Week of Harvest

Oregon & Yakima Valley – Hop Selection 2026

We travelled to Oregon and Washington during the 2026 hop harvest to select the hops we’ll brew with over the coming year. Along the way, we followed them from field to selection table – and met the people whose work shapes what eventually reaches our brewery in Denmark.

There is something very special about being in the Pacific Northwest during hop harvest.

For a brewer, it is one thing to open a bag of hops in Denmark and smell the finished product. It is another thing entirely to stand in the middle of harvest, surrounded by the farms, the people, the machinery, the fresh cones and the incredible aromas that eventually make their way into our beers.

We came to Oregon and Washington primarily for hop selection. In simple terms, that means choosing the exact batches – or lots – of hops we want to brew with over the coming year.

A hop variety might have a familiar name like Citra, Cascade or Simcoe, but that does not mean every batch smells or tastes the same. Hops from different growing regions, farms or fields can have very different aromatic expressions depending on the weather and growing conditions. Even the point during the harvest window when the hops are picked can make a significant difference.

Sometimes two lots of the same variety can be almost unrecognisable as the same hop, so we are not simply deciding whether we like Cascade or Citra.

We’re choosing a flavour.

Smell, rub, repeat

Our first selection was at Crosby Hops in Oregon, where we worked through Cascade, Amarillo and Strata.

The hops on the table have already been harvested, dried and pressed into bales. To evaluate them, we break up the cones between our palms. Rubbing them releases the oils inside and warms them slightly, making the aroma easier to assess.

We smelled, rubbed, discussed, went back to samples, compared them again and tried to put words to things that are sometimes difficult to describe.

That is one of the fascinating parts of hop selection. You are not simply looking for “good hops”. You are trying to understand the character of each lot and decide which expression is the one you want to bring back to the brewery.

Our notes on Amarillo included mango, peach, light lemon and orange blossom.

We try not to stop at a general term like “citrus”, because being precise about whether it is lemon, orange or grapefruit helps us translate those specific aromas into beer.

There is also more to selection than sensory judgement.

The hop companies analyse the lots for things like total oils and alpha acids, which contribute aroma and bitterness respectively, and run their own sensory programmes before the hops ever reach our table. We normally make our first choices without seeing those numbers and then compare our sensory impressions with the analytical data afterwards.

This year, the numbers actually convinced us to change one of our selections to our second choice.

We don’t always agree. Actually, we almost never agree. Everyone smells things slightly differently. That is one reason it helps to select as a group. We discuss what we liked and what we didn’t, go back to the samples and try again.

By the end, our senses are completely overloaded. But that doesn’t stop us from talking about hops for the rest of the day.

 

Behind the hops

The week was not only spent around selection tables.

We moved between farms, picking facilities, breweries and processing plants, seeing the hop at different stages on its way from the field to the brewery.

At Yakima Chief Hops’ T-90 pellet facility, facility manager Eleazar Caballero showed us what happens next in the process.

Before pelletisation, the hop cones have already been harvested, dried, cooled and pressed into bales at the farm. At the facility, those bales are processed into pellets, making the hops more compact and easier to transport, store and use in the brewery, while preserving as much of the quality and character of the crop as possible.

During our tour, Eleazar shared a story that stuck with us.

He had taken his team out for dinner at a brewpub when someone noticed a hop box. They looked at the code on the side and realised that the hops had come through their plant. They were incredibly proud to see their hops out in the wild.

As brewers, we get the same feeling when we see our beer somewhere or watch someone order it. It can take your worst day in the brewery – when it is too hot, equipment is breaking down and the beer is not hitting the specs – and remind you that what you do for a living matters to someone. That it brings people joy.

The people behind the processing were one part of the picture. On the farms, we also got a glimpse of what the hops themselves might look like in the years to come.

Walking through the future

At Perrault Farms, one of three farms that make up Yakima Chief Ranches, Global Brand Ambassador Joe Catron welcomed us and showed us around. Yakima Chief Ranches runs the breeding programme behind new varieties for Yakima Chief Hops, and Perrault plays a particularly active role in scaling up promising new hops.

They were picking Talus when we arrived, and the aroma inside the picking room and kiln was something else. Talus has this intense tropical character meeting lime, with a hit of grapefruit and pine.

After touring the farm and talking endlessly about beer, hops and everything in between, Joe took us to their experimental fields, where they grow varieties for their innovation programme. These are young plants, ranging from one year old to three or even four years old.

There we met Dr. Ryan Christian, Technical Director at Yakima Chief Ranches, who works with the development and evaluation of new hop varieties.

We spent almost an hour walking through the fields, smelling and discussing varieties they are excited about and that, hopefully, we will get to test ourselves in the coming years.

A promising new variety isn’t just about aromas brewers are interested in. It also has to work for the people growing it. Does it produce a good yield? Can it withstand common diseases? How does it respond to heat and other changing conditions? Can the cones be harvested efficiently?

It can take around a decade before an experimental hop becomes a named commercial variety.

It was equally interesting to see how much attention is being paid not necessarily to “the next new thing”, but to hops with better agronomic properties.

That is going to matter in the coming years as growing conditions change.

For us, the experimental fields were an excellent example of the transparency and knowledge-sharing that makes the hop industry so interesting.

You get to see not only what is being grown today, but also what might become part of the future of brewing.

And you can literally walk through that evolution in a hop field.

Sometimes, understanding what happens in the field can also solve a very immediate problem back at the brewery.

 

How Humlesovs got its hop back

One thing we brought home was an actual sample of hops.

Over the last year or so, Yakima Chief had been warning us that they would no longer be carrying what might be Tamar’s favourite hop: Idaho Gem.

