Whether you grow your own hops, live a short drive from a hop yard, or overnight fresh hops from a supplier, fresh-hop (or wet-hop as they are sometimes called) beers are an opportunity to create a unique brew each hop harvest. Three pros who savor this opportunity every hop harvest share their fresh advice.

Derrick Nordberg is the Brewer and Co-Founder of Cowiche Creek Brewing in Cowiche, Washington

If you have ever walked through a kiln during hop harvest, you are hit in the face with aroma from all of these volatile oils and compounds that are being cooked off at 135 °F (57 °C) for eight hours. By using wet hops right out of the picker, we get to trap those oils and compounds in the liquid at every step of the brewing process. There are flavors and aromas that can only be extracted by using fresh, non-kilned hops. That’s what makes fresh-hop beers so special and unique.

We use Centennial and Chinook grown at our farm for our Mt. Cleman Pale Ale. Our flagship fresh-hop IPA, GROWN4U is 100% fresh Simcoe® hops. We believe it is the quintessential West Coast IPA hop and there is no limit to how much you can use. We take advantage of that — the more the better! Max hopping rates do vary by variety. A mild hop like Cascade would be impossible to hit a max hopping rate with, while Citra® is on the opposite end of the spectrum and can come off a little catty at higher doses. That’s why we like Simcoe®, which as a fresh hop we use at an 8:1 ratio compared to pellets. We think that is the sweet spot of a little grassy and a lot of citrus/pine.

You can turn any style of beer into a fresh hop one, but we believe clean West Coast pale ales and IPAs best showcase the wet-hop character. After all, they aren’t called fresh-malt beers . . .

Being located in Yakima, Washington, and having such a close relationship with our friends at Green Acre Farms, Tributary Hop Farms, and Carpenter Ranches, I can leave the brewery halfway through the sparge to go grab the 400–600 lbs. (180–270 kg) of fresh hops used in one batch of beer. By the time I get back with the hops, the boil is almost done. We load the bales on the platform and they head straight into the hopback. The sooner you use the hops from the time picked, the better. If you do the math on water content in the wet vs. dry product it comes out to about 5:1. However, a pelletized product that separates easily in the kettle or fermenter and maximizes surface contact area is not the same as a whole cone with 78% water content. With wet hops, the bracts (leaves) make it difficult for the wort to get to the lupulin and also difficult to get it out, so we use somewhere between an 8:1 to 10:1 ratio compared to pellets. We also use a ton of agitation in the hopback to get as much liquid as possible circulating around the bracteoles (stems of the leaves).

For GROWN4U IPA we only add fresh hops during the boil. For Mt. Cleman Pale Ale, we have the hops right here in our hop yard, so we add them at every step that we can. As a homebrewer, I would throw some in the mash, some as first wort hops, and then completely pack the hopback/whirlpool with as many as I could possibly fit. Then I would separate the batch into two fermenters and dry (wet) hop one half of the batch so you can taste the difference between hot-side and cold-side additions. The cold-side additions can cause some microbial and oxidation issues if fermentation isn’t super healthy so if that half-batch goes south, you still have the hot-side half-batch to enjoy. Don’t forget that hops float, so put them in a nylon bag and weigh it down with sanitized weights so they stay submerged. Extremely healthy yeast is so important with these beers, so don’t be afraid to over-pitch your yeast.

Matt Grimm is the Head Brewer at Upland Brewing Company in Bloomington, Indiana

I’ve only ever brewed IPAs with fresh hops. Some hazy, some juicy, some West Coast, some imperial. Fresh-hop beers are pretty much required to be collaborative endeavors with local growers, so varieties tend to be whatever handles your climate well. Around here, that’s usually Cascade or Copper. Used correctly, fresh hops impart a softer and smoother hop profile with an unmistakable “greenness.” 

Freshness is the name of the game: The less time between harvesting and brewing, the better. For a larger production brewery, we usually use fresh hops within a day or two; harvest happens over the weekend and then we’d brew that beer first thing on Monday. For that short amount of time before use, we simply refrigerate (35–40 °F/2–4 °C) the loose hops in bags or boxes. 

While you could use fresh hops for each hop addition, it doesn’t mean that you should. The biggest problems to solve for with fresh hops are yield and sanitization. The large amount of vegetal matter of the unprocessed hops would quickly turn all your wort to trub without the proper preventative steps. You need some way to take the hops back out after you add them. For our large-scale production batches, we use a hopback. It’s a separate vessel between our boil kettle and whirlpool that is intended for this very purpose. It has screens onto which you can add your leaf hops and allow the wort to flow through on its way to the whirlpool. For smaller-scale batches, nylon mesh bags worked great in whirlpool additions. As far as sanitization is concerned, heat is your friend. Coming straight off the bine, these hops aren’t exactly “clean.” Adding them when your wort is still 180+ °F (82+ °C) is the best way of keeping contaminants out of your beer.

Fresh-hop beers don’t need to be entirely made from fresh hops. Every fresh-hop beer I’ve been a part of making has used other hop formats as well, like T-90s, Cryo® hops, extracts, etc. The fresh-hop component for those usually comes out at around 3–4 lbs./bbl. (1.5–2 oz./gallon or 11–15 g/L).

Fresh hops are a fun way to get creative. With dried hops you have so much information available — alpha acids are the most used day-to-day, but there’s also beta acids, survivable compounds, total oils, terpenes, etc. It can all get pretty overwhelming. I always appreciate the chance when using fresh hops to take a step back and just trust your own senses. Get your nose in them and if they smell good, your beer should too!

Steve Luke is the Head Brewer and Founder of Cloudburst Brewing in Seattle, Washington

Fresh-hop beers are unique because there’s more of a textural component — leafy, chewy — in addition to some pleasant chlorophyllic/green character. 

We use fresh hops all on the hot side — at first wort, early in the boil, late in the boil, and in the whirlpool. We also often convert our mash tun into a massive hopback and recirculate boiled wort through them. Even using fresh hops at all of these stages we’ll still add T-90 pellets and/or kettle extract at boil to make sure we get enough bitterness units. Fresh hops don’t come with lab analysis, so everything is unknown. You have to use your senses — eyes, nose, and hands — to make sure they are up to snuff. We don’t worry about much bitterness pickup from fresh hops; they’re mostly water after all. 

I’d stick with the same fresh-hop varieties you’d use in a style as you would if they were pellets, I’d say at a rate of 5–10 times the typical weight. We typically use 15–20 lbs./bbl (7.5–10 oz./gallon or 55–75 g/L) on IPAs and 10 lbs./bbl (5 oz./gallon or 38 g/L) on lagers. If you go much higher than these rates you risk imparting a vegetal flavor.

If you grow your own hops, you shouldn’t have any problem using them within 24 hours of picking, which is optimal. If we don’t use them immediately, we store them in our walk-in cooler and try to spread them out and let them breathe. To get the best results, pick your hops when they smell the best, not when they look the best. A lot of versions of these beers made with homegrown hops tend to be pretty green/grassy because, I think, the hops are picked a little early.