The pursuit of hoppiness
Only available once a year in extremely limited quantities,
Mount Brewing Co.'s Fresh Hops beer won't last long. So hop to it.
Words Karl Puschmann / Photos Ben Parry
Forget Christmas. For beer connoisseurs, March is the most exciting time of the year. That’s because down in the South Island a plant called Humulus lupulus has just blossomed and its flowers harvested.
These flowers are hops, and hops are the most crucial ingredient in beer.
Hops are what makes beer, well, beer. They give the beer its bitterness and, depending on quantity, source location, characteristics and amount used in the brewing process, also give the drink its identifiable flavours and aromas. Be that fruity overtones, citrus bite or an indefinable “wow” factor.
By necessity, most of the beer we drink throughout the year is brewed with hops pellets. These compressed pellets stay fresher for longer. But this month, when hops season begins, brew masters around the country will be brewing a batch or two with vine-fresh hops.
Pawel Lewandowski, the head brewer at Mount Brewing Co., was one of the lucky brewers who was able to secure an order of the highly-desirable fresh hops.
“It's once a year only. It's quite exciting,” he smiles as he tells UNO about the plan he’s brewed up for these precious fresh hops. “This season we’ll be brewing fresh hop IPA. A filtered and unfiltered version of the same beer.”
You might know “unfiltered beer” by its more popular name of “hazy”. So while the recipe will be the same, the differing brewing process ensures the two IPAs will taste unique from each other. That, Pawel explains, is the point.
“We want to showcase what filtering does to the beer, let people experience the difference and
let them choose what they prefer.”
Fittingly, for such a special ingredient, Pawel’s crafting a whole new recipe. When pressed for detail he says it will have the flavours and aroma of passionfruit and grapefruit.
“This year we're using specifically only the Nectaron Hops variety, and hoping our drinkers will be able to identify flavours that this specific hop provides.”
Using fresh hops ensures the beer will be much bolder in taste, he explains, with a super fruit-forward aroma.
“Everybody's excited. The smell you experience in the brewery is like going to the perfume shop, basically,” he laughs.
Part of what makes fresh hop season so exciting is that even with the most careful forward planning and recipe refinement there’s no way to predict how the beer is actually going to taste.
“You can make assumptions but there’s science and chaos in the brewing process,” he says. “So you never know until you have your first pint in your hand. Then you can say, 'Okay, we did a good job'.”
Having been at Mount Brewing Co for around eight years, and head brewer for four, and having come up with the recipes for their ever-popular Coffee Stout and much-loved Crazy Hazy, Pawel’s confident that he can do just as good a job when he gets his hands on the fresh hops.
They’ll be getting multiple plane loads with which to brew but, because fresh crop beer requires much more hops per batch than using pellets, the 180 kilos of hops being rushed in will only make two batches of beer.
“We’re going to get around 1200 litres per batch,” he says. “So it's a very limited release.”
Pawel says the two fresh hop IPAs will be on tap at the Rising Tide around the third week of April 2023, with a very small quantity escaping out the door in cans to land in select supermarkets and bottle stores. But, if past seasons are anything to go by, you’ll need to hop down to Rising Tide fairly quickly if you hope to get a taste of the fresh hops hype for yourself.
“I don't think it’s going to last long because fresh hop beers are quite popular. Last year, it lasted maybe two to three weeks on the taps,” he says. “It will probably be the same scenario this season.”
His excitement about brewing with fresh hops is infectious. But how fresh, exactly, are we talking here?
“We're going to use hops that have been harvested on the same day. They're going to be flown up from the South Island from the farm right here to Mount Maunganui. We're going to pick it up from the airport and make the beer on the same day. It will be six or seven hours after the harvest. So straight into it.”
Then with a wide grin, he says, “You can't get any fresher than that!”