Airlifted hops make for fresh Norfolk beer
Overnight shipment allows brewers to capture just-harvested, “green” flavor
In the wee morning hours of Sept. 4, Benchtop brewer Eric Tennant got an airlift as urgent as a heart transplant.
The payload arriving at Norfolk International Airport? Eighty pounds of sticky, green, tropicalaroma Citra hop cones — fresh from their annual harvest in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
“They pick ’em one afternoon, and we get ’em the following morning, early a.m. delivery. That’s as fast as we can get ’em,” Tennant said. “When they come in, the whole brewery just smells amazing. Crushing those hops up and smelling those cones was the best thing I ever smelled.”
The UPS bill alone was $500, Tennant said, and he had to pull some strings — his grower doesn’t normally ship hops cross-country on that kind of schedule.
But Tennant didn’t have time to savor the hops. As fast as they arrived, those hops had to be brewed.
“It was all hands on deck,” Tennant said.
What was at stake was something only possible once a year at the end of summer, something few Virginia brewers even attempt: capturing the complex, grassy, often-volatile flavor of just-harvested hops in a beer.
Most beers are made using dry hop pellets. But fresh hop beers are brewed with unprocessed whole hops picked less than 24 hours before: Wait longer, and the hops might start to spoil. The result is a beer that tastes a little leafy and vegetal and maybe a bit wild — in a word, fresh.
You’re reminded, more than ever, that beer is agriculture. It comes from farms.
Benchtop’s Rippin’ Freshies IPA was released Friday at Benchtop Brewing in Norfolk. Amid the big, juicy, tropical notes that the Citra hops are known for, sniff the beer and you get a heady whiff of the farm it was grown on. The beer tastes “green” — blooming with the oils and aromatics and pollen of the unprocessed hop flower itself.
It’s got less aggressive fresh hop flavor than some you might find in Oregon or Washington: The leafy flavor is soft and mid-palate, an accent to a fully rounded beer.
“The thing I enjoy about it the most is the aroma,” Tennant said. “You smell some tropical notes like guava up front, and as you delve in it smells like when I rub those cones together. That’s why it’s enjoyable.”
Fresh hop beers aren’t very well known in Virginia, where hop-farm acreage is measured in the tens — compared to about 40,000 acres in Washington. But in the Pacific Northwest, where nearly 90 percent of the hops used in American beer are grown, fresh hops are an allconsuming beer phenomenon at the end of summer.
Each weekend holds a multitude of fresh hop festivals — and drinkers line up to taste the “fresh” versions of beers they enjoy all year.
The results are notoriously unpredictable. Sometimes a beer will be like the full and transcendent expression of a hop flower. Sometimes it’s like somebody mowed a lawn in your mouth. Always, it’s a lot of fun.
But Benchtop isn’t the only Virginia brewery getting in on the fresh game.
In Afton, far to the northwest of Hampton Roads, Blue Mountain Brewery tapped a fresh-hop beer called Hop Tub on Friday, made with hundreds of pounds of fresh Cascade hops they grew themselves — and harvested with the help of their community of fans. You might have to drive out to Afton to try it, but Blue Mountain describes their hop terroir as having a unique limerind flavor.
Meanwhile, Virginia Beer Co. in Williamsburg had the same plan as Benchtop: They booked an airlift of ever-popular Citra hops, which don’t grow very well in Virginia’s climate.
But it was not to be. Their shipment was scheduled to arrive during Hurricane Florence’s landfall, says co-founder Chris Smith, and delivery was canceled.
The hurricane didn’t arrive either, so the delay was only a day. But fresh hops are only good fresh: A day later, and they’re of no use. So Virginia Beer Co. switched its order to complex and tropical Mosaic hops, which are harvested slightly later.
“We’re getting wet hops overnighted from Washington State right now,” Smith said. “But for a lot of reasons that will be a slower beer for us.”
Virginia Beer Co.’s fresh hop IPA won’t drop till mid-October.
In the meantime, Benchtop’s Rippin’ Freshies should be available for the next couple of weeks, only at the brewery on 1129 Boissevain Ave. The beer is too expensive to distribute to bars, and Tennant won’t let it out of the brewery in crowlers or growlers.
But like all fresh hop beers, it’s best when it’s freshest: Try it sooner than later. If you drink it by this weekend, you might be drinking fresh-hop Citra beer sooner than most beer fans in Oregon, where the hops were grown.
By using Norwegian yeast called gong that brews fast and hot, Bench top managed to beat pretty much all the Pacific Northwest Citra freshhop beers to the market.
“We thought that was hilarious,” Tennant said. “Out there, Simcoe (fresh hop) is the next one out. Citra beers aren’t due out for another week or so.”