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Hi, everyone. It's Jack Bishop.
Bishop. It's the second week of our best of proof to travel edition, where we bring you episodes from our catalog that transport us to different places around the country and the world.
This week, we travel to Colorado, where one beer brewery has cracked the code to make a truly fresh hop IPA.
It starts with flying across the Rocky Mountains.
It's a race against time in this episode from 2023, hosted by Kevin Pang.
Hey Kevin, what's new in your world?
This is Kate Bernat, beer reporter extraordinaire.
You might've seen her writing in publications across the country, including americastestkitchen .com.
And you've heard her on our episode about hangovers.
Well, Kate, earlier this fall, I kept seeing beers that said that they were made with, quote, fresh hops or calling themselves fresh hop IPAs.
Now, I don't really drink beer, but my friends who do, they were going nuts over these.
They said that these beers are pretty special.
They're quite rare.
Hops are harvested just once a year, usually in the late summer or early fall.
And then they're turned into dried pellets or oils that brewers can use year round.
There's a good chance that if I bought an IPA from from the grocery store right now, it could have been brewed with hops that were harvested two years ago, and they still taste great, but fresh hops, man, those are something different.
It's like using fresh basil instead of the dried stuff in a jar.
The hop cone is picked right off the plant and goes straight into the beer.
Sound simple enough?
Actually, it's anything but simple.
It's a complicated dance between farmers and brewers and mother nature, and the clock is ticking.
Hops grow on vines.
That's B as in baby, I -N -E -S.
Vines are similar to vines, but instead of tendrils, vines have stiff, kind of sharp hairs that help them cling to surfaces and grow.
Anyway, the minute hops are picked off the vine, they start to degrade.
They're literally rotting.
So some brewers will go through extreme lengths to get those hops from the farm to their beer ASAP.
Some brewers I know in Colorado even fly their own airplane to a hop farm and back with the fresh hops because it's faster than driving.
And this August, those brewers let me tag along with them for the ride.
Today on Proof from America's Test Kitchen, the race to get the freshest hops.
The story of a Colorado -based brewery and the extreme lengths it'll go to fight against the ticking clock, all in service of a good beer.
I'm Kevin Pang. Buckle up, folks, and stick around.
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Terms apply. The day starts early when you're on a fresh hop mission.
I was already on the tarmac at Erie Municipal Airport as the sun came up on a Wednesday in late August. There, sipping some much -needed coffee, I met the team from Denver's Flight Co.
Brewing. That brewery name isn't a coincidence.
Two of the three owners have pilot's licenses.
And I met one of them standing next to the PC -12 plane, it's an eight -seater, that we were about to board. My name is Eric Cerani.
I'm one of the co -founders and co -owners of Flight Co.
Brewing. We're going to Billy Goat Hop Farms, and we're going to go pick up some fresh hops that were just cut.
We're going to put those hops back in the airplane, fly back to Erie, drive down to Flight Co., where our head brewer and my partner Jason is currently starting the brew day, and we're going to put the hops right into the beer for the freshest fresh hop beer you can get in Denver.
As Eric said, it's an early day for Jason at the brewery, too.
While we're boarding the plane, Jason is starting to brew the beer that the fresh hops will be added to.
This requires precise coordination between Eric and Jason.
Hops get added to a beer at a specific point, like the steps in a baking recipe.
So communication between Eric, who's picking up the hops, and Jason, who's brewing the beer, is key.
This means time was of the essence on the tarmac.
No TSA screening, no pitch for an airline credit card, just a brief safety demonstration, and we were on our way.
The hops wait for no one.
There was a detail I wish I hadn't heard while we were taking off.
two pilots on board explained that the PC -12 we're riding in flies in the mid -20 ,000 feet of elevation, as compared to the 30 ,000 feet or more that big commercial airplanes fly at.
And the mid -20 ,000s are where, apparently, most of the rough weather lives.
Not an ideal factoid to calm my nerves.
