A beer reporter tags along with one of the largest craft brewers on a hop-fueled sensory journey to learn more about what exactly goes into the crucial annual harvest haul.
WORDS John Holl
IMAGES Jake Parrish
After nearly a dozen minutes in near silence, walking counterclockwise around a raised table scattered with whole cone Citra hops, the brewing team from Sierra Nevada was ready to discuss.
Their company jet landed in Yakima, Washington, shortly after sunrise on a Tuesday morning in mid-September. The goal was to visit farms, hop companies and suppliers to select hops for the upcoming year. The 45-year-old brewery, with locations in Chico, California and Mills River, North Carolina, is synonymous with quality, and universally lauded as leaders in hop usage, education and the hop-farming industry at large.
This year, the brewery will purchase 1.5 million pounds of hops, making the six-week window around harvest—typically between late August and mid-September—critically important for site visits, rubbings, conversations and decisions.
In all, Sierra Nevada does roughly three in-person hop visits each season, which includes selecting first-pick hops for Celebration, its annual fresh-hop IPA. The brewery invited this reporter and covered travel expenses on one such trip to observe the process.
So here the team was, in a windowless room at Yakima Chief Hops, one of the biggest suppliers in the country, getting their first look at this year’s harvest and performing sensory analysis on six different lots of Citra.
For the breweries with the means and the need to travel to the Pacific Northwest in September, the chance to select lots from the recently harvested crop is, yes, fun, but key to the beers they are going to make for the coming year.
While its breeding dates to the 1990s, Citra only hit its stride in the early 2000s and clicked with brewers looking for tropical fruit aromas and flavors. It was released commercially in 2008 and is now one of the most popular hop varieties among brewers, and a name easily recognized by craft beer drinkers.
It is hard to overstate how necessary Citra is for Sierra Nevada.
While the company is still known for its iconic Pale Ale and more bitter-forward India pale ales like Torpedo, or the seasonal Celebration fresh-hop IPA, its Hazy Little Thing has become the brewery’s top seller. Citra is a key feature in the beer.
When the craft beer industry shifted in the mid-2010s towards more aromatic IPAs and consumers stood in long lines at small breweries for cans holding turbid hop juice, there was a worry more established breweries would be left behind.
Sierra Nevada set to work, identifying what the seasoned brewers liked about the style and finding ways to make it commercially viable. Through countless trials, the flavors and aromas were dialed in. Packaging design helped, giving Hazy Little Thing a more youthful and fun appearance than the brewery’s tried-and-true brands.
The beer took off like a rocket. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is as good as ever and still holds its own, but that little thing, along with all of its variations, pays the bills.
Back at the table, the brewing team looked up and around at each other. Slowly, but with confidence, they started sharing notes. Words like “muddled” and “muted” were used to describe the six lots they just went through.
Blaze Ruud, vice president of key accounts and brewing innovation at Yakima Chief Hops, appeared in the doorway of the crowded room to check in on things and to inquire about this round of Citra.
Chris Walters, the Chico-based brewery procurement specialist, looked at Ruud.
“The first six were meh,” he responded.
SERIOUS BUSINESS
There are few positive agricultural headlines these days. The hop industry, even as the beer industry faces volume and dollar declines and other headwinds, remains resilient. Year-to-year acreage can fluctuate, and after hops are harvested, the companies work hard and fast to sell out all their stores.
The hop industry employs thousands of people, from the seasonal field workers to scientists, sales and support staff, maintenance and office workers. It brings in tens of millions of dollars annually to companies ranging from multi-national operations to small family farms.
Hop selection is serious business. For the breweries with the means and the need to travel to the Pacific Northwest in September, the chance to select lots from the recently harvested crop is, yes, fun, but key to the beers they are going to make for the coming year.
The hop companies that want the brewer’s business have turned the experience into a well-polished spectacle. There are private well-appointed, well-lit and ventilated sensory rooms, chapel-like environments for the intimate rubbings of just-processed lots. Some are done in a chic modern farmhouse aesthetic, while others resemble a lab. Still others are done in a 1970s rec-room style.
“The farmers are excellent at what they do, but there’s always variables.”
In common areas, racks of branded merch that are free for the taking are at every stop. Coolers are stocked to the brim with beers from around the country that feature the hops on offer. Companies like YCH have installed pilot brewing systems where they produce fresh-hop IPAs showcasing the attributes of just-picked hops.
To forge relationships, some breweries may be treated to dinners at the city’s better restaurants or invited to elaborate home-cooked meals on the farms or homes of company employees.
