Fremont Taps Its First Wet Hop Beer of the Season

Fremont's urban beer garden.

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Fremont Brewing is tapping their first kegs of wet hop beer today at 4 p.m. in their taproom , kicking off the season with theirmade with centennial hops.

Fremont makes some of the best fresh hop beer in the city and this Field to Ferment series won a silver last year at the Great American Beer Festival, the country's largest beer competition. If you're curious what fresh hop beers taste like Fremont's are a good place start.

What is a fresh hop beer? Well if you've been reading Slog lately you already know, but for the fresh hop ignorant: fresh hop beers are made by using freshly picked hops, instead of their dried and cured counterparts. These are wonderfully unique beers that give us a taste of fleeting fresh flavors. They must be made within 24 hours of the hop harvest and once the beers go stale within just a few weeks of being packaged.

Thanks to Washington's Yakima Valley, where more hops are grown than anywhere else on the continent, Seattle is probably the best place in the world to try these fantastic and fleeting beers. So get out and try them, because you soon won't be able to.

Fremont's Field to Ferment series is one of my favorite fresh hop beers of the season because each beer is made with one single hop. That gives us the ability to taste what each hop varietal tastes like by itself. Fremont plans to follow the centennial release with simcoe and citra fresh hop beers in the following weeks. By the first of October we should be able to taste each of these individually hopped beers side-by-side.

Some breweries refer to these beers as fresh hop beers, others refer to them as wet hop beers (because an uncured hop is full of water). I use both phrases interchangeably but lean towards wet hop because Cloudburst Brewing's Steve Luke, the best hop brewer in the city, likes the wet term and I like Steve's beer.

"I use wet hop because wet hop to me is synonymous with green hops—unprocessed, raw hops. Fresh hops connotes freshly kilned hops—ala Sierra Nevada Celebration using the first kilned cascade of the years—which means those hops are processed," Luke said in an e-mail.

So that means to Luke, a fresh hop refers to a beer made with freshly dried hops, whereas a wet hop beer is made with hops that never go through the drying process.

But many breweries use fresh hop and wet hop interchangeably so I do as well. Questions of semantics aside, a fresh hop beer should be very evident as soon as you smell it. It should be so fresh that it literally tastes green, a quality that brewers refer to as "vegetal." They should also be less aggressively bitter than a standard IPA and will often have grassy or dank, weed-like flavors.

Centennial is a classic Yakima Valley hop that was widely used in the 1990's. It is still used today in many pale ales and IPAs, although it isn't as beloved as some of the newer hop varietals like citra or mosiac that offer vibrant fruit-forward aromas.

Centennial can give floral and citrus aromas to beers, although brewing with wet hops can often bring out surprising flavors. Cloudburst Brewing's centennial wet hop beer tasted like a juicy watermelon this year—what will Fremont's taste like? Let's go find out.