- It was a very American kind of thing that, you know, we would make the most intense thing possible.

- Oh my god, they smell so good.

I mean, they're just like luscious.

- You can literally see it grow.

In fact, it's one of the fastest growing plants, - Citrusy, tropical fruit, sweet fruit, piney, cannabis-like aromatics.

- It's still every day like really mind blowing to me how unique this beer culture is to anywhere else that I've been.

- One reason why the rest of the world is not that familiar with Oregon beer because we drink it all.

- The American game pairs best with an American beer.

The IPA was invented in England, but it was elevated and perfected in the Pacific Northwest.

The ingredients are simple water, grain, yeast and something the Pacific Northwest does better than anywhere else in the world.

Hops, lots of - Hops.

- Our family came to the valley in 1885 and started to work as and live as subsistent farmers.

They, you know, grew their meat, they grew their vegetables, they traded with their neighbors.

And then in, in 1904 our grandparents planted the first crop of hops.

Even as a kid, you knew that there was something special going on.

All of a sudden there was all this activity, all of these aromas that you, you, you know, you didn't quite understand them.

When the sun went down, there was still activity happening because in my father's time we would be harvesting in the daytime and then bailing at night.

In a season we'll grow maybe 10 different varieties.

You need to be in an area where day length will be able to provide the hot plant, the requirement of number of hours of sunlight at a particular time of the year.

So the extreme in the Pacific Northwest gets up to the Canadian border.

The extreme to the south would be just below into North California.

Oregon, hey, we sit right in the middle of that.

That's the lucky part about us.

I remember being at social events with my parents and someone would ask my dad, so you're a farmer so what do you grow?

And he would say, hops and they would say "hogs?"

because that was, it was like who knew what a hop was?

And so what a difference it is today.

As a fourth generation farmer, my most serious job really is taking care of what we grow our crops on.

And so what myself and my brothers now are really focusing on is a softer approach to agriculture.

'cause we realize how important the ground is.

That is our literal foundation of our business.

It's a lovely way to farm and it's one that we're able to pass on from generation to generation when you're farming that way.

We have folks on our team now as we're working night and day for hop harvest that have been with us 20 years, 30 years.

It's skilled labor.

It comes from being a part of the process, the whole process year after year.

For me to think about 120 years as a family, growing hops as a crop, I like to just sort of pinch myself.

It's just, it's unbelievable.

- Families like the Goschies with help from tens of thousands of migrant and native laborers help make Oregon, Washington and Idaho the center of US hops production.

While hops in the Pacific Northwest have quite the history in the larger story of beer, these little flowers are relatively new on the block.

- When we talk about beer, we're talking about a cereal grain that is converted into a low alcohol beverage.

So you can use any grain, you can use corn, you can use sorghum, you can use wheat or barley.

It was one of the first things humans did.

There were native traditions of brewing everywhere in the world.

It goes back just about as far as as we can see, and every time archeologists push back further, it seems like beer is there.

- Beer is old, but hops only entered the picture relatively recently at first as a way of keeping microbes from spoiling the party, which helped beer become big business brewers and what would become Germany took the lead in their styles.

Pilsners and lagers came to dominate the globe.

- If you go around the world, everywhere you look, you'll find a large industrial brewery making something that looks a lot like Budweiser or you know, Fosters or something like that.

And that became pretty boring for most people.

Small producers began to look for traditional ways to make beer in styles that are more flavorful than mass market lagers.

- There were no commercially available IPAs when I wanted to brew one.

So we home brewed IPAs.

- The style caught on and breweries started to cater to growing demand.

- When we opened the doors at Steelhead, there was a line outside of people wanting to come in on the first day.

That happened back then all the time.

Whenever a new brewery opened, people would just line up.

It was very exciting.

- Brewers like Teri learned how to work with the intense flavors of Northwest hops.

- People really liked it and it had a pineapple grapefruit character and I liked to describe it as a party in your mouth.

- Eventually an American idiom arose that is sort of Pan-American and is characterized by American hops.

- Lots of places can grow hops, but what sets the northwest apart are the varieties that were bred here.

Thanks to decades of effort from hops scientists - Flavor's, obviously the driving force flavor now is, is king.

- Breeders like John Henning are constantly creating new hop varieties with different flavors.

Break open a hop flour and you'll find the lupulin glands.

These contain alpha acids that add a bitter flavor and keep the beer from spoiling as well as essential oils that give the range of aromatic flavors found in hoppy beers.

Hop scientists can breed varietals with differing levels of acids and oils depending on what brewers and drinkers are likely to want.

- My most recent release is Vista.

