Wet hop beers

Cool article (not by me) in today's SF Chronicle about wet hop beers. Makes me thirsty.

Celebrating harvest is nothing new, but lately brewers have discovered a novel way to reconnect their beer to the land from which its ingredients grow: by adding freshly picked hops to the brew kettle, usually within 24 hours of harvesting. These beers are known as fresh hop beers, wet hop beers, harvest ales or "Lupulin Nouveau," in a nod to Beaujolais Nouveau wine and to lupulin, the sticky, fragrant yellow powder that clings to hop flowers....

When hops are picked, they contain 80 percent water but are slowly heated in kilns to reduce the moisture to one-tenth of the original moisture and then packed tightly into bales for storage and shipping. You can smell the beautiful hop aromas burning off during kilning that are simply lost in the process. With fresh hop beers, whole unkilned hops are used - another similarity to Beaujolais Nouveau, which uses whole clusters of grapes in fermentation. When brewing with the whole, fresh hop cones, subtle herbal, vegetal and earthy aromas and flavors are extracted that can't be produced any other way.

Labels: beer