The better the brewers feel about the experience, the more business they are likely to give to a hop supplier. With more than 9,000 breweries currently in the country, it is impossible to say how many make an annual trip for selection, but when breweries like Sierra Nevada or New Belgium, which produces the popular Voodoo Ranger series of IPAs, or Stone Brewing Co. come through town, the suppliers sit up a little straighter.
That is one reason Ruud was not deterred by Sierra Nevada’s initial reaction to the Citra lots. He has been working with Sierra Nevada for years, and he, along with other purveyors, has come to know what the brewers are looking for.
Behind the scenes, well before the brewers even arrive, they pour over lot and analysis reports looking for indicators on alpha and beta acids, total oil breakdowns and other indicators.
“We’re at the early end [of the harvest] and we’ll have bigger lots next week,” Ruud told the Sierra Nevada crew. “I know your preferences.”
THE VALUE OF VARIETY
Hard as it is to imagine today, Citra and Mosaic were once the new kids on the block. Their arrival came after numerous trials and brewer buy-in. Others have broken through to the mainstream over the last several years, like El Dorado and Krush.
Brewers are looking for hops that will perform well in hoppier styles and also increasingly eyeing noble-like hop varieties, traditionally harvested in Europe but now also grown in America, for their lagers and pilsners.
John Segal, the eponymous heir to the third-generation Segal Ranch in Grandview, Washington, believes he has the next big hop. He is a born salesman, and wasted no time pitching his newest hop to the Sierra Nevada team: Tangier.
“Vinnie [Cilurzo, the cofounder of Russian River Brewing Co.] told me he was waiting his whole brewing career for a hop like this,” said Segal, clearly trying to stoke interest.
The first lots of the citrus-forward hop were planted in 2020. By 2023, the planted lots yielded 600 pounds of Tangier. Last year, the number grew to 18,000 pounds. Sierra Nevada committed to purchasing 5,000 pounds to test in various beers.
Cilurzo, reached by email, corroborated his statement to Segal.
“What I meant by that statement was that I love citrus—and pine from Simcoe—in our IPA and both our top two brands have a good amount of citrus in them when they are on point,” he wrote.
“In the past, it has taken a blend of hops to get citrus, or it can be elusive with sometimes the citrus showing up and sometimes it doesn’t. With Tangier, it is straight-up orange in the aroma and flavor, and it translates into the beer which is great.”
While still early in its commercial life, Cilurzo is betting big on the hop.
“Tangier is already in Pliny the Elder, our top-selling beer, and Blind Pig IPA, our number two top-selling beer,” he says. “In 2026, from the crop year 2025, both beers will get more Tangier as well, which I am very excited about. My hope is that the orange stays a part of the aroma and flavor profile and doesn’t change over time like we’ve seen with some other hops.”
He noted that the best beer he’s had this year so far was an 100-percent Tangier West Coast Pils that Kelsey McNair of North Park Beer Co. made for a hop convention in San Diego.
CHASING IDENTITY
Ingredient suppliers across categories—malt, hops and yeast—have taken great pains to make sure they provide in-depth specs. From protein levels to alpha acids and cell counts, brewers rely on this information as they craft their recipes.
While some recipes might be similar, no two beers are ever the same. Over time, brewers come to know what they want in a final beer, and what consumers want as well.
During hop selection, they choose lots that meet their aroma expectations. Sometimes this means hops picked at the earlier end of the window, or sometimes later. Sometimes they seek hops with more prominent aromas of certain fruits, or less of others.
It is brewery dependent, but the growers need to know what the brewers expect.
“The farmers are excellent at what they do, but there’s always variables,” says Isaiah Mangold, Sierra Nevada’s head innovation brewer. “As far as the pick windows go for these varieties that we’re looking at, we have that pretty dialed.”
He says that since Hazy Little Thing is the company’s best-selling beer, a lot of planning goes into hop selection, starting months before harvest.
“We are very sensitive to exactly what we expect from the hops in that beer,” says Mangold. “And since it’s a larger volume, we get the privilege of being able to go through the entire lots and select exactly what we want.”
For Hazy Little Thing, the brewery wants good amounts of citrus and passion fruit to come through, but not in an overripe way.
“That nice passion fruit that we get from Citra is just like a super-light passion fruit too, not anything that skews more guava or very tropical and highly ripe,” says Mangold. “We’re looking for that nice lift, we want it to be cloud airy and drinkable, highly quaffable, and all those flavors just help to elevate the palate.”
Before the selection window closed, they found lots that met their needs and placed a substantial order, holding them over until the next harvest.
This article was published in the Winter 2025 issue of Full Pour. Don’t own it? Pick one up today!