Category Archives: Brewing

Fresh Hop Beers

Fresh hops

We’re on the tail end of it, but this time of year is the peak season for the release of one of the most ephemeral types of beer—those made with fresh hops. These beers are made with freshly-harvested, un-dried hops (sometimes called “wet hops”) and added to the beer at some point in the brewing process. Sometimes they replace the regular dried hops entirely, more often they are used to complement dried bittering hops.

The use of fresh hops lends a very different character to the finished beer than those with dried hops. They can be intensely floral and fruity, have very “fresh” plant or vegetal characters like fresh-cut grass or chlorophyll, and (in my opinion) can be very “bright” in a way that’s tough to describe without having smelled and tasting one yourself.

Fresh hop season is one of my favorite times of the year for beer, and these beers don’t last long. To help commemorate the hop harvest this season, I thought I’d write a bit of history on fresh hop beers, particularly focused on Central Oregon.

1990s

The first documented commercial fresh hops beers date to the early to mid 90s. In 1993, the late beer writer Michael Jackson chronicled a fresh hop beer made in England:

Trevor Holmes, head brewer at Wadworth, of Devizes in Wiltshire, was inspecting the harvest a year or two ago when he began to wonder how beer would taste if it were aromatised with hops fresh off the vine.

The practicalities are such that it could be done only once a year. Mr. Holmes tried it first last year [1992]. The 100-barrel brew was meant to last a month; it sold out in a week. This year, there are almost 300 barrels.

Mr. Holmes has used the first of the new seasons malt to make his “green hop” beer. The brewery calls it simply Malt and Hops. I can think of only one other brewery that has tried making such a “biere nouvelle,” and that is in the far West of the United States.

The “other brewery… in the far West” of the U.S. Jackson referred to was probably Bert Grant, whose Yakima Brewing (located among the hop fields of Yakima, Washington) was the first post-Prohibition brewpub in the United States. Portland-based beer writer Jeff Alworth wrote a few years ago:

In the mid-90s, he decided to take advantage of the vast wealth of hops that grew within a few miles of his brewery in Yakima (where well over half all domestic hops were grown at the time). He sent folks from the brewery out to the hop fields during the September harvest while he started prepping the mash tun. They gathered a batch of fresh hops, brought them back to the brewery, and within minutes of having been picked, were dumped into the boil.

Concurrently with Grant’s fresh hop beers, California’s Sierra Nevada in 1996 brewed their Harvest Ale, their first fresh hop beer, with freshly-harvest hops flown in from Yakima.

2000s

Here in Central Oregon, Deschutes Brewery was the first to release a fresh hop beer, Hop Trip, in 2005. It was an American-style pale ale infused with fresh Crystal hops sourced from the Willamette valley. This was only three years after Karl Ockert at BridgePort Brewing brewed what was probably the first fresh hop beer in Oregon in 2002. (In a nice bit of synergy, Ockert is now Director of Brewing Operation for Deschutes.) So Deschutes was definitely on the forefront of the Oregon fresh hop phenomenon.

Deschutes Brewery Hop Trip, first brewed in 2005   Deschutes Brewery Hop Trip, 2008

In 2007, the Oregon Brewers Guild partnered with Travel Oregon’s Oregon Bounty to launch the first “Fresh Hop Tastivals” around the state; Deschutes Brewery hosted the Tastival when it came to Bend. This event is what eventually morphed into the Sisters Fresh Hop Festival in 2010, which was started by Three Creeks Brewing.

In addition to Hop Trip, Deschutes regularly brews something like a dozen fresh hop beers each fall, and packages several, including Chasin’ Freshies Fresh Hop IPA.

Deschutes Brewery fresh hop tasting, 2008

Other breweries followed suit, like Silver Moon with their Hoppopotamus, Three Creeks with Cone Lick’r, and Crux Fermentation Project which regularly brews four or five different fresh hop beers each season, including one using hops grown in front of the brewery.

These days it’s almost more unusual for a brewery to not brew a fresh hop beer each fall, and this year (2016) saw at least three dozen beers from 16 Central Oregon breweries. A unique feature to a number of these beers was that the hops were locally grown:

I’m sure there are others I am missing from this list as well. Hop farming has been growing in Central Oregon, and while it will likely not get anywhere near the levels seen in the Willamette Valley, it has become an important local component to the regional beer economy. Especially at a time when “local” is more important than ever in beer.

There are still some fresh hop beers on tap now—don’t miss out on the last of this ephemeral beer season!

Deschutes Brewery will be on the East Coast by 2019

Deschutes BreweryIt’s no secret that Deschutes Brewery has been eyeing the East Coast for expansion for a while now. The 27-year-old brewery is #7 on the Brewers Association’s list of Top 50 craft breweries, and they are shipping beer to something like 28 states and two Canadian provinces, so it makes sense—shipping and refrigeration of liquids is expensive, not to mention environmentally costly from a carbon footprint viewpoint.