But despite my sweaty palms, I had to admit the flight was starting to feel okay.
To help ease my nerves, the pilots also let me listen in to their cockpit conversation.
There's only so many protein bars and other crap that doesn't really taste that good.
Every now and then you've got to have some Skittles.
What was the thing I ate last time?
Was it ketchup flavored?
Oh, the ketchup chips?
They came from Canada.
Those were good. I'm going to Canada next week.
I'll bring some more back.
Okay. Obviously, this kind of cockpit conversation is right up my alley.
We then passed over the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
It's called that because of volcanic eruptions and massive water flows that shaped its formation.
I almost got lost in my sightseeing, but Eric, the Flightco guy, was squarely focused on two things, hops and the clock.
Flightco makes this beer just once a year to make one single solitary batch of fresh hop IPA.
If the plan goes south, there's no do -overs.
The window closes on fresh hop season, and that's it.
Things can certainly go awry.
Remember, fresh hops are quite perishable.
My friend Mandy Naglich actually has some horror stories about what can happen to fresh hops if they're not used quickly enough.
We're talking within hours of being picked.
Mandy is an accomplished home brewer.
And I'm also an advanced Cicerone and certified taster.
Cicerone is basically the sommelier of beer.
There are different levels of certification, vacation, but advanced Cicerones have to pass rigorous written and tasting exams. So Mandy is the real deal.
Anyway, Mandy knew some fellow homebrewers who got a hold of fresh hops, but those hops had been sitting for too long inside of a big cardboard box.
When those brewers opened the box, they found that a portion of the hops at the center had literally rotted.
Basically the center just starts composting because it's holding so much heat.
And then, yeah, those flavors, if you ever get like wet leaf flavor or like mossiness or anything like that's kind of, you might've thrown a little compost in the kettle instead of fresh hops.
The Flight Co. guys really, really don't want to have their precious fresh hops spoil.
So you can see why they're flying instead of driving and why they're not wasting any time on their flight path.
After just a 45 -minute flight, we land in Montrose, Colorado.
Despite the one -in -a -million views, I have to admit I'm glad to be back on terra firma.
Then it's just a short drive from the airport to the fields at Billy Goat Farms. Turn left. Then your destination will be on the left. Eric is making phone calls to Jason, the flight co -brewer back in Denver.
Jason's been at the brewery since 6 a .m., starting to make the beer that we're going to put the hops into.
They've been texting and calling all morning.
Remember, the brewing needs to sync up with our flight so that the hops get added at the right point in the process.
Once his check -in with Jason is done, Eric uses the rest of the drive time to, what else, wax poetic about hops.
It's like growing grapes for wine.
The soil matters. The climate matters.
There's, you know, the variety, the strain of hops has an impact on the flavor.
And all these different elements can make drastic differences in the taste of the hop.
So you can grow a mosaic hop in Washington versus Colorado, and they taste like two completely different hops.
Being the fresh hop beer, this is just the unique opportunity where we actually get the freshest flavors out of the hops and all the smells and the aromas from it that you don't generally get out of the pelletized version of the hops that is in everything else you drink.
We get to Billy Goat Hop Farm just after 9am.
The sun is hitting the lush green vines beautifully and we can hear the hop harvesting machines as soon as we pull up.
After the slight stress of the flight I want nothing more than to explore the farm.
But sadly I'm told that's not really an option on this particular day at Billy Goat.
We're making good time on our mission, but there's no cushion in our schedule.
I get to see a few rows of hops up close, but I don't even get to play with the farm's two adorable dogs before it's down to business.
Immediately after we arrive, Eric finds the co -founder of Billy Goat, hop farmer Audrey Gelhausen.
She started Billy Goat in 2017 with her partner, Chris Dellabianca, and the two of them just finished building their home on the farm itself.
From minute one, I can tell Audrey eats, sleeps, and breathes hops.
She and Chris do nearly everything on the farm.
