Breakside Brewery Finding Ways to Make Fresh Hops All Year Round

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Thursday, September 11, 2014

Betony Meszaros, GoLocalPDX contributor

With hops being seasonal, its hard to have a fresh hops brew all year round.

Breakside Brewery's Brewmaster Ben Edmunds feels your pain, and strives to keep his hops the freshest they can be. He says, "A lot of fresh hop beers just have this really intense chlorophyll, plant matter kind of character, and often don't showcase the varietal character of the hops." Tropical or other flavor undertones have a difficult time showing through.

Edmund's main idea is that hidden glands in the hops are not accessed. So a technique to expose the glands would be beneficial. And that's when they came up with liquid nitrogen.

The following video shows the process of making it:

Breakside Fresh Hop 2014 from Ritch Marvin on Vimeo.

Edmunds says brewers are still experimenting to find the best way to extract fresh flavors from un-dried or un-kilned hops. But the process is a few steps further along. Watch this space for future fresh brews, all year round. 

"Hopfendolde-mit-hopfengarten". Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - see image here

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