Brewing is both an incredibly intricate dance of ingredients, process, biochemistry, and craft—and also a fairly straightforward affair. After all, humans figured out how to do it 10,000 years ago. Fundamentally, all a brewer does is soak specially prepared barley in warm water to make a kind of grain tea. They separate the “tea” (called wort) from the grains, boil it with hops, cool it down, and ferment it with yeast. The hops first enter the picture during that second part—boiling the wort—and may be added at any point thereafter.
Brewing with fresh hops presents a special challenge to breweries because they behave differently than dried hops. Brewers have to be careful if they boil them not to pull out too many vegetative flavors. That’s why many breweries only add them later, steeping them in the cooling wort, or soaking them in the finished beer (a process called dry-hopping). If a brewery wants to get a fresh hop beer out in the market quickly after harvest, they’ll add the hops to finished beer, letting them soak for a day or few, and have them in customers’ hands almost immediately. There are many approaches.
Below are a few of the most common ways breweries make fresh hop beers—and one unusual technique, as well.
- Full immersion. Brewers begin adding the hops to the kettle during boiling, and use them throughout the process. After the boil, they let them steep in the hot wort before cooling it down, and then add a final dose to finished beer after fermentation.
- Hot side soak. Some brewers use a single infusion in hot wort after the boil, often cooling the wort just a bit before adding the hops. This technique pulls both flavors and aromas from the fresh hops without subjecting them to a long boil. A brewery may or may not finish them off with fresh hops after fermentation, which happens days later and requires another trip to the hop fields.
- Cold side soak. Some brewers brew and ferment an entire beer and only add the fresh hops before the beer is ready to be packaged . This has the advantage of shortening the length of time between the use of hops and serving the beer. However, the technique largely draws aromas more than flavors from the hops.
- Liquid nitrogen. The final technique, pioneered by Breakside Brewery in Portland, is definitely exotic. Brewers use the “cold side soak” technique, but with a twist. Once they return to the brewery with a bag of fresh hops, they put them in a canister with liquid nitrogen, instantly freezing them. Brewers then grind the frozen hops, which shatter like broken glass, to expose the lupulin glands. That’s where all the wonderful essential oils that scent and flavor beer are located. The frozen hops go into a sack and then into a tank of finished beer.
There’s no “best” way to make fresh hop beers. Each of these techniques has its fans, and each can produce excellent beer. They produce slightly different hoppy expressions, so it’s up to the brewer to integrate their process with the other ingredients and style of beer to produce the effect they desire.