Meanwhile Back at the Ranch Pairs a Hop Drive With a Hop Flight

Fort George is a few hours from the hop fields. Meanwhile Brewing Co is in Austin and has to fly its hops in. The two breweries built a fresh Mosaic West Coast IPA together anyway.

• Style: West Coast IPA
• Release Date: 2026-09-25
• ABV: 6.5%
• Fort George Brewery (Astoria, OR)

Fresh hop beer is a logistics problem disguised as a seasonal treat, and this release makes that unusually plain. Fort George Brewery has built a West Coast IPA with fresh Mosaic hops from Coleman Farms, brewed in collaboration with Meanwhile Brewing Co of Austin, Texas. It is 6.5 percent ABV and pouring now in Astoria, Oregon.

The distance is the story. Fort George notes that the finest hops and craft malt in the country are grown a few hours from its Astoria brewhouse, which is what lets it describe its fresh hop beers as fresher than just about anything. Meanwhile Brewing does not have that option. The brewery says its Austin counterparts air-freight a batch of Northwest hops down to Texas for their own fresh hop beer, which they have named Same Day Delivery.

That constraint is what gives fresh hop brewing its narrow window. Hops are used undried and unprocessed, straight off the harvest, and the aromatic compounds that make them worth the trouble start fading quickly. Proximity to the field is not a marketing point in this style so much as a practical requirement. Fort George solves it with a drive. Meanwhile solves it with a flight.

The two breweries worked together on the recipe, building it around the fresh Mosaic from Coleman Farms. Fort George describes the result as a crushable West Coast IPA - a style that leans dry and hop-forward rather than sweet, which leaves a fresh hop charge with very little to hide behind.

The brewery is candid about the conditions around this year's harvest. It notes that a cyclone dropped nearly an inch of rain on the North Coast in a nine-hour stretch, and describes the planting and harvest seasons in the Pacific Northwest as brief and notoriously damp. The brewers, by Fort George's account, have been under the tanks from dawn to dusk pitching yeast, flipping levers and squeegeeing floors to keep the hops moving.

Meanwhile Back at the Ranch is on tap now at Fort George in Astoria, part of a fresh hop lineup the brewery is currently running as staff shift beers.