How StormBreaker Won Fresh Hop Season
All photos courtesy StormBreaker Brewing.
I will tell you a secret about how beer writers think. We have certain styles of beer we use as tuning forks to judge breweries. Any well-made beer is meritorious, but certain styles tell you something about a brewery. A great pale lager tells you a brewery has good process; the brewers know how to make a clean, characterful beer from a few ingredients. A good IPA tells you they understand composition and technique. They are windows into the aesthetic and technical competence of a brewery.
A wild card style for me—and again, try to keep this secret just between us—is fresh hop beers. Fresh hops are hard to work with. They can get weird on you, do unexpected things, and either overwhelm or fail to impact a beer. Producing excellent flavor at the right intensity without funkiness isn’t easy, especially because breweries have so few opportunities to practice. Even more rare is being able to make them repeatedly across different styles of beer. Only a few breweries have consistently done it well over the years. Breakside, with their nitrogen-freezing technique, is one, and Zoiglhaus, which seems to consistently be able to do them in traditional German styles, is another. Deschutes is an old hand and has made some of the best, and John Harris, whether at Full Sail or Ecliptic, has often turned out masterpieces.
Add StormBreaker to the list.
With the help of a New School-aided survey of fresh hop beers, I have managed to sample something on the order of four dozen of them so far this year. Two of the best came from StormBreaker, and a third was in the top tier. Indeed, the best fresh-hop beer I had in this very strong year was Handfuls of Fresh Hops, a variation on their IPA of a similar name. My notes were a bit spare (“rich, dense, green aromas and a saturated, pure fresh hop flavor that tends toward citrus”), but the beer left an indelible impression. It wasn’t just clean, well-conceived, and well-executed in the way of many beers one admires without loving. From the moment it splashed into my mouth, Handfuls was sheer joy. It had a tiny bit of sweetness that accented the green, citrusy hops so that while I did admire the technical aspects, mostly I sank deeply into its pleasure.
It wasn’t the most surprising beer, however—that accolade goes to a fresh hop version of their Mississippi Red (named for the street next to the brewery). I don’t like red ales. They strike me as an artifact from a transitional time, when breweries used a massive amount of sweet caramel malt and offset it with lacerating hop bitterness, creating hop brickle. They’re so often heavy and boozy as well—all the things drinkers in 1992 loved. I couldn’t imagine how a red could serve as a pliable base for fresh hops, all green top notes. Somehow it did. I wrote: “Intense, sticky aroma with light citrus. It screams fresh hops, with oils, resin, and chlorophyll expressed in all the right ways. Surprisingly, the chocolately-sweet base beer works really well.” It was the chocolate, which finds harmony with so many unexpected flavors.
(The third beer, House Martell—named with a knowing wink not for Game of Thrones, but brewer Tyler Martell—was a nice hazy made nicer by fresh hops, though it didn’t deliver quite the zing of the other two.)
How’d They Do It?
I stopped by the brewery last Friday as the gang gathered to sample bottles of the beers they’d sent to GABF. I was hoping founders Dan Malech and Rob Lutz (also the head brewer) would tell me. The sad reality is—with one caveat—that “execution” is probably the right answer. The brewery uses what I’m guessing is bog-standard practices in working with fresh hops: an addition in slightly-cooled wort at whirlpool, and another on the cold side at the end of fermentation. They used different varieties from different farms, including Strata, an experimental hop, and Citra. Nothing there suggests a “one cool trick you can use to make perfect fresh hop beers.”
Like all breweries, they learned slowly, starting where everyone did, with lots of fresh hops in the kettle. “We were basically cooking the hops,” Lutz said, making the beers harsh and weedy. Eventually they settled on the whirlpool/dry hop additions, and all I can tell you is that they somehow use them expertly. “We just want every beer to be better the next time,” he added. Brewers often make such comments, but in this case it’s hard to argue.
Cleaning out the mash tun after the hops/mash combo.
They did have one fascinating story to tell. The brewery has no dedicated whirlpool, so the wort goes back into the mash tun after it leaves the kettle. Since fresh hops were already in the mash tun, they wondered about just leaving them in there for a second batch. That’s what they did for Handfuls. The grain went right on top of the hops, and they mashed in as usual. Did it add anything? “It tasted much different,” Martell said.
So maybe that’s a thing. Throw your whirlpool hops into the next mash. Hey, breweries haven’t settled on a single best way to brew these things yet, so maybe this counts as that one cool trick.
Anyway, the fresh hops are not quite done, and you should still be able to get some StormBreaker. Do.