What is a freshly brewed wet hop beer doing on shelves in June? It may be 5 p.m. somewhere, as daytime drinkers like to say, but it isn’t hop season anywhere on this planet.
Hop flowers are ready for harvest in the late summer and early fall. Usually they are immediately dried in kilns, which stabilizes the hops but also sends a significant bit of their aromas into the air, and then reduced into pellets that last for years. To capture every bit of the hop essence possible, many brewers use hops immediately after harvest — the Beaujolais Nouveau of the beer realm. They may be dried in the kiln and used whole for so-called fresh hop beers; or they may be used undried for so-called wet hop beers.
When consumed fresh, these styles are explosively aromatic and lively — and, naturally, they are strictly seasonal.
Lagunitas Brewing Co. has been making seasonal wet hop beers for years. Born Yesterday is their classic example. It’s released each fall.
But this spring, the Petaluma-based, Marin-founded and — in 2017 — Heineken-bought brewery introduced Phase Change. The beer is a pale ale of exceptional aromatic power, made with the equivalent of 7 pounds of undried hops — Simcoe, Mosaic and Citra — per barrel. As Lagunitas brewmaster Jeremy Marshall characterizes it, Phase Change is a wet hop beer brewed so far out of seasonal sync that until recently it would have been an impossibility.
“You can’t get fresh hops this time of year, anywhere, not even from the southern hemisphere,” Marshall says.
To transcend the Earthly limitations of seasons, Lagunitas has invested about $1 million in a system that macerates the hops, blends them with a little water and produces a sort of hop cream, or mayonnaise, as Marshall describes the green goop. Frozen at 10 degrees, these liquified hops last and last. When they go to the brew kettle — whatever month it may be — they are almost as lovey to the nose as freshly harvested hops.
Phase Change represents the best of beer-based agriculture — fresh Washington-grown hops — and the most advanced of beer-based technology. By releasing its new wet hop beer in May, Lagunitas vividly highlights the significance of the liquid-preservation method used.
Fresh and wet hop beers are nothing new. They’ve gotten more popular in recent years, but the idea is simple and straightforward: Use the hops as soon as possible after harvest. This isn’t easy for brewers who live and work far from major hop-growing centers in the Pacific Northwest, England and New Zealand. Still, they pay extra for overnight shipping to make these beers.
Sierra Nevada’s Harvest Wet Hop IPAs showcase fresh hops; the series has included a September release featuring Northern Hemisphere hops and a March release made with hops grown 40 degrees south of the equator.
Moylan’s Brewing Co., in Novato, has been making wet-hop beers using hops from Lake County — a cost-effective shortcut in locally grown ingredients. That beer is called Wet Hop American Summer.
Again, to clarify (yes — vague beer pun intended), fresh hop beers are made with dried but otherwise unprocessed whole hop cones immediately after harvest; wet hop beers are made with undried whole hop cones immediately after harvest. I suspect purists will challenge the notion that Lagunitas’ Phase Change is technically a wet hop beer; we shall see.
Marshall says that Lagunitas is the world’s biggest buyer of wet hop cones by an order of magnitude; the 10 truckloads it buys each year, he says, is seconded by breweries that buy roughly one truckload.
As Marshall says, “We’re buying and trucking mostly water.”
It’s the aromatic hop oils that come with that water that make the effort worth it.
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.
