Fresh Hops Report: Lagers, Mouthfeel, And What Counts as “Good”
Fresh hop Piwo from Threshold—a “restraint schoool” beer, but a damn tasty one.
After merely dipping my toe in the green waters of fresh hop beers, this week I took the plunge, visiting Prost’s 17-day showcase and Loyal Legion, which always features the biggest selection in town. Like every other category in beer, those made with fresh hops (undried, which is the typical way) do change over time. For example, prior to Covid, the vast majority of these beers were draft-only, but now you find plenty in cans. So what’s new for 2023? Read on.
Lagers
The biggest trend by far are the vast numbers of fresh hopped lagers out there. My first FH beer of the year was Wayfinder’s superb Strata-hopped kellerbier. I figured it was an outlier—Wayfinder is a lager brewery, after all—but no. I’m seeing more lagers than ales out there right now. I expect this is a trick of timing—breweries can have lagers prepped and then hit them with a dose of hops in the conditioning tanks before they head out, while the ales are still in various stages of production. But even still, it’s a remarkable development. Breweries have experimented with FH lagers for years, but they’ve been marginal in overall percentages. Indeed, for the first five years or so, we often called the category “fresh hop ales.”
This reflects a couple of intersecting trends. Rather unexpectedly, the Pac NW has become the beachhead for small-production lagers, with more of them available than anywhere I’ve visited in the US. But we’re also seeing the first inkling of a post-hazy intensity-backlash, in which some of the trendiest beers are small, delicate things. Accordingly, most of the FH lagers I’ve enjoyed have been fairly restrained. In the best, the character of the hops are present—often dominantly on the nose—but subtle. The lager comes before the fresh hops. In the past, I’ve loved these beers as great off-speed opportunities to see a different type of hoppy expression. On the other hand, it has left me hungering for an over-the-top 100 mph fastball of an IPA that comes at me hard and fast.
While I may be waiting for a big IPA fresh-hop blast, forensically, I do have to admit that the lagers offer an interesting lens into the nature of these hops I haven’t appreciated as much in the past. For example:
Mouthfeel
We’ve always known that one component of fresh hops is a quality that can be described as “green” or “chlorophyll”—basically, the plant side of the equation. It’s not purely flavor, either. It’s the chalky, rough, living quality of a freshly-picked vegetable. And a big part of it is texture. It’s a fuller, more abrasive feel on the tongue. You notice it in lagers, because they have been engineered to be clean and very smooth. They slosh around one’s mouth with a frictionless abandon. It’s why they go down so easily.
Fresh hops roughen things up. Fresh vegetables sometimes have tiny fibers or spines that pop just after they’re picked. As a fresh hop pilsner lands on my tongue, it’s as if I can feel that roughness. The threshold for this quality is pretty low, too. It seems that if you can taste the hops (rather than just smell them), you’ll notice their texture.
You may ask yourself, well, do I want to feel my hops? This gets to another important dimension of the whole fresh hop oeuvre:
What Counts as Good?
After I posted my photo essay on Breakside’s liquid-nitro hops, I had a long exchange with a brewer about the aesthetics of FH beers and how we haven’t settled on a standard. As a consequence, breweries haven’t coalesced around standard practices, either. Put another way: with an established style like cask bitter or Belgian dubbel, we know what to expect in smell, taste, and textures. Brewers can optimize their process to hit that mark. But what happens when you are trying to achieve different things?
There are at least two distinct schools of thought. One camp, call it the school of flamboyance, shoots for 11–they want the fresh hoppiness to melt your face and turn your tongue green. This isn’t to say that they’re especially bitter or even overtly intense. Rather, it’s that the qualities that make fresh hops distinctive are dialed up. They’re greenly aromatic, oily, sticky, and alive. They may have that toothy chlorophyll texture, and everything certainly lingers on the tongue. It’s a FH beer, dammit, and they want you to know it.
Then there’s the school of restraint. In attempting flamboyance, breweries court off flavors and imbalance. In this way of thinking, distinctive fresh-hop flavors are used to merely season the beer, to harmonize with the base style but give it a unique, harvest-fresh note. They are style first, fresh-hops second.
To bring this back to lagers and add a healthy measure of speculation, I think what we’re seeing this year, so far anyway, is the triumph of restraint. You may be surprised to learn that brewers are a lot less excited about FH beers than their customers. And no surprise: they don’t actually know how the central ingredient will behave because they haven’t used it before. They get a bag of hops and have to guess how they’ll taste. Varieties have some consistency, obviously, but may vary more than a brewer would like field to field. It’s why hop selection is such a big deal.
Moreover, they have never really been able to get on top of the process piece the way they can with beers they make week after week all year long. It’s why you find so many different philosophies and approaches. We have literally done zero research on fresh hops. Should you put them in the mash? The kettle? We don’t have an answer for what happens. Should you select varieties with high oil content? How long should you leave them in the conditioning tank? Should you freeze them, shatter them, and then add the sandy bits to the beer? Brewers do know what has worked for them in the past, so they stick to practices that delivered success. But it’s not the same as understanding at the level of chemical reaction what’s going to happen if you do this versus that.
Perhaps all these lagers reflect an effort to contain and control these wild beasts. With a restrained hand, you’re less likely to end up with something truly bizarre. On the other hand, you’re less likely to spark the paroxysms of ecstasy FH fans seek. Harvest season, for the junkie like me, is less a time for accomplishment and more one of wonder. This is the moment of the hop, not the brewer. I say, let the hop free—take it to 11.