Wet Hopped IPAs - Fall 2016

Troegs Hop Knife
Founders Harvest
Sixpoint Sensei Harvest

All recommended and available in NJ

 

Also, Columbus Brewing's Yakima will be bottled for the first time

 

I have the same problem with one of my favorite rotation beers dry hopped centennial. Dates have been way off

 

But Sierra Nevada doesn't use pellets for their "Fresh Hop" Celebration Ale (or for any of their regular line-up):

SN claims to be the largest user of whole hops in the world.
(I suppose in part, that's thanks to ABInBev which reformulated Budweiser's recipe to use pellets after the takeover?)

 

So fresh means only that it has just been picked?

Do you really think that every restaurant that serves a food item prepared with "fresh basil" has someone run right out to the restaurant's garden of unpicked herbs to pick the basil for use in that meal and only that meal?

Do you really think that when someone buys "fresh basil" in their local supermarket to use on their home made pizza that the manager sent a stock clerk out to their herb garden to pick that basil just for them?

Dried basil vs basil picked fresh from the garden are indeed two different things, but there is a third option in between, and the term fresh is regularly applied to that option.

 

So if I pick an ear of sweet corn and take it home for cooking is it no longer fresh if I shuck it (pre-process it) before cooking?

 

Clearly it is still fresh. If you shuck it, put it in your fridge for a week, then cook it, it's not. In most cases the hops are stripped from the bines before the brewers get them. That is equivalent of husking your corn before cooking. Plus, you should soak that corn in cold water for a couple hours, husk on, then throw it on an open fire. Tastiest way to eat fresh corn, IMHO.

 

I won't argue the tastiest way to eat the fresh corn since it's been several years since I've had it cooked that way or shucked and cooked in a pot beside the field where it was grown and memories that old can be untrustworthy.

But I started with taking it home, shucking it and cooking it soon there after and you agreed it was fresh. When does it stop being fresh if put into the refrigerator? Immediately? One day? Two days? etc. Doesn't perishability time of the produce make a difference?

 

Yes. Which is why the brewers out here call beers made with hops that have been off the bine only hours "fresh", not "wet". The general consensus seems to be once past 24 hours, it's not considered fresh anymore. For example, it's about a 4 hour drive from Yakima to Bellingham. The guys with the van call the brewery as they're leaving Yakima with the freshly stripped hops. The brewer on site has the grain ready to go, mashes in, and has the wort ready to go into the brew kettle. When that van pulls up, the hops are hustled to the brew deck, and in they go.

In a matter of hours those hops go from being alive on the bine, to meeting a boiling fate. Hops that are dried, baled and stored for 2-3 months cannot be considered fresh by anyone not from the marketing department.

 

I don't think shucking corn is analogous to kilning and baling hops.

Heat is the issue here, driving off volatile chemical compounds. The fresh basil at the store was not picked minutes before it was eaten, but care was taken to get it to the store in a state closest to fresh-picked as possible: refrigerated transport and storage, monitored for spoilage, etc.

One other thing I don't understand about the argument that freshly-dried hops are so distinctive: what about all year-round beers produced in August-October? Aren't you implying beers made with 10 month old hops have declined if hops fresh from the kiln are so different? "The hops in this 6pk are fresher, so they're better. Don't think about how every subsequent batch has less freshness, so it isn't as good."

 

This is what I was thinking. I mean, there might be some advantage to those mellow, fully seasoned hops. Even some marketing aspects such as "this ale was brewed exclusively from the famous 1994 vintage hops".

 

I think I understand that notion of freshness (e.g., the corn example), but what makes the use of "fresh" as the brewing industry in general has used it for years now (e.g., since before the craft revolution based on multiple documents, etc., posted by jesskiddn) wrong and unacceptable? In multiple food production/distribution areas the term 'fresh" is used to mean certain kinds of produce and the term "fresh picked" is used to mean something like the usaged of fresh in the PNW. What is it that makes PNW brewers correct and everybody else wrong?

 

Marketing. No matter how processed a food gets, it was all 'fresh picked" at some point. Just because a term has been misused for a long time does not make it true. I've never believed the saying "a lie told long enough becomes the truth".

 

Lots of issues here I'm trying to sort out, but have to step away from the computer for a while, but just to be clear about one point. I'm not arguing one side or the other, just asking questions to clarify.

 

We have this argument every year, and it's always the PNW (where probably 90% of all breweries do some sort of FH beer) versus everyone else. I feel like the only way our argument/belief will ever gain traction is for people to come out and visit during hop harvest season.

Can't stop won't stop the fresh hop. Take a peek in our thread to get a better idea:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/fresh-hop-season-16.439489/

 

Yes, this is exactly what I'm implying. Especially with whole cones, but with pellets too (Not so much for extracts which are much more stable.)

Every year, we get requests to make Celebration longer, or to make it a year-round, but the thing is, we can't, or more to the point, we could, but it wouldn't taste as good, nor would it be as special.
Spoiler alert: Many of the hoppy beers you love from breweries all over the country, re-formulate their hop bills to account for old hops or bad crop years, or just to balance out the flavors.
If you have a hard-and-fast recipe, I can guarantee you there will be a flavor difference as your hops age... especially hops with a poor HSI (Hop Storage Index) which is one of the criteria hops are graded by, indicating that volatile flavors will become unstable over time in storage.

Again, you may prefer the term fresh in regard to wet hops, but we feel that term is both redundant and inaccurate. That doesn't make us wrong, it just means you disagree.

 

Agreed, there is no empirical right and wrong here, just differences of opinion/interpretation. From SN's perspective as one of the most influential craft breweries, I understand their absolute confidence in their position on this issue. From my perspective, with literally hundreds of breweries using an interpretation close to my own, I hope you understand my confidence in my position. Neither is going to explain their way to convincing the other, but it's still fun to debate.

 

I guess it's OK to have "inferior" beer in late summer-early fall due to hop age because everyone else does too? I don't like the implication that hop age is so volatile that current preservation efforts can't overcome the variance over the course of a year, thus quality isn't maintained year-round on flagship beers. I understand blending from year to year is done to maintain consistency, but I think a better explanation is compensation for the varying AA or oil content specs vs. "we can't really control hop volatility but we're not acknowledging the lesser quality of the beer we brewed in August and still hope you'll buy it."

 

Broo Doo. Gimme all the Broo Doo