Electric Fields - Strata Runs on a Hop Bred Down the Road

There are short supply chains, and then there is this one.

Strata came out of Oregon State University's hop breeding program and is marketed by Indie Hops, the Oregon company Threshold Brewing & Blending names as the source of the cones in this beer. So a Portland brewery is fresh-hopping an Oregon-bred variety with Oregon-grown cones, and the whole transaction has to be finished inside a day before the hops lose what makes them worth driving for.

Fresh Hop Electric Fields - Strata is the second beer in Threshold's fresh hop trio and is pouring now at the Montavilla taproom. Like its siblings it is a West Coast IPA at 6.5 percent, built on a base recipe the brewery holds constant so the hop is the only thing that moves. Threshold describes fresh strawberry, tropical fruit and what it calls the variety's signature dankness.

That pairing is what made Strata's name. Strawberry is an unusual note to pull out of a hop, and in this variety it arrives attached to a heavy resinous character that pulls in the opposite direction. The two should cancel each other out and instead they hold. Undried cones tend to push the greener, more vegetal end of a hop forward, so the fresh version is likely to read differently from the pellet Strata most drinkers know.

A beer built on that contrast would sit well against something salty and fried, where the resin has fat to cut through and the fruit has somewhere to go.

Strata is on draft now, with the third Electric Fields beer following this week. Draft pours count toward the brewery's fresh hop punch card, which runs through Friday, October 9.