#centennial hops

Fresh Hop Round Up

We’ve been drinking fresh hop ales for about a month now, and we’ve come up with a helpful set of fresh hop principles.

Lesson one: don’t mess around with your fresh hops. 

Someone at Hopworks thought it was a good idea to dump a load of fresh Centennials into a yeastie saison. It’s all yeast, no hops. I don’t even like it as a Belgian yeast bomb. Level Beer -- a new outfit located near the airport -- made a similar mistake. They’re first can release is a fresh hopped version of their Ready Player One saison. It’s super light and pretty pleasant, but again, the yeast covers up any real hop flavor.

Lesson two: drink it fresh! 

One again, Double Mountain has bottled two different fresh hop beers. We got a bottle of Killer Red pretty soon after the release. It was pretty tangy and sweet. The Killer Green was a several days older. It was pretty plain. Killer Red was juicy with spruce tips and red currants. It had zip and zing. Killer Green was mostly pine and citrus, with a hint of fresh sparkle, but it was almost all gone.

Lesson three: try to be restrained. 

Fremont’s Filed to Ferment is pretty good. It’s got a fresh hop zing, but on the back end, it’s all vegetables -- green bell pepper in particular. I can’t decide if that’s a function of excessive hop material or just an Amarillo hop flavor. I’m leaning toward the former. I can see how some would taste it as a flaw, but I still liked the beer.

Lesson four: sometimes a simple beer is a better beer.

My favorite fresh hop beers so far have been super simple. Fresh Prince from Gilgamesh Brewing is a basic IPA -- no bells, no whistles -- but I like it a lot. It’s got a real bitterness to it. The fresh Centennials add extra floral notes on top of a dry bodied beer. 8 Pound Pale from Full Sail does the same thing. Fresh hops add a little sparkle to a balanced pale ale -- fresh grass and sharp citrus. Nothing complicated, just a shining nice beer.

Fresh!

It’s that time of year again. Back school shopping, one last barbecue, and the return of fresh hops. 

The northwest had a very wet spring and a long dry summer, and the hops are ready a few weeks ahead of schedule. No matter, our friends at Ex Novo Brewing were ready. As the first cones left the field, they were firing up a batch of Eliot IPA. They tossed in the fresh, sticky Centennials and let them do their magic.

The result is a beer bursting with floral flavor and aroma. The smell is out of this world. It’s like burying your face in fresh cut flowers. The flavor fresh and green -- like herbs right from the garden, like foraged fruits. The citrus flavor is subtle -- there’s no mistaking it for orange juice. The whole thing just sparkles and shimmers as you drink it. It’s out of this world.

New But Old

Founders Brewing officially came to Oregon last week. There were tap takeovers; there were meet the brewer events; there were towers of beer in all the usual places. I picked up a couple bottles of Centennial IPA to fill out a six pack. I wasn’t seeking it out. It was just there.

The Crux Fresh/Wet Hops: An Embarrassment of Riches

Okay, First: “Fresh Hopped” and Wet Hopped” are the same thing. Fresh, resin-drippin’ hop flowers, picked, tossed into bins, driven hurriedly back to the brewery – often a journey of several hours – and tossed into a brew tank. A LOT of outright BS that gets slung around about freshness in dried flower, pellet, or extract hops IPAs, MANY of which remain viable for a couple of months, at least,…

Beer Review: Tallgrass Brewing Company Songbird Saison

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Fort George “The Optimist”: The IPA’s New Attitude

Folks, let me just say this right up front:

“The Optimist” IPA from Fort George Brewing is…THE…Best…New…IPA in five years, at least out of the thousands I’ve tasted.

I get a LOT of email that says variations on a theme of “Hey, Fool! Why do you hate on IPAs so much?” OR…”You claim to like IPAs but then you rag on ‘em all the time. You can’t say you love ‘em when you dump on ‘em so much!”

Well, of…

Fresh and Golden

Last year, Old Town Brewing won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival for their fresh hop pale ale. I didn't even know that was a category, but I stopped in to give it a try.

Cents and Centsibility features unkilned Centennial hops on a pale ale base. Most brewers are putting their fresh hops in IPAs but the lighter body is a plus in my book. Cents and Centsibility smells fresh and lightly perfumed. The flavor starts with sweet oranges and transitions into a fresh piney middle and very short bitter finish. The bitterness is rounder and softer than in a pale ale using dried hops.