Ken Grossman remembers the exact field at Roy Farms where he got the Cascade hops for his first batch of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. In 1981, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company had just opened, and he wanted to do a special release of a dry-hopped IPA, a beer almost unheard of at that time. Ken was serious about hop selection, and Lester Roy—grandfather of current Roy Farms owner Mike Roy—had given him his first ever hop field tour back in the 1970s.

“I specifically remember buying that lot of hops. They were from what’s called a baby field,” Ken recalls. He explains that conditions in the Yakima Valley of Washington state are often good enough to get usable hops the first season a new crop is planted.

“I remember loving this first-year field of Cascade that had been planted,” he continues. “They were small, compact cones but were dense with lupulin. I went with that lot for dry-hopping the first batch of Celebration Ale.”

In hop growing, a lot is a batch of baled hops of one variety grown in one location, usually totalling 10 to 20 tons of hops. The characteristics of a single hop variety can vary from location to location, so selecting a specific lot is important for a brewer who wants to achieve a particular aroma and flavour consistently.

That first batch entered the world just a few months before I did. When I first discovered the beer one late fall day in my twenties, the clean bitterness spoke of the bracing cold of the season, and created an image in my head of fresh oranges lying in a blanket of snow in the shadow of mountain pines. Hops and malt were just vague beer words I didn’t understand at the time, but I knew this beer captured something about the change of the seasons that no technical beer knowledge could explain.

What was once a novelty release is now a national undertaking. Ken’s bucolic memories of a single baby field of Cascade hops has given way to a complicated logistical operation, with different hops hitting peak ripeness in very narrow windows, across multiple farms in different states. What was once a single, special release is now an iconic beer, and brewing it on a large scale has proven to be a puzzle over its 40 year history.

***

The person solving that puzzle is Tom Nielsen, who oversees research and development and raw materials at Sierra Nevada, which operates production breweries in Chico, California, and Mills River, North Carolina, just outside Asheville. As the president of the Hops Research Council and the chair and co-founder of the Hops Quality Group, two national trade organizations that advance the science of growing hops and using them in brewing, Tom is a leading expert on hops. And he needs to be, because the hop sourcing for Celebration poses a unique challenge.

The character of Celebration is driven by Cascade and Centennial hops, and it takes a lot of both to brew each year’s batch—45,000lbs (20,412kg) of Cascade and 30,000lbs (13,608kg) of Centennial. Sierra Nevada played a major role in Cascade becoming the hop that defined the early days of American craft brewing by using it in the recipe for its Pale Ale, and showcasing its bright notes of grapefruit and pine. Centennial wasn’t even named when Celebration was first brewed, but Grossman loved the way it complemented the citrus, pine, and floral notes of Cascade, and decided to add it to the mix.

““There’s a friendly competition between growers to try to get their hops into Celebration every year. It’s a big beer that signals the end of their harvest and launch into the holiday season.””

— Tom Nielsen, Sierra Nevada

Brewing with both hops creates a problem for this fresh hop beer though, because Cascade and Centennial don’t ripen at the same time, with Centennial maturing up to a week earlier. Tom looks for the very best fields of both hops in the entire Pacific Northwest, and he needs those two fields to be ready for harvest as close to each other as possible to ensure the freshest hop aromas.

As Centennial hops move through their ripeness window, their aroma transitions from bright lemon to a more orange-like character, before taking on red fruit and rosy floral notes as ripeness peaks. That’s the sweet spot Tom is looking for, and it comes very shortly before the hops begin to degrade. When they’re ready, there can be no delay.

“We want to fully express the rose floral notes and make sure we’re not getting some that have gone overripe into savoury notes,” Tom says. “For us, it’s critical to get those rose, geraniol-derived notes, just at the onset of onion/garlic.”

Tom is in communication with growers throughout the summer to check on their Centennial fields, and he usually flies up to the Yakima Valley the first weekend of September to check on them himself. Sierra Nevada has found that Oregon Cascade fields ripen just a few days earlier than their Washington neighbours, bringing them closer to that Centennial readiness date. They’re looking for Cascade expressing a balanced profile with citrus, pine, floral, and herbal notes.

“That’s a dance, getting those trucks ready,” Tom says with a laugh. “It’s one of the bigger asks that we have of our suppliers. They have to pass all their quality standards and expedite everything to target that truck being loaded and on the road on Friday so we can start brewing that Saturday in Chico and the following Monday in Mills River. It’s a lot of extra work in the heat of harvest.”

Despite the brewery looking for the same hops from the same area year after year, that doesn’t necessarily mean any one farm’s hops will be used each time.

“There’s a friendly competition between growers to try to get their hops into Celebration every year,” Tom continues. “It’s a big beer that signals the end of their harvest and launch into the holiday season.”

That said, the selection for Cascade has moved around more than that for Centennial in recent years, as Tom has found himself consistently selecting the latter from CLS Farms in the Yakima Valley. The farm is the largest producer of Centennial hops in the world, and while the task of selecting these hops for Celebration begins in fall, the farm is hard at work on their coveted crop before the first hop shoots have even broken through the soil in the spring.

***

When I ask Reid Lundgren in early summer about his Centennial hops, he begins talking about the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains, the depth of the snowpack at high elevations, and the hot May weather patterns. When most of us picture hop farms, we see tall bines on trellises, loaded with green hop cones, but for Reid, production manager at CLS Farms, the process starts far earlier. Autumn may be hop season for those eager for the release of wet and fresh hop beers like Celebration, Tröegs Hop Knife Harvest Ale, or Breakside Fresh Hop IPA, but in Yakima, it’s always hop season.

