Hop Notes 19: Fresh Hops & Wet Hops

Expert analysis to help you make better hop decisions.

Updated 11.28.24.

For hop nerds Christmas comes early each year with the seasonal release of Sierra Nevada Celebration. Given that it’s Celebration time I wanted to cover the Fresh vs Wet hop discussion.

Defining Fresh and Wet Hops: they’re both Unkilned.

Let’s start with definitions. Here are my very up-to-date definitions following an email conversation with THE Jeff Alworth**:

Fresh hops (and wet hops) are unkilned (not dried) whole cone hops. Roughly 70-80% moisture by weight. In general unkilned fresh hops must be used within 24 hours or less of harvest or they will spoil. All wet hops are fresh hops. Just with worse branding. What a lot of us call wet hops*** are in-fact, according to PNW experts, ‘fresh’ hops.

All other hops are kilned, and therefore not technically fresh (or wet). They are roughly 9-10% moisture.

That difference in moisture content represents a dramatic shift in chemical profile and behavior during brewing. The same exact lot of the same exact hop will contribute wildly different character when used fresh or wet than kilned.

Laid out this way, it all seems pretty cut and dry (no pun intended). Hops are either unkilned (fresh, wet) or kilned (all other hops). Out in messy reality though is another story.

To me the messiness stems from a gap between the practical definitions on the farm side and the functional marketing language on the brewer and consumer side.

Farmers on Unkilned vs Kilned

Everyone more or less agrees on the farm side about the distinction between unkilned and kilned hops. After all, the process of drying a wet hop is one of the most important, time consuming, and sleep-depriving aspects of hop farming.

There is one point of competing definition surrounding what to call recently kilned (dried) hops. To many brewers these are also labelled ‘fresh’. Here again, the PNW definition would say no, these are not fresh hops since they have been dried. Perhaps a new word is needed to describe recently dried hops to represent the tangible difference in flavor that recently dried hops have compared to hops that have been in the bale for longer.

Brewers on Unkilned vs Kilned

When it gets to the brand, the can, and the social media things get messy. Customers don’t know what unkilned or kilned hops are or what those words even mean. Unkilned hopped beers are almost always labelled fresh and less often wet, because well:

1. Wet sounds bad.

2. Fresh sounds good.

3. No one knows what ‘unkilned hops’ mean.

4. All beer is “wet” and you don’t want that person commenting on every damn social post and every time they order a beer “Hey look - it’s a wet IPA!”. (hey wait isn’t all beer ‘freshly’ hopped? I digress.)

Whatever they are called, unkilned/fresh/wet hop beers are a monster to brew, often involving significant additional labor and hop costs and have a very narrow window of peak freshness. Doing anything to potentially hinder sales after all that extra effort is not an attractive choice. For many brewers outside of the PNW wet hopped beers are not sales monsters, they are a brewer’s project to celebrate hop harvest and hops.

Why add hurdles to sales by labelling a beer unkilned?

Drinkers on Unkilned vs Kilned

From the drinkers perspective, an unkilned hopped beer and a kilned hop beer, are very different drinking experiences. This is where the impact of labelling decisions are most felt.

Up front: I think one of craft beer’s best attributes is the connection craft beer consumers feel to the breweries who make their beer. The direct connection to the area brew pub, brewer, or local brand is one of the things that makes craft beer special. That connection is fostered and bettered by transparency and education. I lean towards labelling the beer fresh accurately and then doing the work to educate and communicate, inviting your consumer to the celebration of hops that these types of beers are.

Correctly identifying and then educating your beer drinkers about unkilned and kilned and all that comes with that distinction is a great connection point. Even if you have to wade through some bad jokes.

Imagine being a customer who loved an IPA marketed as fresh hop for how grassy and lush and green it was. That beer was a unkilned hopped IPA and labelled fresh. Then that customer buys a kilned hopped beer labelled fresh…“Wait this isn’t like that other fresh hop IPA! Was my last fresh hop IPA wrong? Is this beer wrong? Am I wrong? Who have I become?”

