Hot pavement smell. Furniture polish. Dog food. New books. Tattoo ink, with a question mark. This is Fort George's own list of what its newest fresh hop ale might taste like, and the brewery is not being coy - it genuinely does not know.

CoHoperative Ale is a Fresh Hop Ale at 5.5 percent ABV, made entirely with hops grown, donated and hand-picked off the bine by people in Astoria. The brewery is pouring it at the Duane Street pub this weekend.

The uncertainty is a direct result of how the beer was sourced. Commercial fresh hop beers are built around a known quantity: a named cultivar from a named farm, picked and delivered within hours so the brewer can predict what the batch will do. CoHoperative inverts that. The hops came from friends, family and neighbors, in whatever varieties happened to be growing in whatever yards, which leaves the brewery without the one thing a recipe normally starts from.

Fort George frames this as showcasing the flavors of the downtown Astoria micro-climate, and the list it offered runs through hot pavement, furniture polish, farm-fresh produce, dog food, new books, spilled beer, tattoo ink, burger smoke, fresh bread and low tide. The joke carries a real idea underneath it. Growing conditions genuinely shape hop character, and a bine in a coastal Oregon backyard is subject to salt air and river fog in a way that a Yakima Valley trellis is not.

The beer arrives during Fort George's fresh hop season, which this year overlaps its Halloween releases. Where the rest of that lineup names its hop - Cascade, Strata, Chinook, Mosaic, Simcoe - CoHoperative is the one beer on the list that cannot.

It is on draft at the pub this weekend.

Editor’s Take

The list Fort George published of what this beer might taste like is one of the more honest things a brewery has put in a newsletter: hot pavement, furniture polish, farm-fresh produce, dog food, new books, spilled beer, tattoo ink, burger smoke, fresh bread and low tide. Note the question mark they put after tattoo ink. Somebody wrote that down, looked at it, and decided to leave it in.

What makes it more than a joke is that it is the correct list. Terroir in hops is real - the same cultivar grown in two places gives you two different beers - and a hop bine growing in a backyard three blocks from the Columbia River is drinking in exactly that. Low tide is not a flavor note anyone is inventing for effect in Astoria. It is simply what the air does there.

The honest part is the admission at the end, that they have no idea what it will taste like, because the hops arrived from friends and family rather than a contract. A brewery cannot spec a beer it did not choose the inputs for. Pouring it anyway, one weekend only, is the right response.

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.

Nobody at the Brewery Knows What CoHoperative Ale Tastes Like

Every hop in this fresh hop ale was grown in a neighbor's yard, donated, and picked off the bine by hand. Fort George is open about the consequence: it has no idea what the beer tastes like.

Source & Editorial