As the saying goes, fresh is best. When it comes to beer, fresh ingredients are important for flavor and quality and hops are no exception.
The hop harvest is the brewer’s Christmas, or at least it smells like Christmas because the harvest actually happens sometime in late summer to early fall. However, that doesn’t stop hop growers and hop heads from celebrating.
I certainly was not the first person to add freshly picked hops to a batch of homebrew – I must concede that title to many before me hundreds or thousands of years ago. However, adding wet hops or fresh hops into beer has created hundreds of beers described with the two phrases across the United States.
The two phrases aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. While brewers and beer drinkers tend to mean the same thing when they interchange the words, fresh hops can mean hops used right out of drying, while wet hops are never dried (well, duh). The difference between the two matters just as much in the kettle as it does when you drink the beer. For this article, we’ll be focusing on wet hops.
Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River Brewing described the difference in For the Love of Hops by Stan Hieronymus: “They both do a great job, but you get more fresh aromas and flavors when the product is wet, and it takes more, as you have to compensate for the water that i still in the hops… I find more melon and grassy notes in wet hops, grassy almost like a Sauvignon Blanc.”
The late Michael Jackson described one of the most influential commercial wet hop beers in the United States circa 1996, Sierra Nevada’s Northern Hemisphere Harvest Ale as having “the lightest touch of malty sweetness to start; then a surge of cleansing, refreshing, resiny, almost orange-zest flavors; and finally, an astonishingly late, long finish of fresh, appetite-arousing bitterness.”
My point here is not only do wet hops impart different flavors and aromas, but they are delicious when used correctly. There are a few keys to brewing great wet hopped beers and a few more things you should understand about hops to keep that wet hopped goodness in your homebrew.
Wet Hops Are Wet
Wet hops contain about 80 percent water, so you’ll need to use more than you would when using dry hops. In general, wet hops require four to six times more than the dry hop rate. For example, one ounce of pelleted dry hops would be the equivalent of four to six ounces of wet hops. You get the idea.
The wet hops will take up more room in the kettle, enough to consider reducing batch size depending on overall hop amount. They’ll also add water that needs to be considered with calculating final gravities.
Freshness Is Everything
When Ken Grossman, Founder and CEO of Sierra Nevada Brewing, first started homebrewing he had difficulty finding quality hops because “the homebrew trade consumed an insignificant amount of hops and, apparently, in the eyes of hop growers and merchants, wasn’t wort pursuing.” Oh, how the times have changed.
There’s been a resurgence in hop growing since the “2008 Hop Crisis,” making it easier for commercial brewers and homebrewers to source locally grown hops or simply supply their own.
Once harvested, wet hops literally begin to rot shortly afterwards because the cones contain such a high percentage of water, which is why farmers transport them directly from the field to breweries – or in your case from your backyard to your brew setup. It’s very important to use wet hops within a matter of days, preferably one day, after they are picked otherwise you risk spoiling and ruining your hops.
Hops in Moderation
Like all enjoyable things, wet hops should be used in moderation. You can quickly reach a breaking point at which the desirable “grassy” aroma and flavor feels like your chewing on a salad or other undesirable flavors—tobacco and chlorophyll to name a few.
Remember you’re putting in a huge amount of green matter in your homebrew and the result is green flavors, which are acceptable in wet hop beers to an extent. Brewing requires a balance and awareness of the style. It’s a good reason to use dried hops for the bittering portion of your boil and wet hops for the aroma and flavor. If you try to drive up bitterness with wet hops, you risk losing the nuances of wet hops.
Using dry hops will also reduce the hops in the kettle and give you known alpha acids. Another reason is that you don’t really know how much bitterness the hops from your backyard may hold.
Life Cycle of Hops
Hops Before the Kettle
The desire of hops lies in the essential oils they produce, which constitute up to 4 percent of the hop cone. These oils increase during the weeks before harvest and continue to change after the hops are dried and stored.
In Stan Hieronymus’s book For the Love of Hops, he points to recent research tracking how dramatically essential oils change in the days before hops are picked and imply that wet hops may produce different odor compounds than those that are dried. However, there hasn’t been any similar studies about wet hops. “This is not a scientific exploration of brewing,” said Ninkasi Brewing co-found Jamie Floyd. “where’s the economic benefit of analyzing a beer made once a year?”
Hops Boiling in the Kettle
Hops are used during the boil because the boiling temperatures activate many components, but a side effect is this removes some of those essential oils we crave. As previously stated, brewers wanting to know how much bitterness they’re adding to their beer may choose to use dried hops with measured alpha acids. Those concerned with preserving oils, such as linalool and gernanoil, should add wet hops towards the end of boil, at flameout, or whirlpooling.
Hops in the Fermenter
Hops during fermentation is somewhat inconclusive. However, we know something happens because we’ve tasted the differences before, which is the result of biotransformations of hops compounds that occur in the presence of yeast. There’s another reason to believe wet hopped beers will taste different. All you need to do is taste it over time. When I taste beer about 24 hours into fermentation, I get a very green taste. Over time the beer starts to open up and the oils come through in the aroma and flavor. Again, in the words of Jamie Flyod “this is not a scientific exploration of brewing.” Right on, Jamie.
Hops in the Bottle
As a homebrewer, most of my beer contains hops because I cannot and never will be able to afford a centrifuge, which is why the taste changes over time after packaged. Another source of diminishing quality can b poor oxygen control in the bottling process that will hurt any hoppy beer. However, I’ve made wet hopped beers before and they’ve seemed to hold up well when kegged or bottled, but that might just because they tasted fresh and I drank it quickly.
Sources:
- For The Love of Hops by Stan Hieronymus
- Oxford Companion to Beer by Garrett Oliver
- Beyond the Pale by Ken Grossman
- “Getting the Most From Your Hops” by Stan Hieronymus
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