A hop from Growing Veterans, grown ten miles away from our brewery
Fresh hop season is upon us! It’s such a special few weeks out of the year to celebrate what makes beer more than malt liquor. We are welcoming it with open arms and paying tribute to the tastiest, if not the most fragrant, part of our product.
Each year, we partner with Growing Veterans and purchase their entire crop of hops for our annual fresh hop projects. Of course, we had to bring back Charlie Foxtrot Fresh Hop IPA, but also we decided we’d try out something on the lighter side this year.
Now more than ever, we as consumers are voting with our dollar. Not only that, local businesses are counting on their communities for support. It felt like an important time to make a beer with entirely locally sourced ingredients, especially since we already have those resources at our fingertips.
Today, we release the Fresh Hop Kolsch, made with entirely local Skagit x Whatcom ingredients. We are lucky to live in a part of the country with hop farms in our backyard and malt fields just down the I-5 corridor. In other words, Bellingham’s an excellent place to open a brewery. Fresh hop season felt like the perfect time to highlight our neck of the woods by taking a quick trip to our neighbors for fresh hop beer ingredients.
We had the immense privilege of picking some of the hops ourselves, with our friends at Growing Veterans, a farm in Lynden, providing a space for veterans to cultivate purpose and belonging through growing food and community. The weather was perfect, and we were able to pick 100 pounds of hops for Charlie Foxtrot, our IPA.
For the Fresh Hop Kolsch, Growing Veterans was kind enough to drop off another shipment of hops they had handpicked the morning of the brew. Trust us when we say Fresh Hop- we really mean it.
Growing Veterans provides a variety of what we like to call “C-hops”: Chinook, Columbus, Centennial, Cascade, and Crystal. Each of these provides a unique flavor to the beer, and when used all together, create a complex hop profile that perfectly complements the local malt also featured in the Fresh Hop Kolsch.
Hedlin Farms in Skagit Valley. Hedlin Farms sells their organic grains to Skagit Valley Malting, who then coverts it into Pilsner Malt for breweries like Aslan.
If you’ve ever had a beer in Bellingham, chances are, you’ve had the pleasure of tasting Skagit Valley Malting’s product. The malt for the Fresh Hop Kolsch was malted by SVM and grown by our friends at Hedlin Farms, a farm we work with in more than one capacity. SVM is just 27 miles away from the brewery, and Hedlin Farms isn’t much further, making Fresh Hop Kolsch our most locally sourced beer to date.
We think that’s a big deal! Not only are the people drinking this beer directly supporting three local businesses by purchasing it, they are choosing organic beer over conventional, and an organic beer with an additional environmental impact, no less. The carbon footprint was significantly smaller in the production of this brew than usual.
By buying local, we saved 15.91 metric tons of CO2, the equivalent to keeping 3.4 passenger sized vehicles off the road for the entire year. As it turns out, the seemingly small decision to buy local ingredients made a lot larger of a positive impact than we thought! The result was a soft-bodied but crisp Kolsch with notes of lavender, cherry cola and young dough.
At Aslan, we strive to make you world class beer that you can feel good about purchasing. Through the production of organic beer and purchasing local ingredients for projects like Fresh Hop Kolsch, we hope you’ll choose to vote with your dollar and enjoy some crispy, locally sourced, German-style liquid gold at the same time.