Accounting, planting, building the trellises that support the hop vines.
And when it's harvest time, it's all systems go.
An entire year of work culminates in less than a month of harvesting.
So Audrey isn't wasting any time.
Right off the bat, she's explaining to the brewers what this year's crop looks like and how excited she is to get these fresh hops right to them.
Huge machines are running constantly, and a crew of people are feeding long binds into their clacking jaws.
No one is standing still.
Hops are perennials, so they come back every year.
And they'll start coming out of the ground, depending on the year, usually in April.
And then beginning of May, we'll start stringing and training, meaning, which means we tie strings onto the top of the trellis, which is 18 feet in the air, and then clip them into the plant.
So in May, we'll tie roughly 60 ,000 strings by hand, and then clip them by hand into the plant.
We then take the binds of the hop and wrap them around the string, and then over June and July they'll grow that 18 feet tall up.
up. Early August, we start harvesting.
What's most impressive to me is how an entire year of really hard farming work comes down to just these few weeks of harvest. Hop vines grow kind of reckless and wild.
They need a human hand to train them up the strings and trellises.
So every hop vine is touched by the farmers probably hundreds of times.
Audrey is very clear about how much work went into every single vine we're looking at.
Oh, it's insane. We run two nine -hour shifts.
So we have people working from 5 .30 in the morning till midnight or 1 a .m. And then when we send out the fresh hops, we send the driver at 3 a .m. so that it's the cool of the night and they're arriving to the breweries around 9, 10 in the morning before the heat gets up and then that gives the brewers the day to brew as well.
So on those days, you know, I'll be uploading the truck until 3.
It's an exhausting month.
Audrey has a calm demeanor, but the stakes are high at harvest time.
I can see that even as she's talking to me, she has one eye on the crew that's feeding a mass of intensely green vines into the harvesting machines.
You know, that's your payout for the year.
So if anything goes wrong, equipment breaks down, whatever, ever, you can start losing your crop, which is, you know, scary.
At the busiest and most stressful time of year, Billy Goat is also fielding phone calls, and they're responding to emails from breweries, like FlightCo, trying to get their hands on fresh hops.
For breweries that don't fly their own plane to the farm, drivers from Billy Goat deliver the fresh hops.
Those deliveries go out at 3 a .m., in part to avoid transporting the hops during the heat of the day, which would further degrade those sought -after aroma and flavor compounds.
But those deliveries also go out super early so that they arrive at Colorado breweries around 9 or 10 a .m. That gets them ready for brewers to put them in that morning's batch of beer.
And in addition to juggling all of that, Billy Goat also hosts an annual Fresh Hop Festival called Southwest Fresh Fest. They invite brewers from all over the country to pour their fresh hop beers for rabid fanatics.
It's a lot to cram into just a month or two.
too. And this year, Billy Goat had its largest year of fresh hops ever.
They sold six and a half thousand pounds of them.
I think it's a really cool time of year.
It really ties agriculture and the brewing industry, which a lot of times can get lost. I think folks go out to get a craft beer and you're not necessarily consciously thinking of, oh, where did the ingredients in this beer come from.
Are they from a giant mega farm or a locally grown independent farm?
And so I think it's a special thing to really bring awareness to the agriculture that is behind brewing.
Like chefs, brewers generally are pretty aware of where their ingredients come from.
Sure, they can order malt and hops from a big company's catalog.
But many are increasingly choosing individual farmers like Billy Goat Farms for their grains and hops.
It's an important relationship and helps brewers support independent growers.
This effort is why many of the brewers want to physically come to the farm to see the hops themselves.
They want to know how they're grown and to inspect the hop cones up close.
Often they do this through a process called hop rubbing.
Aubrey describes hop cones as like little baby pine cones, except they're green and squishy, not brown and hard. So brewers take a delicate hop cone in their hands and crush it to release its oils and lupulin powder.
That's the good aromatic stuff inside.
