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Wednesday, October 16, 2013

On Making a Good Fresh Hop Beer: the Brewers Speak

Fresh hop season is now mostly in the rear-view mirror.  There are still some fresh hop beers floating around, but we're now six weeks out from the harvest, a good long since the hops came off the vine.  The best beers have already blossomed and faded, putting 2013 in the books.  In my unofficial tracking of things, fifty-one breweries and two cideries used fresh hops to make 91 beers and two ciders.  My guess is the actual number is safely north of a hundred beers, but it's very difficult to keep track of such a fluid and evanescent moment.

Fresh hop beers have been around twenty years, but I don't think that breweries actually figured them out until just three or four years ago.  I first started writing about them in 2007, just about the time fresh hop beers started becoming a mass phenomenon, with many breweries making them.  I awarded a Satori (best beer of the year) to Full Sail Lupulin, a fresh hop beer, but it was an outlier.  A lot of my experiences were along these lines:

"The bitterness was notable, but it didn't taste like hop bitterness, but like ... well, like a pot of boiled weeds."

".... a slightly off aroma that you might charitably call "cabbage." As it goes down the gullet, and particularly after it warms in the glass, "garbage" or "compost" spring more quickly to mind."
That quality of decomposition was especially notable and prevalent.  It was the element I once used to separate the good from the bad, and the percentage in 2007-2009 probably wasn't much better than 50%. Winners on the level of Lupulin were extremely rare.  The excitement of fresh hop season and the postcard images of breweries at the hop fields made for a feel-good season, but not necessarily great beer.  For years I was a skeptic.

But lo, in the last couple-three years, breweries really started dialing it in.  The number of breweries making compost beer dropped precipitously, and those vivid, green flavors I found in Lupulin were everywhere.  Perhaps as many as ten percent of the beers really rocked me back--they seemed both extraordinary and authentically novel.

So what changed?  I inquired with a group of brewers that really seem to reliably produce excellent fresh hop beers to see what they had to say.  What were their methods.  My working theory is that using fresh hops throughout the boil--once seen as the only "true" method--added too much vegetable matter and created the compost note.  I couched my question from that perspective and found some agreement.  Here's Laurelwood's Vasilios Gletsos:
"When I moved to Mactarnahan's/Pyramid/PBCo, I didn't have the flexibility to use fresh hops on the hot side [the kettle], so I devised a plan to add them in secondary/conditioning tanks. We did this as whole flower breweries (Deschutes or Sierra Nevada before torpedo) do: stuffed into mesh bags and tied them to the bottom of the vessel (in our case, since we didn't have tank hooks, we cleaned up heavy chunks of stainless and tied then to that). This gave the best, "Fresh Squeezed" flavor I have ever gotten from fresh hops. A beautiful mix of peach fruit cup with a touch of tea, and an unparalleled horticultural mouthfeel (if that makes sense)."
But wait--not so fast!  I also spoke to one of those "whole flower" breweries, Deschutes.  (Most breweries, especially larger ones, use pellets, which are more compact.)  Brewer Cam O'Connor does use them on the "hot side" for some of their fresh hop beers:
"This hop addition happens in the hot wort, usually in the kettle or in the hopback, where wort is transferred onto the hops. The impact we are looking for here is a nice juicy in-your-face hop aroma and flavor without a lot of vegetative flavors. Hop Trip and Chasin freshies are both made using the hot side hop additions." 
But he agreed that "cold-side" fresh hopping has its place, as well.
"This method is very similar to traditional dry hopping except you are using fresh/wet hops to dry hop the beer in the bright beer tank. The impact from this method is usually potent in aroma and flavor and can pick up some of the vegetative qualities from the fresh hop. We make some of the pub beers using this method. It is very difficult to do on a large scale so the pubs work very well. Fresh Hop Mirror Pond is made using this method." 

You note that Cam mentioned picking up a "vegitative note" even in the bright tank? Vasili agreed and offered a recommendation:
"Don't leave it on the hops too long (48-72 hours seems good) before racking it off, which limits contact with the vegetal matter and may be contributing to the [unpleasant] flavors."
Writing for Gigantic, Van Havig added a point I'd never considered--oil content.
I think it really all lies in hop choice. The higher oil hops seem to make better fresh hop beers.  This makes intuitive sense, of course. But it really is the case that you have to start with the right raw materials. After that, I think boiling is a bad idea. It extracts things you don't want, and potentially drives off oil.  So late additions - hop back generally - is where it's at. When we make them, we add a little bit of a known Bittering hop at the start of boil, and then ALL of the wet hops go in the hop back.  We use a lot - 200+ lbs for 15 BBLs. If we need to "touch it up" with dry hops, we use a light hand (1/4 lb / bbl or so)."
Another factor Double Mountain's Matt Swihart points out is how dangerously perishable fresh hops are. 
I think it is those situations where the stinky, vegetative, musty aromas pop up in some wet hop beers. From my perspective, you simply can’t use non-dried hops more than 12-24 hours after picking, unless you can spread them out in a cooler, and keep ‘em cold.
One of main issues, he points out, resonates with Van's point about oil content:
Unfortunately the high moisture and oil content at harvest also starts to breakdown and physically compost once the vine is cut.
Which suggests that the sooner they get into the wort/beer, the better.  (This gives Oregon brewers a real advantage--Portland-area breweries are 45 minutes from the hop fields.)  I'll have a full guest post from Matt tomorrow that gives one of the best descriptions of the care and tending of fresh hops I've ever read.

