Golden Nugget Finds German Hop Spice in Nugget and Chinook

Two blunt American hops, picked fresh in Ramona, and the brewery reports pepper and German-style spice coming out the other side. At 5.5 percent it sits a half point above Nickel's house lager.

Style: Wet Hop Lager
Release Date: 2026-10-02
ABV: 5.5%
Nickel Beer Company (Julian, CA)

Nugget and Chinook are bittering hops with a reputation for bluntness. Nickel Beer Company reports getting pepper and German-style hop spice out of them.

The Julian brewery has tapped Golden Nugget Wet Hop Lager, brewed with both varieties grown at High Country Hop Farms in Ramona and picked less than 24 hours before brewing. Nickel describes a pleasant, pale-ale level hoppiness without too much bitterness, with clean flavors carrying "some nice pepper and German-style hop spice to them." The brewery calls it a great thirst quencher and puts it at 5.5 percent.

The German-style comparison is the brewery's own, and it is a notable one to make about these two hops. Peppery, spicy hop character is usually credited to the noble varieties grown in Germany and the Czech Republic. Nugget and Chinook are American high-alpha hops, bred for bitterness rather than subtlety, and neither is typically described this way. Fresh cones can read differently from the dried pellets most beers are built on, since drying costs a hop some of its more delicate aromatics, and a clean lager leaves little for them to hide behind.

Nickel positions the beer directly against its own Lake Cuyamaca Lager, saying Golden Nugget has a little more punch. That holds up as a measurement: Lake Cuyamaca is a 5 percent American pilsner made with imported pilsner malt and Hallertau Blanc, so this is a half point up and a jump from an imported German hop to two locally picked American ones.

It is also the only non-IPA among the three wet hop beers Nickel currently has on tap, the others being Green Truck Wet Hop Double IPA and High Country Wet Hop IPA. Wet hop releases skew heavily toward IPA, so a lager is the harder version of the exercise. There is no hop haze or residual sweetness to carry a rough edge. A clean, lightly spicy lager at this strength would hold up well against something fried and salty, which the brewery's resident food truck happens to be serving on weekends.

Golden Nugget Wet Hop Lager is on tap now in Julian, for as long as the harvest beers last.

Editor’s Take

Nugget and Chinook are not the hops anyone reaches for when they want delicate. These are workhorses, the high-alpha varieties that spent decades in the bittering slot because they were efficient at it, and if you had asked me which two hops would produce German-style spice I would have named almost any others first. Nickel says that is what came out. I believe them, and I would like to know why.

The likeliest answer is that this is wet hop season doing something peculiar again. A fresh cone carries a different balance of aromatic compounds than the same hop dried and pressed into a pellet, and the softer, herbal, faintly peppery notes are exactly the ones that tend to get lost in the drying. Put them in a lager, where there is no hop haze and no malt sweetness to hide behind, and whatever survives has nowhere to go but the front of the glass.

That it lands as a thirst quencher at 5.5 percent is the part I find genuinely good planning. Two beers into this hop harvest and both of the others are IPAs. Somebody thought to brew the one you can have a second of.

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.