And then they cup their hands to smell the quality of the hops.
On this particular day, Eric from Flight Co.
only has time for a very quick hop rubbing.
He's watching the clock, knowing we can't linger too long at the farm.
But he can't resist picking a few cones off the vine and giving them a sniff.
He tests out a few different varieties.
Like wine grapes, different types of hops add different aromas, flavors, and bitterness levels.
So Eric wants to compare them to each other.
Yeah, you give it a nice sniff right in there.
And then if you really want to get more aroma, you take the two halves in your hand and you rub them together.
That really releases all the lupulin.
It's a little sticky.
flaky, gets all over the place.
Oh, but man, that smells good.
That smells basically like a fresh IPA.
These fresh hops smell great and get the brewer's stamp of approval.
Eric chooses three types of hops to purchase, Nugget, Chinook, and Comet.
Chinook was a hop originally bred for its bitterness, but today brewers also price it for its piney, grapefruity, and sort of citronella -like aromas.
True to their name, nugget hops have a woody and piney character, and they're also super rich in myrcene.
Myrcene is a monoterpene.
Those are compounds in essential oils, and you might have heard about terpenes in the context of cannabis.
Surprise, hops and cannabis are related, both belonging to the family Canabaceae.
So that explains why, when some people smell a hop rich in monoterpenes, they might describe it as dank or cannabis -like.
On the other hand, comet hops are known for tangerine and grapefruit notes.
But some people also smell mandarin, lemongrass, blackcurrant, apricot, and pineapple from them.
Together, Eric is hoping these hops give FlightCo's IPA an earthy, resinous hop character as well as some citrusy, fruity aromas and flavors.
All these deliciously fresh hops get bagged in brown sacks and loaded up into the back of Eric's truck super quickly.
After just a few short goodbyes, we're speeding.
Well, not speeding, definitely driving the speed limit.
Back to the airport.
It's just after 10 .30 a .m. 70 pounds of fresh hops and we're driving back to Montrose Airport.
We'll load them back in the airplane and have about a 40 minute flight back.
Might actually be a little bit shorter with the winds.
And then once we land at Erie we'll get the hops right into the car and drive 30 minutes down down to Flight Co in Denver.
And Jason should be just about at the time where they get added into the beer.
So he's been brewing all morning so that he'll be ready for us when we get back.
Eric gives Jason an update on our ETA, and he quickly carries the burlap sacks of hops right onto the runway.
Seeing three burlap sacks sitting next to a small plane with no one else around, I'm not gonna lie, It has a little bit of a narcos vibe.
But we're not hustling because what we're doing is illegal.
We're hustling because Jason and his halfway brewed IPA is waiting for us back at the brewery.
We load the hops right next to our seats on the airplane, and we take off back to Denver.
My seat is right next to the bags of hops, and I'm taking deep inhales of pine, citrus, and mint.
It's like the best air freshener you've ever smelled.
I did some research, and apparently the compounds in hops can help ease anxiety and stress.
I don't know if it's the hops I'm smelling or just the focus on getting them back to the brewery in time, but I'm not even anxious on our flight back.
We zigzag around some big clouds over the Rockies, and it's no big deal.
Jason has been brewing all morning, and like baking, you can't exactly stop halfway through and wait for ingredients to arrive.
When the beer is ready for hops, it's ready for hops.
This rush means there's not even time for lunch. As stoked as I am for the hops mission, I'm also getting a bit hungry on the flight back to Denver.
My stomach does a little grumbly thing, and I'm 99 % sure that's hunger, not anxiety.
We've all been awake since dawn, and no one's eaten since we met up at the airport this morning, besides our pilot who snuck a few skittles for a snack while we were flying.
Eric keeps checking his watch and watching out the window as we get close to Denver.
After the break, the race to get those bags of delicious smelling hops into the brewery, ASAP.
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And now, back to our story.
By the time we get to the Flight Co.
Brewhouse in Denver, so much hard work has already happened.
