In the Pacific Northwest (where Urbanspoon is based), the last days of summer and the first days of fall bring a short window for harvesting hops – the conical female flowers of the Hops vine that imbue beer with bitterness and divine flavor. I've been making my own beer ever since we moved into our house and discovered a garden wall covered with vaguely familiar vines. Harvesting them is a simple matter of picking off the cones when they are plump and swollen leaving your fingers sticky with a sweet tangy smell of the lupulin glands.
Hops (both commercially and for the homegrower/brewer) are typically harvested, dried over a period of 1-2 weeks and then frozen for use throughout the year. But a new approach called fresh hopping is gaining widespread popularity. In fresh hopping, hops go directly from vine to wort in the brewpot, imbuing IPAs and Pale Ales with more herbal, floral, green, fruity flavors. Because fresh hopping is dependent on the timing of the harvest, fresh-hopped beers are a treat – available only during a short window, typically through late October.
Fresh hopping (occasionally called wet hopping) first went commercial back in 1996 when brewers at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company had hops shipped post haste from the Yakima Valley in eastern Washington to their breweries in Chico, CA and dumped right into their huge brew kettles on the same day. This April, Sierra flew a planeload of hops from New Zealand to deliver a fresh-hopped Southern Hemisphere Harvest.
Another great fresh-hopped beer distributed across 25 lucky states comes from Great Divide out of Colorado. I spoke with Hannah there who told me their fresh hopped pale ale will be packaged this week and on shelves soon. To get a feel for how short the fresh hop window is, consider this: Great Divide brews their entire batch during a four-day period during which they operate their brew kettles 24 hours a day. Then they all go home, have a beer, and go to bed.
Your best bet to snag a fresh-hopped brew this year (if you don't homebrew) is to find a small, local craft brewery and just ask. The hearty hops vines grow in almost all states and many local breweries deliver this special libation starting mid October.
Next year we plan to write a blog post with a review of some of the fresh-hopped beers in the US. If you are a small brewery, send us a sample of this year's bounty and the staff at Urbanspoon will undertake the laborious process of taste testing. We'll replace this blog post next year with a fresh-hopped taste comparison! Tweet us @urbanspoon for details.
Source: http://www.urbanspoon.com/blog/116/Tis-the-Season-for-Fresh-Hopped-Beer.html
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