Wet hop season 2017--the most wonderful time of the year!

Hoping 2 get the Fieldwork brews on Friday.

To date for me the Breakside Simcoe Fresh Hop and Berryessa Wet Hop IPA were damn tasty. Knee Deep Otter Hops was good but not great.

 

Fresh hop season is almost over which is a bummer.

 

Fresh hops are hops used promptly after they've been harvested and dried so that season is just beginning not almost over.

 

I haven't had a wet hop beer for about 20 years now, must see if I can find some. The ones I have had were brewed by hop growers to showcase their product and were on a tiny scale.Their boast was that the hops were fresh, by which they meant used within a few hours of picking.They called them "green" hops.

 

So do you have to worry about any contaminants using fresh hops in your primary fermenter?

 

Literally the only company that uses the term like that is Sierra Nevada. Fresh = Wet, but you wouldn't call dried basil "fresh" basil.

Regardless, have something like 30~ fresh hopped beers this season, sad to see it go. But going to the Hood River Fresh Hop festival on Saturday, can't wait. Still have a few that I'm trying to find in the next week or so if they're not there. Fremont's fresh hops are always good and FH Pallet Jack is always a gem but haven't gotten my hands on them yet.

Usuals were all fairly good, like Breaksides usual home runs, Gigantic not only had a pretty good one had a great Star Wars themed label for Sodbusted V: The Simcoe Strikes Back, Great Notion had a good fresh hop version of their main IPA, Lompoc had a good one... Overall I feel this was a pretty good fresh hop season in terms of quality.

 

Correction, the only company you know of.

BTW, Hop grower organizations also distinguish between wet hops and fresh hops.

We are not all in the PNW.

 

Fat Head's Hopstalker just came out yesterday and it is magnificent. I am also looking forward to Columbus Brewing Company's Yakima, they have mosaic hops this year for wet hopping.

 

I've only had a handful of wet hopped beers over the years. Generally cans that traveled some distance, so probably not the best representation of this genre.

Can someone explain to me what they're getting in terms of hop aroma or intensity or greenness or whatever that you don't get from a regular hopped version? I get that the ingredients are fresher, but how does that translate in terms of aroma or taste?

I can very much detect differences between dry hopping and not dry hopping; hops added at different points in the brewing process; hop varieties; etc. Don't have enough experience to say how wet hopping affects a beer.

 

I have trouble describing the difference, but this link contains a few quotes that may be helpful from folks I think we can consider to be expert tasters.

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/how-to-brew/hell-wet-hopping-beer/

 

Born Yesterday may be the best bargain in craft beer.

 

Deschutes Hop Trip and Chasin' Freshies are always the big ones I look forward to every year.

Agreed, not to mention High Westified. Lagunitas is (IMO) the best "bang for your buck" brewery on the national level.

 

Had one. Troegs Hop Knife. Was good but on the lookout for others.

 

Fresh hops are good. Wet hops . . . umm . . . not so much. Marketing ploy, more than anything, IMO.

 

I suspect there is no easy/simple/definitive answer here.

A couple of years ago a local beer bar had a wet hopped beer event where he had over a dozen different wet hopped beers (most were from the West Coast). I did not try all 12 but of the 4-5 that I ordered they all tasted different. There was no specific flavor/aroma profile that was common among those beers. I suspect this is much due to the varying hop varieties used in those beers.

I homebrew a wet hopped beer every year. Just a few weeks ago I brewed my fourth batch. I only have one hop plant in my backyard so I use the same variety but each year it seems to have a varying flavor/aroma profile from year to year. Because of the vagaries of the growing season (how much rain, etc.)?

Maybe a discussion of what distinguishes a wet hop from a dry hop provides some insight here?

The flavor/aroma compounds of a hop are typically described under the umbrella term of essential oils. From an organic chemistry perspective these essential oils can be classified as hydrocarbons (terpenes), oxygenated compounds, and thiols (e.g., sulfur compounds like 4MMP).

During the hop drying process certain chemical reactions occur. For example some of the essential oils are lost (volatized). Also some of the oils are oxygenated during drying. Needless to say but these chemical changes are going to result in varying flavors/aroma profiles due to the losses and the changes (oxidation).

The best that I can state here is that producing a beer from the same hop crop where in one case you used the hops wet (freshly picked) vs. using the hops after the drying process you should expect notable differences.

As to the term “green”, I personally have a very difficult time with this concept. To me “green” is a color with not specific aroma/flavor profile associated with it. I have read posts from folks that seem to indicate that green = grassy. I personally have never picked up the quality of grassy in any of the commercial wet hopped beers I have tasted. Also, my homebrewed wet hopped beers has not aspects of grassy for my palate.

Cheers!

 

Although it would certainly be interesting to have a side-by-side tasting with beers where the only difference is that one is hopped normally and the other uses undried/wet hops, I don't think the differences would be significant or, indeed, positively skewed for the wet-hopped version.

Outside of some very minimal oil oxidation and volatilization that is inherent to drying hops, the only difference is that you must add much more hops by weight if the hops are not dried to achieve the same end and that leads to having more vegetal matter in one's kettle, which isn't the best process.

 

wondering how much "juicier" a fresh/wet hopped citra or mosaic NE IPA could get? Is there such a thing?

 

I collected data on 300+ fresh hop beers last year from around the country (and a handful in Canada), and contacted many more breweries. Do you know how many breweries I contacted refer to beers with freshly-kilned hops as "fresh hop" beers, including Sierra Nevada? 3. It's not comprehensive, but may be the largest sample size anyone has on the topic. Granted, Sierra Nevada is a major force in the US beer scene, but I'd argue so are Deschutes and Lagunitas, not to mention the hundreds of smaller breweries in the PNW who make these beers.

Considering that the PNW has the vast majority of both hop production and beers made with undried hops, maybe y'all could go along with our definition instead of us going along with SN's definition?

Anyone who wants to argue that SN's definition should be used, can you tell me when those "fresh hops" are no longer fresh? What if Celebration was brewed a week later? A month? When are they no longer distinct from kilned hops used year-round?

 

No. Fresh hops are, literally that, fresh. In the brew kettle hours after coming off the bine. If they're dried, they cannot, by definition, be fresh.