ReFRESH Nitrogen-Freezes Its Citra, Then Pulverizes It

Migration borrowed the grain bill from its year-round hazy, then rebuilt the hopping around fresh Citra that reaches the tank within an hour of picking, gets nitrogen-frozen and is ground to expose the lupulin.

Style: Fresh Hop Hazy IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-03
ABV: 6.7%
Migration Brewing (Portland, OR)

ReFRESH did not start from a blank sheet. Migration Brewing took a grain bill close to the one behind MoHazeIc, its year-round hazy IPA, and rebuilt everything above it around a single fresh hop.

That hop is Citra, and the brewery's account of how it gets into the beer is unusually detailed. The cones come straight from the farm into the tanks within an hour of being picked. Once at the brewery they are nitrogen-frozen, then pulverized to expose the lupulin glands inside.

Lupulin is where the useful part of a hop lives. The glands are small yellow resin sacs clustered at the base of the cone's bracts, and they hold the oils and acids that supply aroma and bitterness. Everything around them is leaf. Freezing the cone hard first makes the plant material brittle, so grinding it shatters the structure and opens the glands rather than smearing them through wet green matter. The commercial version of this idea produces the cryogenic hop products now common in hazy IPA, though those are made from dried hops at scale. Applying it to undried cones, in-house, in the window between harvest and brew day, is a more improvised proposition.

The beer lands at 6.7 percent and 22 IBU. Migration describes ripe yellow peach, tangerine and tropical fruits, and frames those as the hallmarks of Citra.

Starting from a known base is the quiet strength of the exercise. MoHazeIc is a fixture in Migration's lineup, which means the malt side of ReFRESH is a settled question and anything that reads as different is the fresh Citra doing it. The brewery calls the whole aim capturing the hop aroma of the field and putting it into the glass.

ReFRESH is pouring at Migration's pubs for $8 a pint, the third of three fresh hop beers the brewery put on this week.

Editor’s Take

The name is doing more work than it lets on. ReFRESH is a hazy IPA that is quite literally a refresh of an existing one, in the software sense, and also a beer made with fresh hops, in the agricultural sense, and the capital letters are there in case you missed either. Puns of this density usually collapse under themselves. This one holds, because both halves are true at once.

The part I would happily stand in a brewery and watch is the nitrogen freezing. Commercial cryogenic hop products exist and are excellent, and they are made from dried hops in industrial facilities by people with the right kit. Migration is doing a version of it in-house to cones that are still green and still wet, freezing them until the plant matter is brittle enough to shatter rather than smear, then breaking it up so the lupulin has nowhere left to hide. It is a laboratory technique applied to something picked an hour earlier, which is a fair summary of what fresh hop season does to a brewing schedule.

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.