Notes on Fresh Hop Season 2025
I actually began this post a couple weeks ago and am just returning to it this morning. My tally of fresh hop beer tasted in 2025 currently stands at a clean three dozen (mostly half-pints—I am an oldster). The list in the second sentence is longer now and extends to Astoria, where I spent the weekend.
Fresh hop season is now on full tilt here in the Pacific Northwest. In recent days, I have visited a number of breweries, and they’re all in full swing: Level (6 fresh hop beers), Breakside (5), Great Notion (5), pFriem (5), Wayfinder (2), Little Beast (4), Von Ebert (1 - one?, come on Von Ebert), and StormBreaker (10). On Saturday, Sally and I visited Great Notion’s original brewery and pub. For those of you who don’t know Portland, it’s on Northeast Alberta Street, one of the most vibrant neighborhoods in the city. Originally owned by a defunct brewery called the Mash Tun, Great Notion’s brewery is a lovely indoor/outdoor space, with a beer garden in the back. As a bonus, Matt’s Barbecue, one of the city’s best, runs the kitchen and offers tremendous barbecued tacos. Although I am on record with this view, it bears repeating: ain’t no combo in the world that beats beer and tacos.
When we arrived, the garden was packed. A beautiful night, perhaps 75 degrees, it was the picture of American Gemütlichkeit. In such a setting, I’d have been content with nothing more than a bottle of Pacifico, but no—Great Notion had an impressive lineup of beers using fresh Strata, Citra, Centennial, Krush, and Simcoe. My favorite was Van Beer, which used fresh hop Strata for a massive dose of herbal, green cannabis up front, tailing off to juicy strawberry at the finish. It was a perfect late-summer night in mid-September, and Sally and I observed on the sweetness of that moment, knowing evenings like that were almost gone.
It put me in a reflective mood, and three features of this late summer/early fall came into focus. They all related to the fresh hop season, which as you can see is really coming into its own right now.
As an important piece of context, it’s important to remember that fresh hop season, as such, is really less than twenty years old. American fresh hop beers go back to the mid- to late-1990s, but they weren’t common until the late aughts. In my first post on this blog about fresh hop beers in 2007, I was staggered that Oregon’s breweries made thirty of them. Now they make hundreds. (The breweries I mentioned above, a tiny fraction of the breweries in the state, had 38 on tap among them.) In 2008, Oregon breweries poured fresh-hop beers at the GABF as a demonstration of their growing popularity. By 2009, some breweries had figured out how to make them reliably, and by 2010 or so the stigma of blending fresh and kilned hops had fallen away. Somewhere in the early teens—less than fifteen years ago—breweries had figured out how to work with those unusual hops, and their best practices were being shared across the Pacific NW.*
Now we have a six-week season for these beers. It begins around the last week of August and runs through the first week of October. (Fresh hop beers are available and still good another couple weeks, but there’s something about the October rains that ends their cultural salience). That’s great for breweries, who enjoy extending the summer beer drinking season by 50%. And unlike summer, when people drink more beer but use it as a chill-enhanced for relaxing activities, fresh hop season is all about the beer.
I was speaking to Charles Porter at Little Beast yesterday, and he echoed what I have been hearing for years: breweries can make massive batches of these beers relative to their production, and they sail out of the brewery. It is an exhilarating time of year in the Pacific Northwest. If I had one message to the rest of the rest of the country, which remains fresh-hop skeptical, it’s this: these beers are amazing, and you can't properly appreciate them or this frenzy unless you visit Oregon or Washington in September. (Obviously you should choose Oregon.)
They’re Dialed In
I have no doubt that some brewery somewhere in Oregon has made a bad fresh hop beer this season —but I haven’t found it [Ed. note: since starting this post, I found one!]. I have now tasted a lot of fresh hop beers this season—indeed, my sample has met statistical significance. I expect to find a bad fresh hop beer as often as I find a bad IPA—very rarely. (By “bad,” I mean marred by unintended off-flavors.) In my current batch, that’s an 3% “bad” rate. (Full disclosure: five or so were “meh,” and another five-ish were good beers with little or no appreciable “fresh” flavor.) Among Oregon’s population of fresh hop beers, the continuum basically runs from “no appreciable fresh hop flavor” to “amazing fresh hop flavor.” Beers made badly are outliers.
