Waggle Dance Is Named for How Bees Give Directions

Watts has spent several years working with one Yakima Valley hop farm to pin down exactly when to pick. The result is a wet hop IPA named after the dance honeybees use to tell each other where the good flowers are.

Style: Wet Hop IPA
Release Date: 2026-09-26
ABV: 6.2%
Watts Brewing Company (Woodinville, WA)

When a honeybee finds flowers worth visiting, it goes home and dances the directions. Watts Brewing Company named a beer after that.

Waggle Dance Wet Hop IPA returns this Saturday, September 26, on draft and in cans, at the Woodinville brewery's third anniversary party. It is a 6.2 percent wet hop IPA at 50 IBU, made with fresh-picked Amarillo hops from Virgil Gamache Farms in Toppenish, in the Yakima Valley.

The beer is an annual release, and the relationship behind it is the reason it keeps changing. Watts says it has worked with Virgil Gamache over the past several years to dial in the pick time for a specific set of flavors - layers of lemon, apricot, peach and grapefruit - and that the beer has improved with each pass. The brewery's own framing is unfussy about why this is possible at all: the Pacific Northwest is one of the few places in the world with access to fresh hops, so it makes the most of it.

That timing matters more than it might sound. Wet hopping means using undried cones within hours of the pick, which rules out storage and leaves the harvest date as one of the few variables a brewer can still control. Watts describes moving the hops from bine to brewhouse in under eight hours. Underneath them sit pale and biscuit malts, built for a light and bright body in a west coast format.

Last year's batch took a gold medal in the fresh hop west coast IPA category at the 2025 Washington Beer Awards. The brewery says this year's is better.

The release party

Saturday marks three years in Woodinville, and Waggle Dance opens the day. The schedule:

Outsider BBQ, 3-8 pm

A guided harvest tasting at 4 pm, pairing recent releases with the raw ingredients behind them - $25, free for Social Bees Mug Club and Foragers Can Club members

Live music with Dain Norman & The Chrysalis Effect, 7-10 pm

The tasting is the one to note for anyone who followed the beer from the start. Watts held a fresh hop brewday open house earlier in September, and the session is built to close that loop by putting the finished beer next to the Amarillo cones that went into it.

Editor’s Take

A waggle dance is a real thing and a genuinely strange one. A foraging honeybee returns to the hive and performs a figure-eight shuffle whose angle encodes the direction of the flowers relative to the sun, and whose duration encodes the distance. It is an insect drawing a map with its body. Watts, a brewery whose logo is a bee and whose mug club is called the Social Bees, has named its fresh hop IPA after the act of telling somebody exactly where the good stuff is, which for a beer built on one specific farm's hops is a tidier piece of naming than it first looks.

But the part I would actually raise a glass to is the pick timing. Anyone can buy fresh hops in September - the Yakima Valley is right there, and the whole Pacific Northwest is knee-deep in wet hop beers by now. What Watts describes is narrower and more patient: several consecutive years of working with Virgil Gamache Farms to find the window when Amarillo tastes the way they want it, which is lemon and apricot and peach rather than whatever the bine happens to be doing that week. Hop character shifts measurably across a harvest, so choosing a day is choosing a flavor. Most breweries take delivery. This one appears to have spent three seasons arguing about a calendar.

Amarillo is a good hop to be that fussy about, too. It is not a shouty modern cultivar - it does soft stone fruit and a clean grapefruit edge, which is exactly the profile that gets lost if you pick early and chase raw intensity instead. Served alongside the barbecue Watts has booked for Saturday, the grapefruit end of it should cut straight through anything smoked.

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.