Farm Fresh Hops
We once dreamed of grow hops in the back of the original Off Color brewery and build a canopy to provide some shade during late summer and early fall. We obtained a couple rhizomes from a local home brewer (who claims we named Scurry after him because his name is S. Curry) and planted them in some sawed-in-half used bourbon barrels. Over the summer of 2014, the vines shot up the trellis along the wall and began to make the horizontal climb over our patio. When September came we picked enough hops off the vine to make our first whole firkin of wet hopped beer.*
Wet hopped beers are made in late summer to early fall when the hops are picked fresh off the vines and rushed to a local brewery to be utilized in a brew a few hours later. Without proper drying and processing, the wet hops rot extraordinarily quick. The freshly harvested cones are full of water (about 90% by weight) and are also exothermic, meaning they give off heat since they are still alive. The high water content and heat exuded by the cones create the perfect condition for the hops to rot in a matter of hours if not stored properly. Additionally, the freshly picked hops tend to lose most of their uniquely alluring qualities with 24 hours pretty much no matter what you do.
After a couple weeks of conditioning our first every Aqua Predator firkin, we decided the perfect place to debut this one-of-a-kind firkin was at a bigger accounts featuring Off Color beers for the month. The whole brewing crew showed up for it’s tapping. Only problem was the first ever firkin of Aqua Predator did not make it on the menu for the night or had signs or any type of promotion anywhere else. So we did the most reasonable thing we could… we tried to drink the whole firkin ourselves. Our task of drinking like 90 beers was aided by the fresh lemongrass and hop vapors making this version of our farmhouse ale extra crushable. The final tab had us in the 50 beer range, not a complete success but a valiant effort from our small crew on hand.
The following year we decided to scale up from the first firkin and brew a 20 barrel batch. We contacted our hop guys in the Pacific Northwest, but they advised us against shipping cross country as the hops will certainly rot in transit. They strongly urged us to look for a local source. So our friends at Hop Head Farm in Michigan were just starting to get some yields from their newly planted field and were offering to deliver wet hops picked at the farm in Michigan in the morning to breweries in Chicago in the early afternoon. Being a fairly new operation, we applauded their efforts when the 100 pounds of wet hops we ordered showed up jammed into the back seat of a Honda Civic.
The next step was finding the best method for infusing the fresh hop flavor into the brew. Through the last few years, we developed a process that utilizes a makeshift hopback so we can run the wort through a bed of wet hops on their way to the fermenter. We purchased a large rolling tank and dropped the wet hops inside. The wort from the kettle is pumped into the tank and then gravity drained into a buffer tank that is pumped through the heat exchanger on the way to the fermenter. We weren’t sure if we’d remember how to do it next year, so we drew a less-than-to-scale picture on the back the brew sheet as a reminder. The stick figures probably were not necessary, but we chose to include them anyway so we knew where to stand while we drank some beers during the extra hour this process added to our brewday.
The whole process is so time consuming and difficult that every year we say we are not going to do it again next year. But then a year goes by and we forget how hard it is (but conveniently remember how good the beer tastes) and we end up doing it again… every…year.
Our goal is to have all of our wet hopped farmhouse ale consumed within a few weeks to a month of packaging as wet hopped beers are best when consumed super fresh as the unique character of the wet hop additions fades quickly with time. We hope you get to enjoy an Aqua Predator this season and if you won’t help us drink it, we will likely try to drink it all ourselves.
*We have since killed those hop plants and now the planters are filled with costmary for Prisoners Dilemma . The costmary plants look so much like weeds, gardeners once cut them down and threw them in bags to take them away.
**No one was burned but we found out things can still get really hot even through thick gloves.
