We’re always pretty well-connected to our hop growers since we need their cool stuff (hops) to make our beer taste good. In early fall, though, we become very well-connected to our hop growers as we coordinate multiple company-wide efforts to pick up, process, brew and package thousands of pounds of fresh hops from all over the Pacific Northwest. This time of year, our whole facility smells like an IPA, every van has a layer of powdery yellow dust on the floor and even our clothes smell like hops.
This change in pace for the brewery coincides with a change in the weather. Shorter days, cooler mornings, warm, breezy nights. Perfect Fresh Hop Beer Weather. This year, we’re releasing our biggest ever suite of Fresh Hop beers. We’ve spent months carefully considering the profile and origin of our featured hops, from Fresh Mosaic to Estate Grown Crosby Comet Fresh Hops, planning our releases and dialing in recipes to ensure that the hops express the flavors we want in the final beer. With 7 major Fresh Hop releases this year – 6 in package and one draft only at the Pub – it’s a lot of coordination. And we’ll have enough Fresh Fresh to go around.
We take hops seriously and we take Fresh Hops even more seriously. That’s why we put our fresh hops on the hot side of the brew, rather than adding them in the fermentation stage. When we add our Fresh Hops, picked and delivered from the farm within a few hours, they go directly into a hop back during whirlpool – allowing us to extract hop flavors that are harder to achieve with cold-side hopping alone. Introducing Fresh Hops during fermentation (cold side) can introduce oxygen – giving some fresh hop beers a green, grassy taste. You won’t find those common off flavors in our line-up since we hop with our green matter in the first part of the brew.
Since we’re not brewing beers ahead of harvest, once the hops come off the field, we have a lot of work to do very quickly. Our brewers and our packaging team are currently hard at work getting these beers into production. You’ll see the first Fresh Hop Fort George release in mid-September, with more to come all the way through the end of the month.
You can pre-order cans in the online store or stop by the Pub on the day of the release for the Freshest Fresh this side of a hop farm.
FRESH IPA
Wednesday, 9/17
West Coast IPA with Fresh Strata Hops from Goschie Farms.
Bright, zesty, clean. From the bine, to the can, to your taste buds in just a matter of days, Fresh IPA is best consumed FRESH.
FRESH PIEROGI
Thursday, 9/18
Hazy Double IPA collaboration with Hop Butcher For The World. Fresh Strata Hops
Just like a Fresh Pierogi, except we swapped the dough for pilsner malt, and we swapped the potato for Fresh Strata Hops.
FRESH HOP FIELDS OF GREEN
Saturday 9/20
Hazy IPA with Fresh Chinook from Coleman Ag.
We drove a truck load of Fresh Chinook from Coleman Agriculture in Willamette Valley right to the open hop back on the brewery floor – we’re so close we can almost see the hops from our backyard.
CoHOPERATIVE ALE
Saturday, 9/27
Fresh Hop Ale with a variety of hops from our community. Draft Only.
Every Wednesday after Labor Day, we gather in the courtyard of our Pub in Astoria to pick hops off the bine for our favorite and longest running seasonal beer: CoHoperative Ale. Every year, friends and family from all over Oregon and Washington drop off between 80 and 120 pounds of backyard hop harvests to be processed and dumped directly into the hop back. We’ve been brewing CoHop for nearly two decades and we have friends and neighbors who’ve been contributing their hyper-local hops since the beginning.
SEDIMENTS OF MEMORY
Wednesday, 9/24
Fresh Hop Hazy IPA collaboration with Ruse Brewing. Fresh Citra Hops.
Fruity, full, barely bitter peach-colored Hazy IPA with a slightly sweet finish. Brewed at Fort George with over 600 pounds of Fresh Citra Hops from Coleman Agriculture.
FRESH HOP MIRRORED REALITIES
Saturday, 9/27
Fresh Hop West Coast IPA with Fresh Comet Hops from Crosby Hop Farm.
Straight from the farm, to the hop back, to the hot side of this unparalleled West Coast IPA faster than you can draw all homeomorphically irreducible trees of size n=10. It’s a glimpse into an alternate reality, using the newest, freshest hop science to create the beer of the future.
MOSAIC ARCHITECT
Wednesday, 10/1
Fresh Hop West Coast IPA collaboration with Ghost Town Brewing. Fresh Mosaic Hops.
Sorcerers of madness, Ghost Town and Fort George, this year renew their profane bond of friendship forged over the fires of their irreverent love of fresh hops and Black Sabbath to create MOSAIC Architect, a crisp, aromatic IPA with Fresh Mosaic Hops.
See Event Listing:
Fresh Pierogi with Hop Butcher for the World
