The Hops in Talladega Nights Were Frozen Straight Off the Bine

A fresh hop beer is a logistics problem before it is a recipe.

Hops come off the bine wet and start degrading more or less immediately, so standard practice is to kiln them dry within hours of picking and press them into pellets. Fresh hop beers skip that step entirely, which means the cones have to reach a brew kettle in roughly a day. In practice that has always meant brewing within driving distance of the fields, during the few weeks of harvest, which in North America means the Pacific Northwest.

Roadmap Brewing Co. is in San Antonio.

Its 8th anniversary beer works around the distance. Talladega Nights is a West Coast Pils hopped with Simcoe and CGX Nuvo Comet, and the brewery says both were "fresh frozen right when they're picked from the bine preserving a fresh hop taste and smell that can typically only be found in the hop fields of the Pacific Northwest."

Freezing is the other available answer to the problem kilning solves. Drying preserves the hop, but it costs the volatile aromatic oils that make a just-picked cone smell the way it does, because those are precisely the compounds that heat drives off. Freezing halts the decline without applying any heat at all. What survives is much closer to the smell of the field.

That makes the choice of style a pointed one. A West Coast Pils carries the hop load and dry-hop aromatics of a West Coast IPA over a clean, cold-fermented lager base. It is a format built to deliver hop aroma and not much else, so a hop preserved specifically for its aroma has somewhere obvious to land.

The two varieties aim at different parts of the same register. Simcoe is a West Coast staple, piney and resinous with citrus sitting underneath it. Comet runs sharper and grassier, with a grapefruit-rind character that reads as wilder than most modern varieties. Neither is a soft, tropical, juice-adjacent hop, and in a beer this clean that looks like the whole idea.

The packaging commits to the theme without much subtlety. Blue block lettering, a checkered flag running up the side of the can, a red stock car across the bottom. Roadmap photographed a four-pack on a checkered flag with two die-cast race cars parked alongside.

Talladega Nights pours at the anniversary party on Saturday, September 19, alongside 26 other beers, among them a special cask tapping of a new Hazy IPA, a new West Coast IPA and a coffee stout the brewery says it has never brewed before. General admission runs $45 early bird, VIP $65, and the VIP ticket includes a four-pack of the anniversary beer to go.