So it was interesting this weekend to see an article come out of Asheville, North Carolina—itself quite a beer town, not unlike Bend—highlighting that as a possible destination for a new Deschutes production facility. Here are some quotes:

Representatives from Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Oregon, the sixth-largest craft brewer in the country, visited Asheville in December and plan a second trip in late May, according to company president Michael LaLonde, who spoke highly of the mountain region.

Among the sites company officials visited was the 137-acre parcel Buncombe County recently bought from Henderson County for $6.8 million to entice an undisclosed economic development prospect.

“We’re looking at a number of locations in a number of states,” LaLonde said. “We’re looking in North Carolina, we’ve looked in Virginia, we’ve looked in Tennessee, as well as South Carolina.”

The brewery also looked at sites in the Greenville and Charleston, South Carolina, areas, LaLonde said. The company was impressed with Greenville.

The company plans to open an East Coast operation by 2019, LaLonde said, “so we have a little time, but not much.” He said the search and securing land would likely take about a year, with construction taking another year.

Plans call for a brewery that could produce about 200,000 barrels of beer annually, with the capability for growth. That would require about 100 employees for the brewery and packaging operation, and another 100 or so if it adds a brewpub on site.

Deschutes would be joining a small-but-growing number of regional craft brewers who have expanded east, including New Belgium, Sierra Nevada, and Oskar Blues (also in the Asheville area), Lagunitas (Chicago) and Stone (building a brewery in Virginia). And from an historic standpoint (since this is a blog about Bend’s beer history, after all!) it’s amazing to watch the continued success of a brewery that almost didn’t make it way back in 1988 when they opened in the economically-depressed milltown-in-transition of Bend.

It will certainly make an interesting addition to a future edition of the book!

Come brew beer with me in Redmond this Saturday!

This Saturday, the 31st, Redmond’s homebrew club, the Cascade Fermentation Association is having their monthly group brew—and I’m the guest of honor. The theme is “Brewing with Jon Abernathy” in that I’ve provided the recipe (Dusseldorf-style Altbier) and I’ll be set up with books for sale and to help brew and chat and drink beer with anyone who wants to come by.

Cascade Fermentation Celebration

So please do! If you are interested in homebrewing (either learning as a beginner, or are more advanced and just enjoy the process), or interested in beer and history and/or books, come on out! The brew day is open to anyone who wants to check it out.

Brewing will start by 11am, and it’s all taking place at Redmond Craft Brewing Supply, located at 235 SW 6th Street (about a block and a half from Wild Ride Brewing). This is also a great opportunity to acquaint yourself with Redmond’s homebrew shop and get a handle on the local beer scene.

Cheers!

Brewing a pre-Prohibition American lager

I’ve been homebrewing for years, since the mid-90s really, and one thing I thought might be fun to do—as time allows, of course—is brew up some beers inspired by the local beer history I’ve been researching.

Hops

The first beer that came to mind was inspired by the very first brewery to exist in Central Oregon: the Ochoco Brewery of Prineville, which lasted from 1882 until 1890. Of course a pre-Prohibition brewery at that time—with an Austrian brewer, no less—would have been brewing a lager, though a stronger, darker, maltier lager by today’s commonly-understood “American lager” standards. So I set out develop a pre-Prohibition lager recipe loosely based on what I would imagine might have been coming out of the Prineville brewery.

Now, in all the time I’ve been homebrewing, I had never done a true lager prior to this. The main reason is temperature control: lagers require a fermentation temperature of under 60 degrees Fahrenheit (45-55 is pretty ideal) and I’ve simply never been set up to do that. However, during the winter our garage stays a relatively-stable 55 to 57 degrees, day and night, so while we had the colder weather I went for it.

Malt in the mill

Here’s the base recipe I put together:

  • 7 pounds of American 2-row malt
  • 1 pound of Munich malt
  • 1 pound of flaked corn
  • 2 ounces of chocolate malt (~350°L)
  • 8 ounces of cane sugar
  • 0.75 ounces of Perle hops (~8% alpha acid) for 60 minutes
  • 0.25 ounces of Santiam hops (~5% AA) for 60 minutes
  • 1 ounce of Santiam hops for 15 minutes
  • 1 ounce of Santiam hops for aroma
  • Wyeast 2035 American Lager

Homebrewers familiar with the style will note I’ve taken liberties with it. The use of 2-row versus 6-row malt, for instance. And likely there wouldn’t have been much in the way of specialty malts available in frontier Prineville, but I can imagine having an imperfectly-kilned malt which could have lent darker colors and roastier, nuttier flavors to the finished beer. And the hops would possibly have been Cluster or some similar Willamette Valley-grown early variety.

Also, I do a simple single-infusion mash, whereas lager brewers of the day likely employed step-infusion or even decoction mashing.

The end result is a 6.3% amber-brown lager that is tasty and I hope befitting the beer being brewed in Central Oregon 130 years ago!

Ochoco Lager