Fresh Hop Beers Go to Eleven
Nigel Tufnel: “Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? …What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?Marty DiBergi: “Put it up to eleven?” Nigel Tufnel: “Eleven, exactly. One louder. These go to eleven.”
The thing about adding more is at a certain point you don’t get more. We learned this when breweries were putting eight pounds per barrel of hops in their beers and making them taste like lawn clippings. To get more, you have to add different. And here I give you fresh hop beers. They offer a dimension of flavor that is different from regular kilned hops. Trying to describe them is hard because rather than just reaching for another adjective, we grope toward different realms of experience. Drinking a very good fresh hop beer is to experience synesthesia and encounter the taste of iridescent green.
I was going to include this observation in a longer post I was working on, but I don’t want it to get lost. I entered this post a bit fancifully, but I’m pointing to something real in the experience of these beers. The flavors fresh hops contain are not on the same flavor continuum with regular hops—it’s not just like the difference between Citra and Krush. They have their own, strange quality. They are a different category of flavor.
One of the best examples of this was Wayfinder’s Outlaw Country, a sessionable corn lager made with fresh Mt. Hood hops. It was not a hurricane of hop flavor like the ones I had recently at Great Notion, but rather a little, unassuming lager. Mt. Hood hops are an under-utilized treasure bred from Hallertau Mittelfrüh back in the 1980s to replace German hops. Mt. Hood is an herbal hop, as adept at spicing a lager as her mom. In their fresh-hop form, they’re somehow more herbal, though. The intensity level in Outlaw Country was not greater than a kilned-hop version would have been, but drinking that beer was like experiencing it in three dimensions rather than two.
Or, to borrow the words of the theoretical physicist Nigel Tufnel, fresh hop beers go to eleven.