I’ve written quite a bit about fresh hop beers and how they’re made, and different philosophies definitely govern how to make them. The big divide is whether to add them to the hot side, usually at whirlpool, or the cold side during fermentation/conditioning. Despite what the partisans say, both techniques produce excellent beer, but the methods do change the character somewhat. Here’s a section from my Craft Beer & Brewing article:
“We see deeper, resinous, heavy polyphenol flavors on the hot side,” says Ruse’s [Shaun] Kalis, a hot-side partisan. “You get more of that watermelon candy, melon-heavy flavor from the cold side.”
Fellow hot-sider [Steve] Luke at Cloudburst also favors the “leafy, chewy, chlorophyllic flavor” this method produces. “You need some chew,” he says. “You need a little piece of leaf in your teeth.” (He is being poetic—no leaves make it into a can.)
It does appear to be the case that more plant-like, resinous sensations come from using fresh hops on the hot side, while brighter, fruitier notes come from the cold side.
I don’t actually know how many people out there understand this divide, but I do think regular Oregon drinkers are familiar enough with fresh hop beers that they know what they like. They aren’t out to try fresh hops because they’re new or strange anymore—they know what to expect. It’s no longer a season fueled purely by novelty and discovery. Now drinkers want fresh hop beers because they have that distinctive flavor they know, recognize, and love. Much like our Saturday night was sweetened by knowing it was a rare, fleeting experience, our frenzy for fresh hop beers comes from knowing they won’t last.
Breakside’s Fresh Family, with a sidecar of the same beer as a “Director’s Cut.”
At Level
Fresh hop selfie!
A Budding Tradition
This was the first year I detected a slightly different fresh hop vibe: familiarity rather than novelty. In those early years, drinkers roamed the pubs like bears during a salmon run, eyes scanning for movement. We consulted social media for any new releases, and tried to direct traffic to the winners we’d discovered.
Ubiquity has changed that equation, but not in a bad way. To switch harvest metaphor from salmon to produce, it reminds me of my efforts to find a good peach. There’s something about a juicy, sweet peach that tastes like the end of summer. Peaches don’t save or ship well, so they’re one of the few fruits we can’t find year-round. Buy them too early and they’re hard and starchy. You really have to wait until they ripen on the branch to get a good one. For a few glorious weeks, it’s cobbler, pie, dribble-down-your-chin season. Nothing marks the end of summer as distinctly in my mind.
That’s what fresh hop season is becoming. It’s still fun to seek out good ones, but not because you’re looking for something new. In fact, now I’m looking for that wonderful, recognizable taste of the harvest. If peach season signals the end of summer, the iridescent green flavor of a fresh hop tastes like autumn. When I was sitting in the gloaming of a September evening at Great Notion, I was looking for the reassurance of that familiar flavor, not something exotic and new. Finding it brought that evening in alignment with early Septembers past. Decades hence, this is what fresh hop season will feel like: an immutable part of the fall ritual. It’s already starting.
Go enjoy yourselves, fresh hop fans, and tell us about your experience. Not much time left!
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* It’s not easy to brew with fresh hops, and this is the reason the beers are almost entirely a product of the Pacific Northwest. The learning curve is sharp, and if you only make one or two of these beers a year and don’t have the benefit of tasting dozens of them and talking to other brewers about how to make them, they’re going to be hit and miss. Most Americans have never tasted good fresh-hop beers either, for the same reason. When I’m outside this region and I talk to drinkers about fresh-hop beers, I usually get a negative reaction. They think the idea is cool, but the beers don’t impress. You gotta come to Oregon or Washington in mid-late September if you want to see the full potential of these beers. This may sound like boosterism, but it’s really true.