Fresh Hop Beer? Wet Hop Beer? What is it?

On Monday we got to brew the first of our three fresh hop beers. Some people refer to these at Wet Hop Beers. But what really does that mean? A Fresh/Wet hop beer is a beer that you make using hops that were pulled from the field within 24 hours of brewing the beer. Most hops are dried, concentrating the lupulin and alpha acids that provide the bitterness, flavor and aroma to the beers that hopheads have come to love.  These hops are “wet” because their water content is 80-90% of the total weight. In dried hops, you only have about 10-20% water weight.  This type of hop addition adds a different flavor and aroma and you have to use  A LOT more (5-7X more) but there is no doubt that you have the freshest of the fresh with little to no oxidation problems that some stored hops can have.

Now that I have moved to the great state of Oregon, I have the opportunity to craft these fresh hop beers and more importantly, I can run up to the hop field and experience it myself. Several brewers these days are doing what we are doing, but have to overnight hops to their breweries. We grabbed the hops and 2 hours and 55 minutes later, they were in the brew! (but who’s counting!)

Here’s how the day played out:

We had planned to brew it on a Tuesday. When you brew like this you are at the whim of not only the hop farmer, but mother nature as well.  When the hops are ready, that’s when you brew.  We had planned to go north of Salem to pick them up on Tuesday. When I called at 10AM Monday to confirm, he said I had to come right now or miss out on the Cascades we wanted! Yikes.  We were immediately motivated and Joe jumped on the mill and began brewing the wort. I grabbed a check and the box truck and sprinted up to Salem to meet the farmer.  Doug Weathers and his family have been growing hops in the Willamette Valley for years and he had quite an operation.

The hops start out in the feild, growing all summer on tall climbing vines.

Here, the trucks await unloading in the shed. They use round the clock teams of seasonal workers to bring in the crop and process them in the small window of time that hops are available:

Then the trucks are unloaded by large hooks that pull individual vines out of the trucks and across the ceiling into the picker.

I didn’t get good pictures of the next process. Once the hop cones are pulled off the vines and the vines discarded, they are conveyed to a drying room. They get laid on a porous floor where heated air is blown up underneath them.  This evaporates the water and then they are known as whole leaf dried hops.  Our hops for these beers are pulled prior to drying.  My hops were pulled, bagged and thrown on my truck, but the rest of the hops continue on to the dryer and then to baling.

Below is some pix of the baler as they get pressed into blocks and a plastic bag is sewn around them. They are stacked and shipped to cold storage.

Some hops are used from these bales. Deschutes is an example of this. Some claim it makes better beer.  Most brewers use pellets. These hops would go into a pelletizer where they are crushed up and pressed into little rabbit food shaped nuggets.  This helps with storage issues as hops are easily oxidized leading to a cheesy flavor and aroma.  Also, it makes it easier for most brew systems to handle and process.

But back to the brewing of a wet hop beer.  I jumped back in the truck with the hops after chatting with Full Sail’s John Harris. He was there leading a group on a tour (Pretty swank charter bus by the way John!). I cruised down I-5 trying to keep the needle beneath the limit, but it was fun trying to time my trip with Joe needing the hops in the kettle. And carrying precious cargo always makes you feel a little more important.

When I arrived, the boil was just starting and we put the kettle hops into large mesh bags as to not clog things up.

The bags worked great in containing the hops and made cleanup a breeze.  Also the bags seemed to get well saturated.

Next it was time to set up the hopback.  Since wet hops have a high water content and a much lower bittering potential, these hops are mainly added for a fresh hop flavor and aroma so a lot of wet hops need to be added at the end of boil to maximize aroma.  Since we don’t have a hopback for this purpose, we had to use our mash tun as a place to steep the hop cones-just like tea.  25 pounds went into the kettle bags so we had 55 pounds for the mash tun. In they went and the hot wort came in through the bottom.

After a little steep here, it was off to the fermenter and the yeast pitch.  The first of three fresh hop beers is a black ipa style of beer. We wanted to do something a little different than the standard and this was certainly it.  Some are starting to refer beers like this as Cascadian Dark ales. Since we used 100% of the fresh hops were cascades, it seems appropriate. We may add a clever name to this beer before it comes out.

The other two beers we will be brewing, Saturday and next week are a Red made with Nugget hops and and an orange colored beer in the oktoberfest tradition that uses Chinook hops.  Both of these last two beers will use fresh hops from local farmers here in Eugene. The Chinooks are certified organic and the nugget were grown organically but are not fully certified. Look for the Black to be ready around 9/20 and the other two before 10/1. Three fresh hop “tastevals” will be held around Oregon. Oct 3 in Hood River, Oct 10 in Portland, and Oct 17 in Eugene. Stay tuned for details.  I hope you’ll be able to come out and try our fall seasonal beers. Call them fresh hop beers or call them wet hop beers. We don’t really care, as long as you enjoy them.

Cheers!