As with all things brewing, there are different methods and approaches.  Matt recommends using traditional kilned hops in the conditioning tank along with wet hops, while Vasili cautions against it.  (For Matt, the combo is "pleasing" while to Vasili it's "distracting.")  Your experiences may vary.  A consensus seems to be forming around adding the hops later rather than earlier.  In addition, use the freshest possible fresh hops and hops with high oil content. 

After that?  Probably pray to Ninkasi that the crop was good and the oils rich and vibrant.  There's a certain bit of alchemy in the process that makes fresh hop beers a bit of a mystery. 

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the article Jeff, I really appreciate the points of view you brought together. I wanted to briefly clarify something in my first statement you quoted.

    I didn't mean to suggest that Deschutes made their Fresh hop beers using the method I do, rather I use Fresh hops in secondary/conditioning much as a brewery who only uses Whole Flower hops (i.e.,kilned) might add WF to secondary/conditioning, by tying these hops in a bag to the bottom. It was my understanding that Deschutes used WF in this way, as did Sierra Nevada before they developed the Torpedo. I did a quick flip from talking about how I make FH beers to how WF dry hop with WF hops, which confused things. Make sense?

    If I came off as sounding like I was speaking for Deschutes and how they make their Fresh Hop beers, it wasn't intentional, though I suspected that is how FHMP was made. I tried that beer for the first time at the '09 or '10 Portland FH fest, The same year I made FH Macs for it, and it had that similar FH quality I loved in the Mac's, and my FH beers since.

    Thanks again, cheers,

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  2. Vasili, I didn't think you meant that and I hope I didn't suggest it by the juxtaposition of the comments. But you had given me such a smooth lead-in to Cam's quote that I could hardly ignore it. :-)

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  3. Very interesting. I must say I've been lucky in not detecting a degraded vegetal taste in the fresh hop beers I've had. The ones I've had (just a handful, American and Canadian) have been incredibly good, and I'm starting to think this is how brewing started, which would make it more seasonal than most of the historically-minded understand it to be. I did find one reference in old hop literature to some people using hops "green", so it's not anything really knew. I suspect it is what everyone did before even early hop culture became industrial so to speak. As to manner of adding, surely it is down to each producer's approach, and hot or cold might succeed, or not, depending who is doing it and how. Condition of the hops is critical too no doubt.

    Gary

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  4. It does seem true that there is a lot to learn and discover about fresh hop beers, and this post was an excellent exercise/analysis along those lines.

    Regarding usage of fresh hops on the cold side, I have to wonder:

    What about the bugs and spiders that will inevitably be in/on the hop cones? Sure, hops have that magical "preservative" quality, but a load of real off-the-bine hops will have some less-cleanly hitchhikers.

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  5. "you simply can’t use non-dried hops more than 12-24 hours after picking"

    I'd suggest that's generous - consensus in Kent seems to be that after 12 hours you have compost, you really want to be adding hops within 4 hours of picking. Certainly my favourite ones this year seem to have been from breweries within a few miles of the gardens, so they start the boil and then go to pick up the hops.

    "hops with high oil content"
    I can assure you, green East Kent Goldings works just fine. :-) As with the hot/cold additions, it just depends what you're trying to achieve. There seems to be a bit of a trend among the Kent brewers to make two green hop beers, one with significant cold hopping that shows off the oily/resinous quality - in the really fresh versions you can even see puddles of oil on the top of your pint - and one where they are just trying to make the nicest beer they can, where they dial back the cold hopping and use significant amounts of green bittering hops in the boil.

    I think part of the problem is brewers not being able to adjust to what green hops bring to the brew - that story in a previous article about a green hop beer not coming out as bitter as expected sounds like someone who forgot they were dealing with something that was 80% water rather than 8% water, and forgot to scale up accordingly. If you talk to Eddie Gadd, one of the main proponents of green hop beer in Kent, his eyes light up at the skill needed when dealing with a natural product that isn't homogeneous - how much do you scale up the weight of hops to allow for the fact it was raining when they were picked, how do you allow for the flavour profile varying from year to year and so on. I know some Kent brewers who eg allow for the extra flavour of green hops by using less "shouty" (aka "dull") clones of Goldings like Early Bird as green hops in their kettle, to build that platform to show off green EKG as the cold addition.

    You've made no mention of malt blend - most Kent brewers just use barley, but it seems no coincidence that many of my favourite green hop beers come from the few that include a bit of oat or rye in the malt, I think they just bring out the flavours.

    @fplusbeer - I've asked about the dangers of contamination with wild yeasts etc, and it doesn't seem to be much of a problem in the real world, at least not here in Kent.

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