There's the hard work of the Billy Goat hop farmers, Audrey and Chris, who worked all year to produce the 70 pounds of hops that are going into this batch of beer.
Eric spent the morning flying to their farm in Montrose, sniffing hops and making sure they were exactly what he was looking for.
And Jason Slingsby, Eric's partner and co -founder of Flight Co., has been brewing since 6 a .m., making sure the beer was timed just right for the hops to arrive.
Jason's had a long day already, so he sounds a little tired.
Plus, he's not exactly the kind of guy who gushes on and on about his work.
Like most brewers, he's more comfortable behind the scenes making a beer, rather than in front of a camera or a podcast mic talking about it.
But despite his just -the -facts -ma 'am approach, I can tell all of this work is 100 % completely worth it to him.
It's almost 2 o 'clock now, and the hops showed up here about an hour ago, and we put some in right away within about five minutes of them being in the building, and then the rest are going in here just an hour later.
So all pretty quick, straight into the kettle.
All the hops we picked up at Billy Goat, the Chinook, the Comet, and the Nugget, are going to go in the same batch of beer.
Like wine grapes, each hop variety has its own characteristics.
Often, brewers blend together several types of hops to get a prismatic set of hop flavors and aromas.
To add these fresh hops to the beer, Jason stuffs them inside giant sacks that look like tea bags.
Then they're added to the hot wort.
That's what you call the liquid that isn't fermented into beer yet.
The bags make a very fun gurgling sound when Jason submerges them with a huge paddle.
So we took a quick break and ran over there and we bagged all of the hops up and dumped them in the kettle.
And so now they're basically steeping, almost like you'd make a tea.
And we're extracting all those volatiles off of the hop flower cones.
And yeah, making all the good stuff.
Today's work is about nine hours to get it from the grain and all the other raw ingredients and the fresh hops to the fermenter.
Fresh hop beer season is like Christmas for brewers like Jason.
The beers that are made with fresh hops reflect a particular moment and place in time.
These hops came from a specific farm and were picked at their peak.
week. These hops from Billy Goat taste different from the same Nugget, Chinook, and Comet hops grown somewhere else.
Plenty of brewing experts will tell you that, yes, beer can have terroir.
What Jason is doing today is turning place and time into something we can taste.
It's such a fun process because you can use a lot of local ingredients, and we do use stuff from everywhere depending on beer style.
But I really like using local ingredients whenever I can so you know making a beer with a local maltster and farmer going out to the hot farm and seeing the people who actually grew the product we're putting in is so special.
I think the best thing about the fresh hop day for us and the way we do it is all the other people that get to be involved in it.
All of our friends in the aviation community seeing the people at the Hoff Arms, working with everyone for this.
So instead of me and my brewer in the brew house, it's, you know, it's an event.
It's a party. The music is going in the brewery and everyone has a million questions for Jason about the beer.
But Jason can only chat here and there with me and the Flight Co staff because he has to keep popping over to the brewing equipment to check on how the beer is going.
When I get to stand on the the brew deck and peer into the kettle, I take a huge whiff of the Beer in Progress.
It smells hoppy and divine.
I can understand why hoppy beers like IPAs are so appealing to drinkers and brewers all over the world.
Jason explains that hops don't just smell great, they also help preserve beer's flavors.
Hops have a lot of importance in beer.
It's, you know, it's kind of that antimicrobial and preservative, as well as such a huge flavor component as one of the the main drivers of what you're tasting in your beverage.
Especially in American craft beer, you've seen such a surgence of hop presence through the styles where IPAs have gotten more and more hoppy, more bitter, but then also the transition to even something like a hazy where it's not about the bitterness as much as the aromatics and all the other flavors that you can get from really unique hops.
There's so many different varieties these days.
So you can really play with it.
And it's definitely one of the largest drivers of beer flavor.
I asked Jason what this Fresh Hop IPA is going to taste like.
