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

I just tapped a wet hop beer I brewed a couple of weeks ago. It was brewed with a very small bittering charge of pelletized nugget hops to about 25 ibu at 60 min, the rest of the hop additions were about 1 lb of cascade picked 6 hours previous, and then a 170 degree whirlpool addition of another lb of the fresh cascade.

This beer is like nothing else I have ever tasted. The aroma is nothing to write home about (it also wasn’t dry hopped) but the main body of the sip has this unbelievable floral character, it’s so strong it’s almost too much. It’s like perfume, almost synthetic tasting, like potpourri. I honestly have never had anything remotely close to something like this with dried hops.

My guess is that there are very high levels of the floral-like essential oils
like gerinol ect, so from this experience i lean heavily on the side of wet hops have a very distinct character.

 

You got a good answer already but I thought I'd add that a few years back, at the Portland fresh hop fest, a brewer told a group of us that using fresh hops early for bittering was a colossal waste of product for what you got out of it. I got the impression he was speaking for more than just himself.

 

I think your comparison to the lambic / gueuze distinction here is a good one. But I did want to point out though (and maybe you know this already) that the argument is semantic. The term "wet hop" is simply not used here in the PNW for anything - at least not in the 12 years I've been here (like another poster I've only ever seen it on a Sierra Nevada bottle). I have no argument for or against anyone's definition of "wet" or "fresh" but my guess is most of the beers in the PNW calling themselves fresh hop are what other regions call wet hop. These beers are hitting tap lines weeks after harvest and unlike
SN you don't see anyone claiming fresh hop beers after that month long window. I remember Deschutes hop trip describing the time between harvest and kettle as the duration of the truck ride between the two, and that was called a fresh hop beer.

Anyways, I spent a lot of times studying linguistics in college so I probably find this more interesting than anyone else does.

And I'm 3 fresh hop beers in.

 

Yeah, but marketing isn’t always reality...Fresh Hop beer is just that, moist, picked from the bine and in the brew kettle within 24 hours...there is no substitute...our release, the largest in craft beer, is a labor of respect for our farmer partners, the Carpenter, Gamache, Perrault and Smith families to celebrate the harvest in this truly PNW way, Because Fresh Hops Matter!

 

Care to share who you work for?

Is that the marketing slogan that you guys use?

 

Fremont.

 

Not to terribly experienced with wet hopped beers, but I did have one this past weekend that I loved - Boulevard's Wet-Hopped Nobel Prize.

 

Cool. Never had their beers, but I've heard good things.

 

Fremont's slogan is "Because Beer Matters" but it gets riffed on a lot in the NW forum.

 

That wasn't really a serious question, but thanks for the answer anyway.

 

I think the reason the “fresh hop” term is being debated is in large part because of Sierra Nevada sharing their definition of what fresh hops are. Personally, I agree with their assessment. There is a significant enough difference from wet hops to freshly kilned whole hops to whole hops that sat baled before pelletizing that their distinction between wet hops and fresh hops makes a lot of sense.

 

1) Do hops actually get baled before pelletizing? That seems an unnecessary use of labor and materials.
2) Since SN uses whole cone hops year-round, when do SN's "fresh hops" stop being "fresh"? Under SN's use of the term, what time limit or other factor distinguishes "fresh hops" from regular hops?

Not trying to be a jerk or goad you specifically, these are aspects I truly don't understand about SN's perspective and hop processing.

 

Yes they get baled and when they are pelletized, bales from multiple lots are put into a bale breaker and blended together in the pelletizer. I don’t know how you would get whole hops into a pelletizer without baling. Baling is a very quick process

I think Sierra Nevada defines fresh hops as being within a week of harvest. If they were to go directly to the kiln, that would give about 6 days after kilning to be considered fresh.

 

To add, kilning and pelletizing are the bottlenecks of most operations. After kilning, it can be a while before the pelletizer is free, so baling also helps to store them in addition to being useful for blending and feeding the pelletizer. Hop farm production schedules are insane during these months.

 

Thanks for that. All my first-hand experience is on a small hop farm where the hops go from the oast straight into a hopper/pelletizer.

 

According to @Brewtull it can be done both ways:

“Once hops are picked from the fields they either get baled or they go straight to the pelletizer. The pelletizer chops up all of the matter and squeezes the byproduct through a mold that gives you the pellets. Baled hops can still be processed into pellets, but some growers bale them first then run everything all at once. Depending on the size of the farm, they will most likely process and sell their hops through a whole seller like Hop Union, Hass, or Yakima Chief. Large farms have the ability to sell straight to breweries and cut out the middle man.”

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/pelletizing-home-grown-hops.114403/

In the Stan Hieronymus Hops book he discusses Roy Farms: “Roy Farms produces its own pellets, milling cones right after they are dried.”

I have never been to a hop farm or a hop processing company but I would think that the timeframe from the hops being dried to then being processed into pellets would not be long; a few days or weeks?

Cheers!

 

Interesting. The two companies I’ve toured both baled after kilning and before pelletizing. As far as time frame, I don’t know how they determine the schedule, but I didn’t expect my Amarillo (harvested in mid-September) to be ready until November or maybe even December. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was pelletized last week. Idaho 7 is a later harvest and I expect that my lots for it will be harvested in a week or two, then pelletized in December.

 

Weedy, 6 days is not consistent with the production schedule for Sierra Nevada Celebration. Below is something that Bill Manley (@sierranevadabill) posted on this topic:

“Celebration is one of those beers that we start brewing on X day, and continue brewing for weeks (months, really) until we make enough to fulfill our commitments.”

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/2014-celebration-ale.221404/page-7#post-2990211

Given the fact that Celebration Ale is brewed via multiple batches over months it would seem that for Sierra Nevada a hops is considered “Fresh Hops” if they are less than a few months old.

Cheers!

 

Weird... I got that from their blog from 2015: “Fresh hops are the freshest driedhops on the market and usually hit the kettle within a week of harvest.”

http://www.sierranevada.com/blog/hops/one-hop-harvest-three-unique-beers

 

And that is indeed an option as was mentioned by Brewtull in the above quote I posted.

So, those hops were pelletized in a matter of weeks, right?

Please report back on when you receive your Idaho 7 hops. If they are pelletized sooner you would receive them sooner, is that correct?

So, as regards to when hop pellets are produced it would seem that this varies:

• Pelletized very quickly on hop farms such as Roy Farms
• Pelletized in a matter of weeks (e.g., the Amarillo hops you will be shortly receiving).
• Maybe longer?

Cheers!