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The Season of the Harvest
It's time to harvest hops - brew your first wet hop beer or look for them at your local breweries.
Brandon Copeland
September 22, 2024
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Good morning. It’s official - summer is over. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s not all bad - we are approaching leaf peeping season. Grab a pumpkin beer, a flannel, and head out to the great outdoors.
-Brandon Copeland
The Season of the Harvest
September brings with is hop harvest season for most places in the United States, including the homegrown Cascade hops from the side of my mother-in-laws house! We had a family harvest this past weekend, and just 3 rhizomes yielded around 22 ounces of hops in year 2 of growing! This will be enough to brew ~ 3.7 gallons of pale ale with wet hops, which I will be brewing today.
The whole family lending a hand for the hop harvest!
Hops before cutting the bines down!
Hop harvest season is a great time of the year even if you aren’t growing your own hops because you will start seeing wet/fresh hop beers from all of your local breweries. You will rarely get a fresher beer!
One bucket list item for me is to visit the Yakima Valley in Washington state during harvest season. 70% of the hops in the United States are grown in the Yakima Valley, and I would love to visit a hop farm during this special period. There’s also the American Hop Museum in the area, and plenty of breweries to enjoy wet hopped beer. It’s a beer lovers mecca, and one of these years I’ll make it there - in 2024 I’ll settle for our own backyard harvest.
Have You Visited a Hop Farm? |
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Beer Trivia Question
🍺 Why did early colonists in the United States start brewing pumpkin beer out of necessity?
Read to the end to find out if you're right!
Brewgr Recipe of the Week
In honor of the first weekend of Oktoberfest, here is a festbier that is just in time for the season. Normally you would start brewing this in March, but you can get a pretty similar style by lagering in time for Halloween if you start now. Even if you don’t brew this beer, have a festbier tonight in celebration.
Credit: Beerserked
Overwhelmingly, the majority of you are planning on brewing a seasonal beer this winter. If you’re not, it’s a nice way to spice up the season - it’s especially something that your friends and family will enjoy. Bottle a 6 pack and bring it to a holiday dinner and see how excited people are to give it a try.
And the Answer Is...
🍺 Pumpkin beers were brewed by colonists because barley was in short supply, so they brewed “pumpkin beers” using pumpkin pulp as a substitute malt. The first modern day pumpkin beer was brewed in 1985 by Bill Owens of Buffalo Bill's Brewery in California, using George Washington’s pumpkin beer recipe as inspiration.
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Happy Brewing!
- Brandon, Brew Great Beer Team
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