Do Fresh Hops Contain Multiple Markers of “Fresh” Aroma?
Tuesday night, Ezra Johnson-Greenough hosted a fresh-hop tasting. Five socially-distanced tasters gathered in his driveway and worked our way through more than a dozen beers. (Sign of the time: they all came in cans and not a single one was bottled.) Ezra will have more on that soon, but I wanted to mention a curious finding that emerged over the course of the evening.
The flavor and aroma of fresh, unkilned hops and conventionally dried hops differ. Fresh hops, whatever their variety, have a particular flavor I have yet to be able to characterize. We all agreed it was “green,” but that’s a dodge, a placeholder for a better term. And, it turns out, it may not even be referring to the same flavor.
What we think of as a particular flavor in food is usually a composite of multiple compounds. “Blueberry,” for example, may be comprised of more than a hundred terpenes, aldehydes, alcohols, and other compounds. Poke your nose into a tuft or grass or vegetable garden, particularly on a warm day, and you’ll encounter sharp, intense, green aromas. They evoke essential oils in my mind—all brassy top notes, sharp and clear. That’s what I seek in fresh hop beers.
If I stop and examine my experience, though, I discover other scents. Plants have an astringent, fibrous scent that comes from their cells rather than oils. Sometimes they send out bass notes of spice, wood, and earth as well. Scent is a rich composite, and we tend to filter and compress the experience, focusing on the bits that delight us.
As we were tasting the beers on Tuesday, we were all responding differently to the beers. I was laser-focused on the oily, resinous aspect. But Bill Night, that now-reclusive avatar of fresh hop enthusiasm, was drawn to the planty, chlorophyll quality. I’m neutral to negative about that element, and so some of his favorite beers didn’t wow me.
There is overlap, of course, and the best, most intense examples of fresh hop beers impressed us all. Ex Novo’s Eliot IPA was a tour de force of freshness, immediately evident in the nose, and saturated with that essential oil distillate of hoppiness only fresh lupulin can deliver. It wasn’t Bill’s fave, but it was in the top group.
The beers we sampled came from the first wave of harvests, and many breweries used Strata, an early hop. It’s an unusual hop in that it contains many more of those “bass” notes. I get black tea, sandalwood, and tree bark from fresh Strata. I appreciate these flavors, and in some of the beers they painted a delicious background layer. Yet because Strata lacks the bright top notes, beers featuring it rarely hit my sweet spot.
We suffer from the absence of words to describe these experiences—even the most basic catch-all term that points to fresh hops. I don’t expect we’ll find a remedy anything soon, but it’s worth at least exploring these sensations so we understand their different dimensions. Fresh hop aromas and flavors are a composite.
Oh, and of the fourteen beers we tried, four impressed me, and two really impressed me (Ex Novo and Zoiglhaus). If you can find these, buy and drink them ASAP:
Ex Novo Eliot, for reasons already noted;
Zoiglhaus Kölsch, which has a subtle, tangy-herb freshness that works tremendously well with the base beer;
Baerlic Punk Rock Time, which has a sharp, bright tropicality; and
Breakside Fresh Guy, a hoppy speedball in which the fresh hops add a zippy undercurrent.