Yeah, the flavors for this beer, I'm expecting some earthy and grassy notes.
The malt character will be there, but it'll really be all that fresh hop character coming in and kind of that mix of earthy and slight citrus.
If it tastes half as good as it smells, I'm sold.
But brewing beer isn't an instant process.
As much as we rushed today to get these hops, it will take three weeks from the brew day until the IPA is ready to hit tap lines at the brewery.
That's a pretty typical ale brewing timeline.
The yeast has to work its magic, flavors have to meld together, and brewers have to make sure nothing is going out of whack inside the fermentation tanks.
Oh, and they have to taste samples of the beer, of course.
Brewing is a lot of hurry up and wait.
You're monitoring the beer progress, you're checking fermentation, you're making sure the temperature is staying in the zone that you want throughout that process.
The brewers also spend that time coming up with a name for this beer.
They named it Hop is My Co -Pilot.
While I wait for the beer, I wanted to learn even more about the sensory science behind hops.
There's lots of research around hop breeding, which is how scientists develop new varieties of hops.
They're designed to have particular characteristics, like being drought -resistant or having certain aromas or bittering properties.
This is a process that takes years, even decades.
But the results are so cool.
Brewers literally get new hops to work with.
In 2019, for example, a new hop variety named Sultana was commercially released.
least. It's a hop that smells like cracking open a can of pineapple chunks.
It was the result of 10 years' worth of work by a hops supplier called Hopsteiner.
Breeding isn't the only thing scientists are working on when it comes to hops, though.
There's also a lot of research into how our human palates perceive all the amazing chemical compounds in hops.
You know, the good smells, the great flavors, the delicious bitterness.
It's sensory science, so you know I'm going to pick Mandy, the Cicerone's brain, about this again.
When we're drinking an IPA and we think we taste mango or grape flavors, we are indeed actually tasting mango or grape flavors from the hops.
Within them are these little compounds called terpenes that literally are the same terpenes in fruits.
So like there's one called linalool that's in plums. It's also in hops.
So if your hop tastes like plum, you're tasting the exact same flavor compound, which is something I think people don't always realize.
You know, you're literally tasting the same flavors you're tasting and your fruits that you think are there.
They're literally the same flavors in the hops.
If you eat a lot of different fruits, you know how varied and complex those flavors are.
And those exact same compounds could also turn up in beer.
I almost think of it like when you're ripping a sweet corn husk.
You know, it's not it's like that fresh green, but almost that little bit of like cellulose vegetal thing going on to it where you can tell it's like right off the farm.
I think that's a really cool thing that fresh Fresh hop beers can offer this feeling of almost like walking through a field, but not in a way that it's overly earthy or overly dirty.
It's more of that green, sweet grass kind of presence.
Fresh hops have that right -off -the -bine, sort of kind of chlorophyll flavor.
They're just green to the max.
A lot of that comes from the compound mercine that we talked about earlier.
Remember, it's a monoterpene, and it's also found in plants like basil and mango and lemongrass.
And Mandy says... Those flavor compounds are super delicate.
They don't stick around for really long.
Here's the thing. Myrcene is super volatile.
So are the other essential oils that give hops their amazing flavors and aromas.
These are essential oils that contribute aromas like lavender, wood, fresh cracked pepper, and rose water.
But the levels of those essential oils in hops begin to degrade when the hops are exposed to oxygen.
So fresh hops, when brewers use them quickly, lock those oils into beer.
The hops used in FlightCo's beer went from vine to beer in just six hours.
With the fresh hop, the brewer's kind of at the mercy of the field.
That kind of greenness that's hard to put your finger on is what you're looking at more in a really well -made fresh hop beer.
So this finally brings us to the million -dollar question.
How did FlightCo's Hop Is My Copilot IPA turn out?
out. Once the fresh hop IPAs are ready, the race is on again for drinkers to drink them.
Because IPAs, but especially fresh hop IPAs, you don't want to let them sit around in a can or in kegs.