CLS Farms is near the small town of Moxee, about 150 miles southeast of Seattle, and this farm has a knack for the notoriously hard-to-grow Centennial. Celebration isn’t the only big name beer for which they supply it—they send Centennial to Bell’s Brewery in Michigan for their legendary Two Hearted Ale, too. CLS grows about 2,300 acres of hops, 325 of which are Centennial—some 15% of their yield. Reid talks about his Centennial crop like a gardener talking about his award-winning roses—he and CEO Eric Desmarais are just tending a much larger garden.

“Eric and I see every Centennial field every day, and multiple times per day leading up to harvest,” Reid explains. “We set our picking schedule off aroma. We know that for Celebration, Sierra Nevada likes that deep, darker rose note that comes on later in harvest.”

“I’ve been farming hops for almost 30 years,” says Eric. “But I didn’t understand the complexity of those aromas until the last seven or eight.”

Eric explains the CLS team was working with very simple sensory descriptors until Sierra Nevada and other craft breweries began coming to them several years ago. This led the farm to start being a lot more nuanced with their recognition of sensory notes throughout a hop's maturity window.

Both Reid and Eric confirm Tom’s assertion of how much work the Celebration project requires, but the feelings that this work inspires isn’t exhaustion, but excitement.

““We set our picking schedule off aroma. We know that for Celebration, Sierra Nevada likes that deep, darker rose note that comes on later in harvest.””

— Reid Lundgren, CLS Farms

“When harvest comes, the energy of the brewers is unreal,” says Reid. “We can be in the dog days of harvest, but they come and bring all this energy. That is very invigorating to us on the long days. You go through the growing year and then that first Centennial we crack open in the field immediately takes me back to doing selection at the table or drinking a beer with Sierra Nevada.”

***

When Tom started at Sierra Nevada nearly 18 years ago, he considered himself one of the luckiest young people in America.

“One of my first projects was walking around the cellars during Celebration season and tasting every tank every day at 5PM with [then-brewmaster] Steve Dressler to compose the blends of tanks,” he recalls. “We were traditionally dry-hopping with the bag soak method, and we got a lot of great flavours that way, but it had a big impact on our capacity. As the brand grew, we had to come up with a different way to do this.”

That’s how the Torpedo was born, Sierra Nevada’s re-circulating hop vessel that proved so successful it spawned its own eponymous IPA. The bag soak method requires a relatively high hops-to-beer surface area ratio, which necessitated the use of multiple tanks that tied up production capacity. The re-circulating Torpedo allowed Celebration production to be moved to one large tank.

“The genesis of the Torpedo was actually to meet Celebration demand,” Tom says. “I’m not sure many people know that, actually.” After bringing the Torpedo online, the challenge then became ensuring the beer met the flavour and brand specifications of the pre-Torpedo beer .

“Certainly it is an agriculturally sensitive beer,” Tom says. “That was another important thing for us to get right, philosophically—that this [new hopping] process wasn’t going to change the heart and soul of the beer. And we nailed it. Analytically, you can’t tell them apart through extensive gas chromatography or sensory analysis. We did our job.”

So does the yeast. Widespread understanding of biotransformation has increased over the past few years ago due to its effects in the brewing of hazy IPAs and the popularity of the style, but the process of yeast interacting with and upon aromatic hop compounds had been understood by brewers for much longer. Tom himself published a research paper on the topic in 2007—before the term had even been coined.

“We were looking at these flavour pathways that were happening in the beer,” he recalls. “When you dry hop beer post-fermentation, you’re going to express very similar qualities if you just infused the hops in hot water and smelled it. There are quite a few flavour systems that the yeast will activate in hops. When you dry hop during active fermentation, you get a softening effect as well.”

Tom explains that the active yeast absorbs much of the intense piney flavour from the fresh hops and liberates hidden tropical, citrus, and floral notes in the hops—all key elements of Celebration’s iconic flavour profile. He’s found over the years that delaying dry-hopping by even one day during active fermentation will adjust this flavour balance.

***

Celebration Ale is such a monumental undertaking now that from an outside perspective it’s hard to visualise quite how humble its beginnings were, and Ken Grossman remembers the fledgling endeavour with pride.

“At about 90 cases that first year, it didn't go very far,” he recalls with a warm smile. “I still have fond memories of that first batch. It was intense yet balanced. It really brings me back to a time of going out of our comfort zone a little bit. There wasn't that kind of understanding of the flavours of hops then. Celebration Ale allowed us to introduce beer drinkers to a different dimension with dry hopping and the kind of flavours you can get from that.”

Tom Nielsen’s sharpest memories of Celebration come from before the beer is brewed each year. Arriving in the Yakima Valley at the end of every summer has become a pilgrimage for him, a ritual full of sensory impressions and the excitement of the task ahead.

“The whole thing is like a dreamscape,” he says. “Just rolling into Moxee during early harvest and getting up on one of those hills. The hills in Yakima look like a Shar-Pei—the dog with all the rolls. You look down on Moxee and you see mile after mile after mile in every direction of fully mature hops. You grasp the magnitude of what’s going on around you.”

Celebration Ale was once a symbol of Sierra Nevada’s trailblazing spirit, but after forty years, the trail has long since been blazed. The beer stands now as a testament to an ongoing commitment to excellence, to the worthiness of pursuing beauty in the face of challenges.

Sitting on my patio one day last fall during the mess of 2020, with the still-unfolding Covid-19 pandemic and a contentious presidential election causing anxiety and division, it felt like there was little worth celebrating. When a friend dropped off a six-pack of Celebration, I was reminded there are small moments of joy in this life, and sometimes they’re found in a pint glass. Those oranges in the snow beneath the high elevation pines and that bracing bitterness in the autumn sunlight were enough on a hard day to remind me life is a gift, and something worth celebrating, one pint at a time.