Would the world of craft beer be better if everyone knew everything about hops and so drinkers would interpret fresh and wet IPAs as ‘unkilned’ with similar expectations? I mean, probably yes. So let’s work towards that better world.

Conclusion

For all the confusion and debate, I land on labelling beers accurately and inviting connection. Communicating unkilned and kilned seems like a lot, so just start by calling ‘em all fresh. Maybe the whole unkilned story can go in the beer’s description or a social media post. That’s my keyboard warrior opinion. You do you. Ultimately this is an interesting conversation and one, perhaps like the myth of the origins of IPA, that will be discussed over beers for decades to come.

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**THE Jeff Alworth

Jeff Alworth (Beervana, The Beer Bible) sent me an immediate rebuttal of my wet and fresh hop framing. He makes a strong argument that fresh hop beers are nearly 100% a PNW thing and therefore us non-PNW-ers and our silly wet and fresh words should give way to the unkilned/kilned dichotomy that PNW industry-types follow. I like learning and I like adapting and I try to honor the importance of Place. I have made significant edits to Hop Notes 19 from it’s originally published version to reflect that and incorporate unkilned and kilned.

Here’s his definitions in his own words, reprinted with permission of course:

• Fresh hops = unkilned hops 

• Wet hops = a much more confusing and gross description of unkilned hops 

• Newly-kilned hops = hops, no matter how much one brewery tries to gaslight their consumers

***New unkilned hop products

I would be remiss not to highlight some of the new hop products and technologies being applied to the wet hop space. Unkilned hops are now available in powders, a squishy chutney-like mass in a tin, and frozen too!

Individual Quick Freezing (or IQF) is a long standing technology for food storage, but some have tried it in hops. Most famously Yakima Chief Hops in 2021 and their now scuttled Frozen Fresh Hop program. It started as IQF wet whole cone hops and in 2022 was re-introduced as YCH Trial 301, IQF’d hops then made into a concentrated lupulin pellet. Based on conversations with brewers and searching the YCH catalog it appears both product lines are no longer being offered. Before YCH entered this space, there was a much smaller outfit, Blue Lake Hops from Twin Lakes, Michigan - offering what sound to me like IQF hops. Frozen whole cone hops and frozen, ground, and tinned hops using this process were around CBC last year, presumably still available if you want to play around.

Crosby Hops is the only major player dabbling in this space right now. This crop year they’ve been trialing a wet-hop-input version of their enriched lupulin pellet line, CGX, called CGX Fresh Hops. CGX Fresh Hops are a powdered product. Crosby starts with unkilned whole cone hops and feeds them into their very cold enriched pellet system, first freezing the unkilned hops with liquid nitrogen and then using a series of screens to shift the frozen hops into a fine sandy powder. Thanks to the Crosby team for reaching out about the process!

So far none of these have caught on. And when I see the biggest player in the States, YCH, quit on a product it’s a decent sign to me that the market demand isn’t sufficient. Sometimes, the way it’s been done is the best way and innovation is not necessary.

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More hop content:

• I’ve recently signed up for Final Gravity: A Beer Zine. Which is “a quarterly print magazine about beer and the culture surrounding it published by David Nilsen and Melinda Guerra.” Each Final Gravity issue is filled with everyday stories about and by our craft beer community which is a refreshing change of pace from standard issue commercial craft beer press.

• Hopsteiner’s HS16660 is now named Erebus. Spooooooky (and full of geraniol).

• Hop Connections Game 4: Game 4. One of the categories is sorta a gimme. The other three might be a little tougher!

  • Link to Game 3.

  • Find Games 1 & 2 in Hop Notes 16.

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Thanks for reading Hop Notes 19. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please consider subscribing or forwarding it to a friend.

That’s all for now. If you have topics you’d like to read about in Hop Notes my inbox is open 24/7: ericsannerud@gmail.com.

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