At 5 p.m. today, Chuck’s Hop Shop in the Central District will tap a keg of Chainline Brewing’s Fresh Hopped Tune Up IPA and from that moment onward Seattle will be the world’s greatest place to drink hoppy beer.
Fresh hop season is upon us.
Chuck’s tapping is only the beginning of this season of hop, over the course of the next three weeks fresh hop beers will slowly fill tap lines until it will be nearly impossible to find a respectable bar without at least one fresh hop on tap. This is a remarkable occurrence—nowhere else outside of the Pacific Northwest makes fresh hop beers in anywhere close to the quantity or quality that we do.
These beers are related to Seattle's standard hoppy pale ales and IPAs but, because they are made with wet, fresh hops they have their own unique qualities. They tend to be less bitter and have less of a bite and have more of a fresh, herbal, and dank flavor. They often have unusual flavors that surprise even the brewers that made them.
These surprises happen because the brewers are doing something entirely unusual and odd when they make a fresh hop beer. Hops, which give beer much of its flavor and act as a preservative, are always heated and cured in large kilns after they are harvested. Always, that is, until fresh hop season. For a fresh hop beer, the hops are harvested and then brought directly to a brewery and immediately thrown in a boiling vat of sweet wort, where they flavor the beer without ever going through that drying process.
By not going through that drying process the hops are still full of water and lack any shelf stable properties. A wet hop will start to rot within just hours of being picked, hence the need for a brewer to use it immediately, and its flavors lack the stability of their dried hop counterparts. That means a fresh hop beer is constantly changing, changing so fast that every hour after its keg has been tapped creates essentially a new beer.
Colin Lenfesty, a brewer at Holy Mountain Brewing, said these fresh hop beers are good for only a short window.
“These are the ultimate seasonal beers that can only be made once a year and have a very small window before their special characters fade," Lenfesty said in an email.
The only reason we can make these special beers is because the second largest hop-growing region in the world is three hours east of Seattle. Without our proximity to Yakima valley, and its nearly $400-million a year hop industry, our brewers would have a much harder time playing around with unkilned hops. You can find fresh hop beers all around the country, but brewers on the other side of the country have to ship hops overnight from the Northwest to their breweries, meaning their bars only have one or two fresh hops a season. Seattleites have access to hundreds.
Today’s tapping is just the beginning of this season and as we move further into the hop harvest more and more fresh hop beers will show up on tap. Expect to see fresh hop beers everywhere by late September.
Centennial hops are usually the first varietal harvested by farmers every year so, naturally, many of the first fresh hop beers are made with this classic hop. Fremont Brewing plans to release their Field to Ferment: Centennial fresh hop on Sep. 5 or 6. Cloudburst Brewing plans to release their first fresh hop beer, also made with Centennial hops, the second week of September.
Steve Luke, Cloudburst’s founder and head brewer, said their first fresh hop will be brewed with Centennial Hops and is called One in Eight.
“It's a breast cancer fundraiser beer (1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime) for the Wellness House in Yakima because both the wife of the farmer and my mom have battled/are currently battling with that disease,” Luke said.
Holy Mountain’s Lenfesty told me that they are using some mystery hop, which he declined to name, for their first fresh hop.
“I think you could expect the first one sometime in mid-September using a new hop we're extremely excited about,” Lenfesty said.
I reached out to a number of other breweries to find out when they’ll be releasing their first fresh hop beers, but have yet to hear back. I’ll update this list as I hear from more breweries about when they’ll be releasing their first fresh hop beers.