It has some phenomenal melon, citrus, stone fruit characteristics that really come out in hazy IPAs.

The other variety that I also released a few years before that is called triumph.

Depending upon when it gets harvested, you can come up with a bubble gum flavor, which is pretty unique for hops.

- It takes about 15 years to bring a new hop to market and brewers are constantly on the lookout for the next big varietal to satisfy an ever changing palette.

- I started brewing in San Diego, California.

My wife got me a home brew kit when I started brewing Beer was, we're going to have classic West coast IPA profile.

It's going to be bitter, it's going to have some citrus and it's going to have some pine resin and bang, you've got an IPA.

Whether you're making West coast IPA or you're making hazy IPA Everybody's now just shooting for like fruit juice bombs and that's really pleasant and I like that.

We're traditionally going to be adding our hops during the boil and then you send the beer, the fermenter and let the ye do its work with IPA, depending on how you're making it.

The big thing is really dry hopping, which is where you're adding hops to mostly finished beer in the fermenter, like after the yeast has done its work.

Every time that we package a beer, all of us sit around and kind of analyze it right before we put it in the package to make sure that we feel that the quality is right and to make sure that we've hit our flavor and aroma targets.

Does the body feel right?

Is the carbonation right?

Is it the right color?

What do we want to do today?

Do we want to make something that is super berry-forward?

Do we want it to be really citrusy?

Do we want it to be stone fruit-forward?

...every little aspect of the beer.

- The possibilities are immense thanks to the sheer variety of hops available to today's brewers.

But for the ultimate hops experience, you have to get them fresh.

- We're sitting here in Milwaukie and over 15 minutes from downtown Portland, we're 15, 20 minutes from a hop field and there's no metro area in North America that is as close to the hop fields as Portland.

The unkilned hop is only usable during harvest time really and really in the immediate aftermath of picking, you know, in the hour after picking or two hours after picking.

What we just did is we received in fresh unkilned crop year 2023 hops that were picked this morning and we took those, we quickly froze them with liquid nitrogen because the hops are so wet, what we wanted to do is freeze them very briefly so that we could actually then kind of shatter them open or shred them open.

'cause all those aroma bearing compounds are in the resins and glands that are inside the hop.

- It's really difficult to not have it just taste like you kind of went out and mowed your lawn and threw some clippings in because it would go.

It was so delicate and no one realized how quickly the hops would start to compost.

They do it, you know, almost immediately.

- It's a really, really tight window and these hops are very, very fragile.

They degrade incredibly quickly 'cause they're so wet.

When Breakside first opened, we were making IPA, but you know, when you look at the hops that were available kind of widely to us at that point in time, it wasn't the range that we have available today.

If you just rub a hop and smell a hop like off the bine, they all smell kind of the same until you're really well trained.

You know, you kind of have to learn to smell beyond the hop.

You have to smell beyond the plant to understand what it's going to actually smell like in beer.

But once you can do that, the range of aromatics is really pretty dramatic.

Really what we're trying to do is just capture the essence of hop harvest and the aroma of hop harvest and that experience in a beer.

And it's kind of this year that really celebrates and honors this year's hop harvest.

- And there's no better place to experience that than one of the many fresh hops festivals in the Pacific Northwest where brewers show the best of what this little flower can offer.

- We have the best beer out of any state in the country, I think, because we have the best hops in the country and the freshest hops in the country.

- Oregon beers are fabulous.

This time of year is especially good when you have all of the fresh hops and there's incredible variety.

- Being able to try the taste differences between having a fresh hop in it and having just a standard pellet hop is really fun to do.

And using like a beer app, you can kind of compare how you liked it like last year or this year, but just like how the profile changes from year to year with fresh hops.

It's really cool.

The first thing I would say always about fresh hop beer is the best thing to do with it is taste it not to talk about it because you have to come to the northwest during this time of year to experience these beers fully.

- This time of year is incredibly special and today it's beautiful.

So what better place to be?

- This little flower loves to grow in the Pacific Northwest?

- Drinking a beer that has my hops and that I know that has my hops, that is so unique for a farmer.

You know, I make the comparison.

It's like, do green bean growers get this excited and passionate?

- Through decades of exploration and work, hops have become one of the signature tastes of this region securing Oregon's place In the long history of beer.

- Craft beer's been such a part of the lifeblood of the Northwest and Portland in particular for such a long time now.

IPAs are definitely the American style and they're here to stay.

- There's much more to the story of why the northwest fell in love with hoppy beers.

You can hear that tale on OPB'S weekly podcast, The Evergreen, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Superabundant and the Evergreen are only possible thanks to the support of OPB members.

Thank you.