Lorien Lager Draws All Its Bitterness From the Mash Tun

Migration ran the wort for this lager through its mash tun packed with 10 pounds per barrel of fresh Lorien hops. That green bed is the only bittering charge in the beer.

Style: Fresh Hop Lager
Release Date: 2026-09-03
ABV: 5.3%
Migration Brewing (Portland, OR)

A mash tun's normal shift ends before the boil begins. Migration Brewing found it a second one.

For Fresh Hop Lorien Lager, the Portland brewery used its mash tun as a hop back, running wort through a bed of fresh Lorien hops dosed at 10 pounds per barrel. That bed is the beer's only bittering component. Nothing else in the recipe is doing that job.

A hop back is a vessel packed with whole cones that hot wort passes through on its way out of the kettle. The wort picks up aroma and a measure of bitterness on the way, without the long boil that drives the volatile oils off. Pressing a mash tun into the role is a practical piece of improvisation rather than a novelty. It is already a large vessel with a false bottom, built to hold a deep bed of plant matter and let liquid run through it slowly, which is close to the specification a hop back needs.

The result lands at 5.3 percent and 21 IBU. Migration describes it as light, refreshing and crushable, with sweet hay and fresh-cut grass coming through from the malt rather than the hops. The brewery credits notes of lime zest and fresh-cut cantaloupe with accentuating the subtle New Zealand Wakatu hops in the beer.

Wakatu is a sensible partner for that. It is a New Zealand aroma variety that leans soft and citrus-lime rather than tropical and loud, which is the register a 21 IBU lager can actually accommodate. In a beer where the bittering charge is green and unpredictable, an aroma hop with a light touch keeps the two from arguing.

Lorien Lager is pouring now at Migration's pubs at $8 a pint, alongside the two other fresh hop beers the brewery released the same week.

Editor’s Take

There is a particular strain of brewery ingenuity that consists entirely of looking at equipment you already own and asking it to do a different job for one afternoon. Migration has looked at its mash tun, a vessel whose entire professional identity is holding wet grain and letting liquid drain out the bottom of it, and concluded that this is also a fairly good description of a hop back. It is not wrong. It has a false bottom. It drains. What more do you want from it.

The consequence is the part I keep turning over. All 21 of this beer's IBUs come off hops that were never dried, never pelletised, and never sat in a cold room waiting on a purchase order. They went bine to bed to beer. That is an unusual amount of ceremony to arrange on behalf of a lager whose stated ambition is to be crushable, and I suspect that is exactly the point.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.