Iowa Brewers Guild

Cascade hops in the Worth Brewing Co. hop garden.

The first hops of the year were picked on August 23 and tossed in the brew kettle fresh the next day for our annual Wet Hop Ale. Forgoing the traditional drying process yields a different final beer with complex flavor and aroma properties. This ale is not more bitter (it’s less bitter than our Pale Ale) even though we use about five times more hops by weight than normal. The resulting ale is a refined, gentle brew, one of my favorites. I’ll decide whether to add more hops to the keg after post-fermentation tasting. Hops were harvested from the Pangburn farm as well as our field, pictured above (that red fruit in the background will find its way into our Five Season Cherry Elixer this winter).

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Tags: hops, Worth Brewing

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Brewery News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.