Season of the Wet Hop

Fall is here.  To a great portion of the country, especially up here in Alaska, fall is harvest time.  Time to hunt, gather, and store your food for the long cold winter.  The hop farming business has a similar schedule, September is time to harvest the hop fields.  Since fresh hops have a quick expiration date, most are dried then vacuum sealed or turned into pellets to ensure we have freshly brewed beer all year long.  HOWEVER there is a small batch of hops that are not dried and packaged but instead sent to those who ask to make Fresh Hopped or Wet Hopped ales.  The wet hops need to be used within 24 hours (quick expiration date) of being picked which makes October not only fall, but the season of the Wet Hop.

Are Fresh Hopped ales worth all the trouble?  Well, that's really up to you.  Wet hops do add definite variety to ale recipes.  When done right, they add a fresh, grassy, hoppier taste and have a strong hop bouquet.  Sierra Nevada is credited with introducing this style to craft brewers in 1996 with their Northern Hemisphere Harvest ale.  Since then it has become a phenomenon.  In the Northwest, the arrival of the posters for all the Wet Hop Festivals is one of the signs of fall.  In Portland, the Green Dragon chalkboard is filled with breweries' wet hop/ fresh hop concoctions.  This time of year I definitely miss living in the Northwest.  Oh well, when I'm in Portland next week I am going to concentrate on fall seasonals and maybe bring a few home with me!

Here's a few to look out for in your local market.
Merry Fall!

What's in a name?

What's in a name?  That which we call a brew by any other name would taste as sweet.

Nano brewery, craft brewery, microbrewery: how can you keep them all straight.  For the average beer consumer, the distinction between these "types" of breweries doesn't matter much; as long as they make good beer, right?!  But let's try to get all these terms straight.

The largest term is craft brewery.  A craft brewery puts out annually less than 6 million barrels of beer a year.  Less than 25% of the brewery is owned by an "alcoholic beverage industry member": meaning it's independently owned.  The beers produced are innovative and mostly malt-based.  The term craft brewery is used to distinguish itself from a macro-brewery, like Coors (over 20 million barrels per year).  Sierra Nevada brews 780,000 barrels annually.

A microbrewery is a craft brewery with lower output, producing less than 15,000 barrels a year.  With trends moving to local beers, some say the bar should instead be at producing less than 50,000 barrels a year.  Ninkasi Brewing Company, for example produced 32,000 barrels last year but is considered a microbrewery by most.  Smuttynose Brewing Co is New Hampshire produced 20,000 barrels last year.  Allagash Brewing Co in Portland, ME produces 4,000 barrels a year.  Microbreweries are usually community-oriented and not largely distributed.

A brewpub is a pub or restaurant that brews on-site.  Pizza Port Brewing Co in California is a brewpub. 

A nano-brewery has less than a 4 barrel brew system.  They are also referred to as large-scale homebrewers.  Most micro and craft breweries started as nano-breweries; some stay small with no desire to grow.  Ambacht Brewing Co in Hillsboro, OR and Hess Brewing Co in San Diego, CA are both nano-breweries.

Scaling an Icy Mountain then Drinking a Torpedo

Scaling an icy mountain then drinking a Torpedo, who else had an excellent Sunday?  Jonah, Brian Korth (works at the USFS with Jonah in the Wildlife Dept.), and I headed out this Sunday to scope out Power Creek Trail for visitors we're having at the end of the month.  Well, to put it lightly, it's still quite snowy.  We went from 4 feet of snow on the trail, to trying to climb up the face of the valley, to walking along (and in!) the creek. 

After the hike we cracked open a Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA.  Torpedo is a great beer, a true hop punch.  Sierra Nevada invented their own contraption for dry-hopping to pack as much hop flavor as possible.  This is a serious beer for serious "need-a-beer" times.