Stewing Over Brewing: harvest season

Thanks to a good friend, Max Butler, we were able to harvest about 5 lbs of dry hops this year from his garden.

I had 8 plants of my own growing up at the in laws house, but since it was the first year, we only got about a pound of wet hops.

Max had Chinook (Bittering, Aroma), Mt. Hood (Finishing Aroma), Cascade (Bittering, Finishing Aroma), and Willamette (Bittering, Aroma).

We had a 'harvest fest' so to speak and brewed up a couple batches of fresh hopped ale.

A fresh hopped ale (also known as a wet hopped ale) is when you take hops right off the vine and use them in the boil. It's usually between 4:1 - 6:1 ratio for wet to dry hops. Where people make the mistake is at what point in the boil you add the fresh hops. You can't add them at the beginning of the boil or even half way through, unless you love the taste of fresh cut grass. Typically you want to add them no more than the last ten minutes of the boil. When you're doing this, it's strictly aroma that you're going for.

There is about a month every year where you can find these beers that the bigger breweries put out, and we're coming to the end of that season right now.

Deschuttes does a 'Fresh Hop Mirror Pond' and a 'Fresh Hop Trip'.

Full Sail does a 'Lupulin Fresh Hop Ale'

Sierra Nevada puts out a 'Southern Hemisphere Harvest Fresh Hop Ale'

Lompoc (if you haven't had any Lompoc beers you're missing out) Puts out a couple different fresh hopped brews. 'Crystal Missile Fresh Hop Pale Ale' and 'Fresh Hop Harvest Man Red'.

We're coming to the end of the harvest season, so keep an eye out for anything fresh hopped!

On our 'harvest fest' weekend, Danny McCabe (or Dooney as he'll now be referred to) and myself did two experiments with wet hops.

I came up with a fresh hop 'Autumn Wheat Wine' that I adopted from a recipe received from a friend in the OSU food science and fermentation program. It's a wheat wine style that they did as a club brew. I took the recipe and substituted a couple grains (mostly because I didn't have access to what they do) and upped the hop bill by a LOT. The original IBUs on the recipe was somewhere around 100. The final count on my autumn wheat wine was about 157 - adding 4 different varieties of hops to the original 2. Technically I don't think we can physically taste anything over 100 IBUs, but that's not confirmed, just what I've heard. Currently in secondary fermentation.

Dooney loves Citra hops. In fact - he'd probably make love to Citra hops if possible. I constructed the recipe for his 'Fresh Hop Citra IPA', but he executed like a boss. Basically we took the standard Citra IPA recipe that we make quite often and doubled the hop bill with fresh hops. Currently in Secondary fermentation so we'll see how it turns out!