High Country Wet Hop IPA Rebuilds Volcan With Ramona Hops

Nickel took the recipe behind its house IPA and rebuilt it with hops from a farm in Ramona, picked within a day. Same idea as Volcan, different hops, and only available while the harvest lasts.

Style: Wet Hop IPA
Release Date: 2026-10-02
ABV: 6.8%
Nickel Beer Company (Julian, CA)

The most direct way to taste what fresh hops actually do is to put them in a beer you already know. Nickel Beer Company has done roughly that.

The Julian brewery has tapped High Country Wet Hop IPA, described in its own newsletter as a wet hop version of its classic Volcan IPA. The hops are Centennial, Columbus, Cascade and Chinook, grown at High Country Hop Farms in Ramona, about an hour southwest in San Diego County. The beer is 6.8 percent, according to the brewery's beer list. Nickel describes lots of pine and floral notes with hints of citrus in what it calls a hop-forward beer, and elsewhere lists juicy fruit melon and citrus flavors with fresh pine in the finish.

Volcan is Nickel's house IPA, a 7 percent West Coast IPA named for the Volcan Mountain range north of the brewery and hopped with Centennial, Citra, Crystal and Columbus. So the two beers share Centennial and Columbus and part ways after that. Cascade and Chinook come in where Citra and Crystal drop out, which shifts the emphasis toward pine and resin rather than tropical fruit. Chinook in particular is the American hop most associated with pine and grapefruit pith, and Nickel has reached for it before, including in a grapefruit variant of Volcan tapped last month.

The larger variable is that these hops were picked within 24 hours of going into the kettle. Nickel is running three wet hop beers at once this season and frames them as a snapshot of the hop harvest, available once a year. Fresh cones carry aromatic oils that dry out and dissipate during the normal pelletizing process, which is the reason the style is tied to the farm calendar.

Two of the brewery's three current wet hop beers come from the same Ramona grower, the other being Golden Nugget Wet Hop Lager. Pairing a locally grown hop with a recipe the brewery runs year-round gives regulars a useful reference point, since the familiar version is on the next tap over.

High Country Wet Hop IPA is pouring now in Julian.

Editor’s Take

A wet hop beer built on an existing recipe is the closest thing brewing has to a controlled experiment, and I enjoy that nobody involved is calling it one. Volcan is the house IPA, it is on tap all year, and anyone who drinks at Nickel already knows what it tastes like. Put the same beer up with fresh cones instead of pellets and the comparison does itself. No tasting notes required, no marketing language needed, just two glasses and whatever conclusion you come to.

The hop bill moved too, which makes this a little less tidy and a lot more interesting. Volcan runs Centennial, Citra, Crystal and Columbus. This one swaps in Chinook and Cascade, and the whole lot comes from a farm in Ramona, which is forty-odd minutes down the mountain. Fresh hops cannot travel, so a wet hop beer is always a map of what grows nearby, whether the brewery meant it that way or not. Here it clearly did.

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.