Wet Hopped IPAs - Fall 2016

For a 2007 account, I really hope you're kidding.

 

I'm going to get this out of the way/(type is up so when Celebration comes out I have a reference this year) for everyone who things that fresh =/= wet hopped. Or moreso thinks "Celebration" by SN is "fresh" hopped and everything else with recently off the bine is "wet" hopped.

To borrow Jeff Alworth's (author of "The Beer Bible") analogy; if you ordered a pizza with fresh basil and it came to you with dried basil, how would you feel? That's what Celebration is; hops dried and put in beer... just like every other beer. In the PNW (and how it should be everywhere) fresh and wet are interchangeable and it really makes the most sense (though cards on the table, I prefer the term fresh). Only SN uses "fresh" like they do. It might've meant something when SN was first brewed, but it means nothing now.

Fresh and Wet mean it was used in beer >24hrs after picking before drying (and hopefully ASAP >8 is preferred).

 

Pretty sure you got that backwards. All wet hopped beers are fresh, not all fresh hopped beers are wet. Because storing wet hops leads to mold mildew and rotting, they cannot be effectively stored.
Also, fremont brewind has field to ferment, a line of pale ales that will utilize centennial, citra, simcoe, and mosaic individually. The centennial is great, can't wait for citra.

 

Nope. I got it just right. Hops can be not dried, thus wet, but that does not make them fresh.You can pick basil or oregano from your garden, stick 'em in your fridge for 3 weeks before you use, and they're still "wet", but would you consider them fresh? Sierra Nevada is the most egregious brewery about mixing up the terms, and a lot of folks just think they're right because they're SN. Go to the nearest farm, and ask the farmer what his definition of fresh is.

 

And, as I just typed in another thread on this topic, SN is wrong, but because they choose to misuse the term, lots of folks blindly accept their definition. If you were to pick an ear of corn from your garden, leave it in your fridge for three weeks before you cooked it, would you consider is still fresh? Wet hops are just hops that haven't been dried and processed, they can sit in a warehouse for months before use, and they are still wet. They are not fresh.

 

We're just gonna have to agree to disagree then, I guess.
To us, as ever, "wet hops" mean undried hops.
Dried hops can be "fresh" (recently dried and still full of oil) or than can be older and "not so fresh."
Hops lose aroma every day they are off the bine... Sometimes imperceptibly, little-by-little. When we have a cooler full of hops in August and the first shipment of Celebration hops gets loaded-in, the first thing you say is "oh yeah, that's what they're supposed to smell like!" We've had that experience every since since 1981 so we stand by the terminology.

You may think we're being pedantic, we consider it being more accurate.

BTW many hop growers we work with, use the term "wet" or "green" to refer to undried hops. By definition (since hops only have one harvest window) any ready-to-go hops from that crop-year (dried or not) are "fresh". After picking, most hop growers do not store hops on-site (that's the brokers) and they're the ones with the "fresh" or "not so fresh" inventory.

 

Actually, no. Wet (undried hops) decompose VERY quickly. A grower or broker storing undried hops for months will have compost, not viable hops.

 

I respect the hell outta Sierra Nevada, and love many SN beers, but this fresh/wet thing that you guys have done to confuse noob beer drinkers is super obnoxious. Dried is not fresh. I've never seen a chef call for a fresh herb and then shake dried stuff onto his food. The reason? Dried herbs are not fresh, and neither are dried hops.

It's weird because people love Celebration Ale, it surely has no trouble selling around the country, and doesn't need a gimmick like calling it a fresh hop ale. Branding it in this way is just bizarre.

 

To follow your chef analogy:

Q: What does a chef call oregano air-dried a few days out of the garden?
A: Oregano

Q: What does a chef call oregano that's been dried and sitting in the jar at the back of the cupboard for a year?
A: Sawdust.

Hops (like spices) lose their potency over time... Their freshness, if you will.
Hops 6-months after harvest DO NOT have the same aromas and intensities of hops a few days or even weeks after harvest time. Yes, they're both dried, but they are hardly the same quality.

Again, we believe our terminology to be more accurate than the wet=fresh analog that has come to pass.

If not "fresh" what other word would be better for dried hops that have not deteriorated due to the passage of time?

 

I get fresh as meaning recently harvested as opposed to hops that have been stored for awhile. That makes sense.

 

No one disagrees that once dried the hops lose their luster over time.

If you ordered a pizza with fresh basil and it came out with little dried bits sprinkled on it you'd be a little confused right? Even if the pizza maker freshly picked and dried the basil to order no one would ever call that fresh basil pizza.

 

You do realize that SN has been making Celebration longer than most of the breweries mentioned In this thread have even existed, right? They can call their hops any damn thing they want.

 

Hops, like many other agricultural products (especially before modern transportation and refrigeration) were always traditionally dried - often right on the farm/ranch, daily during harvest, before they could possibly even reach a brewery. "Fresh hops" was long a term used for the first dried hops of the season in the industry.

Undried hops were called "green" (as noted by SNBill) or "raw" by the growers.

I prefer this one:

If someone offered you their homemade "fresh raisins", would you expect them to serve you old grapes?

 

They have earned every right to be wrong.

 

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

 

Doesn't get any clearer than this.

 

Sorry, but this is ridiculous. By this logic all IPA's made nine months after the harvest should actually be called Sawdust Ales.

Anyway, as you said before this is an agree/disagree issue. I'll leave it alone after this.

 

We could extend the argument to quantify fresh beer--oh wait that is 20% of the recent threads.

 

I believe they pioneered the use of the term in the US and the beer has been around for 25 years. Neil Young didn't invent grunge, but is still referred to as the godfather of the genre.

 

Pretty certain that they didn't always call it a fresh hop beer though. IIRC, that was added to the description only in the last ten or so years. Before that, no one was calling beers that used pellets "fresh hop" beers. They muddied the water and confused a lot of people by doing this.