Initially, we misunderstood this to mean it was no longer being grown, so we started looking for substitutions.

Nothing matched it particularly well, which was a problem because Idaho Gem plays an important role in Humlesovs.

We even turned to a company that produces terpenes and thiols (aromatic compounds) from yeast fermentation, providing hop aromas without any hops involved in the process. They took Humlesovs and a sample of the beer before the hop was added, analysed the compounds Idaho Gem was contributing and made us an extract.

It turned out pretty good. It had the cherry and berry top notes we associate with Idaho Gem, but it was missing some of the base “hoppy” character.

Then we learned that BarthHaas was still supplying Idaho Gem. We received samples of their hops from previous harvests, but they didn’t have the character we were looking for.

After a number of conversations with BarthHaas, Tamar was put in touch with Sensory Manager Jeff Dailey from their Yakima branch, who would be doing the selection for that variety.

The two of them bonded over the fact that they had both lived in the same town in Colorado, and before long Jeff was on the phone with the farmer trying to figure out a way to get us what we needed.

They decided to change the picking window. Instead of picking the Idaho Gem when the farm normally would, they harvested it around the time they used to pick it when Yakima Chief was buying from them.

A hop variety has a general period in which it is considered ready to harvest, but picking towards the beginning or the end of that window can give a very different aromatic expression.

Lo and behold, the flavour was there.

Jeff was so excited he accidentally called Tamar late at night, forgetting about the nine-hour time difference between Washington and Denmark, to tell her that he had never experienced this particular aroma in hops before but that it matched what she had been describing.

While we were in Yakima, we went over to the Haas Innovation Center to give the hops a rub. Sure enough, they were a match. So we brought some back for the team in Denmark to smell.

And then we placed an order.

Humlesovs is saved!

It is a small story, but it says a lot about why these relationships matter. And those relationships become especially visible during harvest, when a whole temporary community seems to gather around the hops.

A temporary community

There is a kind of temporary community that appears in these parts of Oregon and Washington every year during harvest.

Everyone has come for hops, but they also come to share stories, beers, experiences and ideas.

At Single Hill Brewing, we shared beers with brewers and other people from the industry who gather in these remote corners of the Northwest during harvest.

At the family-owned Double R Hop Ranches, owners Jessica Riel and her uncle Keith showed us around the picking room, kiln and baling facility. Keith has been heavily involved in designing the farm’s expansions and building much of the equipment in its newer facilities.

Every farm has its own way of approaching harvest, its own history, its own people, its own machinery and its own solutions to the same challenge of getting the best possible expression out of the crop.

At Loftus Ranches, also home to Bale Breaker Brewing Company, we got to see the whole circle in one place.

The fields.

The picking machines.

The kilns.

The baling.

The brewery.

And eventually, the beer.

We spent much of the week asking questions. A lot of questions.

We are brewers, so we are nerds about details.

Give us the right person and we can stand in a corner at a beer festival talking about centrifuge processes for an hour and still feel that we have barely scratched the surface.

Here, we spent a whole week around people with the knowledge and passion to actually want to geek out answering our questions.

Growers, processors, hop breeders, engineers and other brewers.

That is one of the things that makes being there difficult to replace with a box of samples sent to Denmark.

The selection itself can technically be done blind anywhere.

The rest cannot.

And by the end of the week, the “rest” increasingly came down to one thing: people.

People

Our final night was spent at Loza Farms, a Mexican family-run farm in the Yakima Valley.

By then, something had been sitting in the back of our minds throughout the trip.

People.

Harvest is intense, physical work.

When you stand inside a picking facility surrounded by the noise of machinery and the smell of freshly picked hops, it becomes very clear that the quality we are looking for later in the selection room is only possible because of an enormous amount of work happening long before we ever arrive.

Many of the people working these harvests have roots in Mexico and return season after season, year after year.

During one visit, Tamar asked a farm owner whether immigration enforcement by ICE had affected his farm or his workers.

He was standing in front of around 20 visiting brewers and could easily have given a diplomatic answer and moved on.

Instead, he became emotional as he talked about the fear some of his workers were living with and about people he considered part of the farm family.

For Mariano, there was another layer to this:

“I am an immigrant myself.

I moved from Argentina through many countries until I arrived in Denmark and built a life there. My experience is obviously very different from that of the people working seasonal agricultural jobs in Oregon and Washington, and I would never want to pretend otherwise.

But being an immigrant changes the way you look at certain things.

You become more aware of what it means to arrive somewhere that isn’t originally yours.

You notice the difference between being a visitor and building a life somewhere.

You think about the reasons people move, what they leave behind, what they are looking for, what they contribute, and how much of a person’s identity can become tied to more than one place.

Standing in the Yakima Valley, surrounded by people whose family histories, work and lives cross borders, I found myself thinking about my own journey from Argentina to Denmark.

The privilege, the opportunities and the challenges are different.

But the underlying human questions are familiar.

What makes a place home?

What do we carry with us when we move?

And how much of the place we eventually call home is built by people who came from somewhere else?

Those questions gave the trip another dimension.

I had arrived thinking primarily about hops. About aroma, quality, varieties, selection and the beers we would eventually brew.

I left thinking about all the people and stories contained within those ingredients.”

And that is probably the biggest thing we are taking home from this trip. Because behind every hop we selected, there were people.

People growing it.

People picking it.

People drying it.

People processing it.

People evaluating it.

People moving it.

People brewing with it.

And people drinking the beer at the very end of that chain.

Perhaps that is the real value of being there in person.

You don’t just come home knowing which hops you selected. You come home knowing a little more about where they came from, who made them possible, and why the ingredients we work with every day deserve the level of attention we give them.