While I am an avid beer drinker, I don't necessarily consider myself an avid hops drinker. But lately my days and nights have been consumed with hops. Wet hops, dry hops, hops, hops, hops. I journeyed into the world of "hoppy" beers, and I think I have come to a conclusion: It doesn't matter much what kind of hops are used or where they are from; it really boils down to who brews them. I guess the same is true for wine. Yes, different terroir and different grapes produce different flavors and styles. But in the wrong hands, those grapes just make bad wines — likely with funny names like Fat Bastard or Marilyn Merlot.
In its truest form, beer is based on the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot or "Purity Law" of 1516, which lists beer's ingredients as water, barley, yeast, and hops. That's four ingredients total, and hops are just one. Used in beer, hops (or really, the female flower cone of the hop plant) are the stabilizing agent and a flavor provider. The hops work in beer because they balance the sweetness of the malt with a bitter flavor. They can add flowery, citrus, fruit, or herbal notes and aromas too…Ugh. That makes me think of wine and all the things you have to know to drink wine. I don't want to ruin beer drinking.
Geographic Hops
Some of the beers I tasted in my hophead journey got their hops from a single geographic spot — very much like varietals of wine in specific demarcations. I guess Sam Adams wants a demarcation for their Imperial Pilsner, because they hand-selected the Noble Bavarian hops in the Hallertau region of Bavaria. That is a lot of effort for a $9.99 four-pack (which my friend Walt said he’d pay $9.99 not to drink). It was too bitter and left a terrible aftertaste that felt like a wire brush I could not remove.
Great Divide Brewing offers a Fresh Hop Pale Ale with hops it claims were overnighted from the Pacific Northwest to Denver. For $6.99 a pint, it provides a nice golden brown color and straw head with a decent flavor, but no terrible aftertaste.
Hoppy Otter, brewed in Devon, England, was another story. Its bottle told me it contained five of the Pacific Northwest's most citrus-flavored, aromatic whole-cone hops. . . blah blah. Yeah, it has a citrus flavor; one that took some time to pinpoint. Then I realized: It was citrus-scented dish soap. The beer also poured flat and was generally pretty undrinkable. I was sad because the bottle and name brought back happy memories of Otter Pops, only to crash down with a flavor that did not even rise to the level of Sir Issac Lime.
Wet Hops
There's also a big trend to use wet hops right now, which basically means that instead of drying the hops, brewers take the hops from the field and brew them within 24 hours. This is, supposedly, to seal in flavor that can disappear as the hops dry. Great Divide's Fresh Hop Ale was…well, it was okay. But it certainly didn't have a better flavor than plenty of beers that use dry hops.
Founders Brewing created a wet-hop beer to replace their Oktoberfest because, as one of the brewery's owners, Dave Engbers, said of the Oktoberfest in a recent interview: "Everyone was like 'We hate that beer.'" I imagine Dave is going to hear that about this harvest ale, too. It has an interesting Belgium lace to its head and is light in color, but it smells very much like a musty orange. If this is what experimenting with hops is going to do for citrus flavor, I would rather have a Corona with a lime or a Belgium white with an orange slice.
As I journeyed further into hops, I tired of seeing bottles called Hop Devil Ale or Hop Toad IPA or Hoptimus Prime — yes, this was actually the name of a terrible beer I tasted last week. (I think that drinking beer out of my old Transformers would have been better.) The names of beers alone have kept me away from a lot of micro beers in general. Hop Hog, Hop Scotch…I feel like Kermit might sell out any day to a microbrewery. Here’s my belief: like wine, if you have to have a catchy, cutsey name and label, your beer probably sucks.
Delicious Hops
Back to the whole reason I started this journey: I'd run into an old friend, Len, at my liquor store. Len works in the beer business; his father is a winemaker. He was at the liquor store looking for Sierra Nevada Harvest Ales, and I decided to help him. We finally found them — they were in the fridge with the 40-ounce Olde English, probably because they were in 24-ounce bottles.
I trust Len to steer me right, so I followed his lead and picked up three bottles of the Sierra Nevada Southern Hemisphere Harvest Fresh Hop Ale. (I know this is a long name, but it is at least descriptive and not cute.) The Southern Hemisphere is one of three beers from Sierra Nevada's Harvest Collection. It's Sierra Nevada's 12th year of putting out a harvest beer, and their experience shows. The hops in this particular beer are picked in New Zealand, dried, and immediately flown to Chico, California, where they enter the brewing process, hence the fresh-hop name. The beer has a nice golden hue and a good sturdy head of straw color. Moreover, the taste is delicious — not too bitter, and just enough flavor not to overpower. It has none of the terrible aftertaste that several of the other hophead beers have. It even paired well with Chinese food, which is notoriously difficult.
The only negative to being turned onto Sierra Nevada's harvest beers is that I missed the other two made this year: The Chico Estate, which was brewed with wet hops grown right at the brewery, and the Cascade and Centennial, which had hops from the Yakima Valley in Eastern Washington, also brewed wet. Next summer, I will be the first in line when they come out. Maybe I am falling for the hop craze after all. But if you see me drinking something called Autobot Ale, please shoot me.
Tyler Wilson drinks beer. Email him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Hops photo from lexnger via Flickr (Creative Commons), "The Brew" photograph from Flickmor via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Bottle" photograph from istockphoto.com.
