new kind of ale, with bright, fresh – yet ephemeral — vegetal notes. Within a few years, legendary Yakima brewer Bert Grant followed suit and before long the Northwest was overrun not only with fresh hop ales, but fresh hop festivals and fresh hop fanatics. Comparisons to France’s young-wine Beaujolais phenomenon would follow, even if the comparison was not fully apt. The hops are bright and new, but the resulting beer is allowed to fully mature, which is why the fresh hop beers don’t hit the taprooms and grocery shelves until weeks after harvest, usually in mid-to-late September and October.

Hops are a mainstay of any beer, supplying bitterness, flavor and aroma. Yet in every other kind of beer, the hops have first been dried in a kiln, usually right in the hop yards. Hops are light, delicate cones that must be dehydrated right away or they will deteriorate and lose their character. Those early fresh-hop pioneers discovered that using fresh green cones, in the crucial hours before they started to go bad, gave their beer new kinds of flavors. These came partly from the green vegetable matter and partly because the lupulin — the flavorful yellow powder inside the cone — was unsullied by drying.

Why fresh hop beer is a Northwest specialty

The Northwest is the undisputed center of America’s fresh-hop scene. A map and a stopwatch will show you why. About 90% of the nation’s hops are grown in Washington and Oregon. The Yakima Valley alone supplies 77% of the hops in the U.S. Because fresh hops deteriorate so quickly, it is vital to get them into beer vats right away. Even a one-day delay is too long. Even six hours is usually considered too long. Jeff Alworth in The Beer Bible tells the story of a hops truck driver in fresh hop season who made the mistake stopping to get coffee on the way home. When he finally rolled in, the waiting brewers gave him the stink eye. Every minute counts.

Breweries within quick striking distance of the hop fields have a huge advantage, which explains why breweries in and around Seattle, Portland, Spokane and Yakima have the best fresh-hop reputations. These reputations were hard-won, because brewers quickly discovered that making a truly great fresh hop beer was not easy. For one thing, the aroma and flavor of a fresh hop variety does not strictly correlate to the flavors from the same dried hop. Some mainstay hop varieties proved to be completely unsuited to the task. A few of the usual hop varieties gave off what Alworth called “gassy, grassy, or even compost-like vegetal flavors.”

Ugh. Not good. It took years of trial and error for brewers to figure out the best fresh-hop varieties. By around 2015, brewers had settled on Cascade, Centennial, Crystal, Amarillo and Simcoe as among the hops best suited for a fresh-hop brew, with new names such as Citra and Mosaic soon added to the list. They all produce different flavors and aromas, which adds to the allure. Serious beer lovers enjoy comparing — and debating — the strengths and drawbacks of different fresh hop varieties.

Where to find fresh hop beer

Where is the best place to hold that debate? Perhaps at one of the region’s fresh-hop ale festivals, where you can sample the largest variety. The two biggest festivals are Yakima’s Fresh Hop Ale Festival and Hood River’s Hops Fest, both in early October. A number of brewpubs and taprooms also offer their own fresh-hop events.

Yet you can also do some fine sampling right at home. A number of Northwest breweries rush out their best fresh hop beers in cans, including Fremont, Bale Breaker, Kulshan, Icicle, Fort George, Reuben’s, Stoup, Matchless and the Crux Fermentation Project, to name just a few. Fremont and Crux deserve special mention in that list, because they both offer something unusual. Crux, out of Bend, Oregon, produces a non-alcoholic fresh hop IPA, proving that a fresh-hop ale doesn’t need an alcohol bite.

In Seattle, Fremont has long produced its exceptional organic and salmon-safe beer, Cowiche Canyon Organic Fresh Hop Ale, in a collaboration with pesticide-free, organic hop farms nestled in the Cowiche Canyon near Yakima. Men’s Journal once called it “one of the best beers in America” and every year it has proven to be a top-quality fresh hop ale. In addition, both Crux and Fremont offer several conventional fresh-hop ales — Fremont’s Field to Ferment (F2F) fresh-hop line is consistently excellent every year.

A brewpub, of course, is probably the best place to find a good fresh hop ale. Almost every brewery taphouse throughout Washington and Oregon will have a fresh hop beer or two on tap in the fall. Having a cold one on-tap at the brewery is ideal, since fresh hop beers taste best when they are — no surprise — freshest. Roll into a local brewpub in mid-September or October and scan the tap-list for anything that says fresh hop, or “wet hop,” a term which means the same thing.

If you do go the pub-crawl route, be prepared for it to be hit-and-miss. Not every brewer knows how to handle the odd nuances that come with fresh hops. Some brewers may not be getting their fresh hops delivered quite promptly enough — or they must settle for getting hop varieties that other breweries didn’t want.

Homebrewing fresh hop beer: A cautionary tale

Several years back, I learned about the perils of making a fresh-hop beer the hard way. One of our local breweries held a Community Hop Day, where backyard hop growers could bring their fresh hop vines (technically, bines) down to the brewery for an afternoon of hop-picking. The brewers would then whisk our buckets of hop cones right into the brewery and brew what they called a Community Hops beer. It sounded like a great idea, but it unwittingly revealed some of the real challenges of brewing a fresh hop beer.

First, not all of the hops were fresh enough. The brewery tried to anticipate this issue by specifying that people bring their whole bines — not already picked cones — to the brewery’s outdoor courtyard, where people would gather to separate the cones from the bines. Yet there was still no way to tell how long ago the bines themselves had been harvested. Some of them arrived in a decidedly funky (or skunky) state. Even more crucially, there was no way to control which hop varieties they were getting. Some people arrived with hops which had a known pedigree, but plenty of other people had hops that they had inherited on their fences, fields, and yards. They had no idea what they were. The subsequent Community Fresh Hop beer duly arrived on the tap list a few weeks later and it was — not surprisingly — funky and skunky.

Yet that beer was still miles above a beer that I once made, using Centennial hops that I had grown in my own backyard. My friend Rick and I had come up with the hare-brained idea of making what we called Backyard Beer: a beer made entirely from ingredients grown in my own urban backyard.

The impetus for this ill-begotten notion was this: My Centennial hops were so pristine and beautiful, why not plant a patch of barley and make the most hyper-local fresh-hop beer possible? It was a disaster. Trying to harvest, thresh, and winnow barley by hand gave me a new appreciation for the travails of the medieval serf. And trying to malt that barley was even harder. Malting involves forcing the barley to sprout under carefully controlled conditions, which proved completely beyond my meager capabilities. Of course, we persevered anyway. We thought we could salvage it by dumping a huge amount of Centennial hops into it, but the only thing worse than a bad backyard beer is a bad fresh-hop backyard beer. We tapped it, tasted it, made faces, and dumped the whole keg in the garden.

The lesson: Making any decent beer is difficult enough, and making a decent fresh-hop beer is even harder. I still have those Centennial hops growing in my backyard, but now we use those aromatic cones only as a bit of garnish, split open and floating in a glass of Fremont, or Crux or Reuben’s fresh-hop ale. It gives the glass a little extra dose of ultra-fresh lupulin powder. These days, we are content to let the fresh-hop professionals do the truly hard work.

Jim Kershner is a Spokane-based author, historian and journalist and staff historian at HistoryLink.