Oregon Beer Award Fresh Hop Winners and the Lessons of the Season

The Oregon Beer Awards (OBAs) convened their annual seasonal judging of fresh hop beers over the weekend and announced the winners today. I was fortunate enough to participate, which gave me a great snapshot of this moment in time. Combined with about six weeks of sampling, I have a fairly good sense of where the state of the craft has landed.

The competition hints at how big a deal fresh hop season is. Forty-seven breweries sent 137 beers to be judged. If the numbers represented every brewery making fresh hop beers and all the beers they made, that would be impressive—one in five breweries making nearly a gross of beers. But of course not every brewery submits beer to competitions, and many of the early fresh hop beers were already out of their window of perfect “ripeness” and so didn’t get entered.

I would guess that half the breweries in the state make at least one of these beers—and a number do only make one. But many go crazy, so the number of beers they ultimately make is, what, over 400? 500? Every year I try to make the case that things are just different here during fresh hop season, and those numbers help you appreciate the impact.

The OBAs judges beer in three categories, hazy pales and IPAs, regular pales and IPAs, and other styles. When the competition started, the “other” styles was a small, almost experimental category. That has really changed. This year I noticed so many different styles getting the fresh hop treatment, mainly lagers but assorted other styles as well. At the OBAs this year, 42 beers were entered in that category, exceeding hazies (33).

I think those are now some of the best examples of fresh hop beers out there. Brewing with fresh hops comes with a learning curve, and that’s true with different styles. It’s a tricky dance figuring out how to inflect a delicate beer with the flavor of fresh hops while keeping the nature of the base style intact. Several years ago, breweries defaulted to overwhelming the beers with hops to ensure the fresh hop came through. Not only did that unbalance the beer, but it added a chalky, “grippy” plantlike quality that’s fine in an IPA, but not a pilsner. Moreover, and somewhat counter-intuitively, it turns out that delicate beers are sometimes better showcases for fresh hops because the other flavors and aromas don’t interfere as much.

Despite the fact that there were only about half as many hazy IPAs in this year’s competition, they were stronger than the regular IPAs as a category (at least in my flight). I don’t want to draw any grand theories about why this may have been, but hazy IPAs have historically been weaker across the board, with many mediocre examples, so this was a nice switch. Once again, I was impressed with the degree to which an “Oregon hazy” seems to be emerging (it may be West Coast- or Northwest-wide, too). They are less sweet, have less body, and contain a bit more typical bitterness, and that all seemed to work very well with the fresh hopping.

The competition tends to select for hops harvested later in the season—though that’s not true when lagers are in the mix. As a result, Citra and Mosaic did well in the IPAs categories, along with Krush, interestingly, while Stratas, which are an awesome fresh hop variety, were tired by the time we got them. I was again really impressed with Lórien hops, this time in green form—that is just going to be a badass cultivar. Earlier in the year, I was also impressed with beers made with Tettnangers (which are actually probably Fuggle) and Centennials. Those Oregon Cents were just juicy as hell, all orange sherbet and honeydew. The Citras, no surprise, have also been lovely. I did have one Cascade-hopped IPA in a flight this weekend. That hop is now a real rarity among fresh hop beers, and it was clear why. It has a very old-school palate that just tastes dated. Nevertheless, it is a wonderful hop and objectively, the beer was delightful. Perhaps in a few years it won’t taste dated so much as “classic.”

Below are your winners for this year’s fresh hop categories. StormBreaker was back again—it is one of the perennial powerhouses of fresh hops—and actually scored with the same beer that won an award last year. It was an outlier, though. The usual suspects, Breakside, Great Notion, Ruse, and Sunriver, failed to win a single medal. One of the big surprises was Binary’s pilsner, which took gold. It’s a two-year-old brewery from Beaverton, and it beat some impressive competition. Nice to see new brewery Oak Union (2023) make the list, as well.

Fresh Hop Pales and IPAs (62 entries)

Gold. Living Häus Dino (Citra, collab with Ghost Town)
Silver. Baerlic Fresh Hop Splishy IPA (Krush/HBC 586)
Bronze. Bend Brewing Fresh Hop Mega Pint (Mosaic )

Fresh Hop Hazy Pales and IPAs (33 entries)

Gold. Von Ebert Fresh Hop Sector 7 (Krush/HBC 586)
Silver. Fort George Fresh Hop Fields of Green (Citra)
Bronze. StormBreaker Set Freshies To Haze

Other Fresh Hop Beers (42 entries)

Gold. Binary Cones of Lórien (pilsner)
Silver. Hetty Alice Fresh Hopped Italian Pils (Lórien)
Bronze. Oak Union Fresh Hop Green Idol (Strata, West Coast Pilsner)