Beer of the Week: Protect Ya Neck

From the Beer Writer: It’s the time of year when hop farmers are harvesting the bine-borne fruits of their labor. While the bulk of those hops are bound for pelletizing for use throughout the year, brewers are going farm-to-brewery, adding a select sect of those botanical gems straight to their beers in whole-cone form. The result are beers that communicate their intense aromatics and terroir in the resultant “fresh-hop” or “wet-hop” beers. Producing these beers has historically been extremely challenging, required the hops to be added within 36 hours of picking, but a new innovation from Yakima Chief Hops and Wyckoff Farms is easing the process, with the latter flash-freezing the whole-cone offerings of the former’s farmers. Much in the way frozen vegetables are suspended at the height of their freshness, the hops are saved from degradation until they can be utilized by operations like Viewpoint Brewing, which used Frozen Fresh Hops to create this week’s featured beer, Protect Ya Neck. An IPA fresh-hopped with Cascade and Simcoe, it comes on strong in the nose and front-palate with a range of earthy flavors—grass, wood, pine needles—giving way to nuances of orange pith and black currant and an ultra-dry finish. It took several weeks for the hops to make their way from Washington State to Viewpoint’s Del Mar brewpub, but you wouldn’t know it, making flash-freezing hops a helpful game-changer for brewers looking to celebrate the harvest season care of wet-hop beers.

From the Brewer: “Protect Ya Neck is a classic West Coast wet-hop IPA using Simcoe and Cascade. It’s a beer we look forward to brewing annually, and this is the first year we used flash-frozen wet hops, which allowed us to get access to a blend of hops instead of a single varietal. What a treat! The inspiration for Protect Ya Neck comes from our house West Coast IPA, Penitent Man, for which we use a little bit of Munich and honey malts to stand up to the beer’s big, classic hop profile. This wet-hop IPA starts off bold with big hop expression and ends with a classic, resinous, piney finish. Coming in at 6.8% (alcohol-by-volume), it’s easy-drinking and a classic representation of both the season and San Diego-style IPAs. The name inspiration is a blend of our love of old-school hip-hop and the fact I had to brew this beer in a neck brace due to a surfing accident. Protect Ya Neck!”—Moe Katomski, Head Brewer, Viewpoint Brewing