When they're ready, they're ready.
Jason explains. It's in the name of fresh hops, but you want to drink them fresh.
You don't want to sit on them or age them.
You want to drink them right away.
I think a beer peaks a few days after it's been released.
When your local tap room releases a fresh hop, I mean, go get it that week.
I was already back home in Montana by the time the beer was ready to drink in mid -September, so I sent Jason a message asking if he could fill a crowler, that's a 32 -ounce special can, and send it to me.
But here's how seriously he takes this beer.
He very politely explained that he couldn't send a crowler to me because it wouldn't be perfectly fresh once it got to me.
The can wouldn't be refrigerated in transit, so it could get hot during its journey to Montana, which is very bad for beer quality.
Plus, it would take a few days to get from Denver to Montana, further eroding those delicate, beautiful hop flavors.
If he couldn't guarantee that the beer would be perfect when I tasted it, Jason didn't want to risk it.
I was bummed, but I have to admit, I appreciate his commitment to freshness and quality.
But when it came to Hop Is My Copilot, I had to rely on Jason to tell tell me how it turned out.
And he's a humble guy, so I know he's not exaggerating when he says.
Personally, I think this was the best one yet that we did.
And also I think the public agreed because it went pretty fast. We were only a couple weeks in and I was down to my last few kegs.
So drinkers loved it as much as Jason did.
He said the success of this year's Fresh Hop IPA had to do with the inclusion of Comet, a type of hop that the brewery hadn't used in a fresh hot beer before.
Along with the green grassiness of the nugget and chinook, it added aromas and flavors of orange and grapefruit, which can suggest an element of sweetness without actually being sweet.
This is kind of exactly what I hoped for this year's beer.
It added a little bit more complexity to just the earthy notes, which are great, but I think this made it a more palatable beer for everyone, adding some of those other citrus elements in.
Even FlightCo's other brewer, Mike Bracco, was impressed with how evocative the fresh hops in this IPA were.
This is all about the hops.
As we move through to sipping the actual beer, you know, still more of that citrus coming from those comet hops.
And then it bends into the pine, very piney, like almost like you're in a, you're hiking in a forest. And like it's like it's rained or it's like springtime, the trees are kind of blooming.
you see like a pine tree and it's got like that white sap running down it.
That's exactly what pops into my mind with that flavor.
I know it's just a beer, but I can't help but get a little sentimental about the whole journey it went on.
It started with the hard work of Audrey and Chris at Billy Goat Hop Farm months and months ago.
And then it continued with the super fast journey Eric and I took to the farm and back to get those hops in August. And then Jason had to work his brewing magic over the the course of the next few weeks.
And FlightCo's bartenders had to be ready for the crowds of hop lovers descending on the taproom to get it.
The final IPA is a collaborative effort, and so much had to go right, timing -wise, for it to exist. It's an example of why fleeting, rare things are often prized in the world of food and beverage.
All due respect to spam, but a can of that stuff will probably out -survive humanity.
Fresh hops, on the other hand, are these precious little postcards whose most valuable essential oils are waning the minute they're picked.
Hop as my co -pilot tastes like Montrose, Colorado during a particular season.
Those hops' chemistry can't be precisely replicated again, no matter how hard the farmers or brewers want it to be.
No one will ever taste that particular batch of beer again.
Even next year, when FlightCo's pilots return to Billy Goat, The hop varieties that are ready for harvesting might not be the same, or they might be the same type of hops but with different characteristics due to weather and temperature.
To really appreciate fresh hop beers, you have to surrender to that.
Drink them while they're here because that same beer won't ever come back.
Jason knows. I don't really start thinking about it next year until we get closer.
I now move on to all the other fires I need to put out.
But we've got, you know, I think one keg left in the tap room.
So I'll be enjoying that till it's gone.
Thanks to Kate Bernat for bringing us that great story.
An Airwave Media Podcast.
