Amarillo Pale Runs on 60 Pounds of Hops Frozen After Picking

Sixty pounds of Amarillo went into this pale ale, harvested and frozen quickly rather than kilned. Migration says the goal was to get the smell of the field itself into the glass.

• Style: Fresh Hop Pale Ale
• Release Date: 2026-09-03
• ABV: 5.5%
• Migration Brewing (Portland, OR)

Sixty pounds of hops went into Migration Brewing's Fresh Hop Amarillo Pale. What happened to them between the field and the brewhouse is the more interesting number.

They were harvested and frozen quickly, rather than dried. Kilning is the step that normally makes a hop keep, and it is also the step that costs a hop some of its most volatile aromatics. Skipping it leaves a cone that smells enormously of itself and starts losing that within hours. Freezing arrests the decline and widens the window past the same-day scramble that fresh hop brewing usually demands. Migration says the whole exercise was aimed at capturing the aroma of the fields the hops were grown in.

The beer is a pale ale at 5.5 percent and 17 IBU. The brewery describes big notes of ruby red grapefruit, which is the character Amarillo is best known for and, in Migration's framing, what the hop is all about.

Amarillo earned that reputation the long way. It is an American aroma variety with a strong grapefruit and orange signature, usually deployed as part of a blend where it supplies the citrus lift over something else's backbone. Handing it a whole beer to itself, undried, is a more exposed arrangement. At 17 IBU there is very little bitterness for it to hide behind either.

For anyone thinking about what to put next to it, a low-bitterness pale ale pushing hard on citrus aroma would sit well with shellfish, or anything dressed with lemon and salt, where the beer can echo the plate instead of fighting it.

Fresh Hop Amarillo Pale is on at Migration's pubs now for $8 a pint.