It would have sounded implausible just a few years ago, but the most intriguing, dynamic territory for hop experimentation in 2025 is found in the lager domain.
The territory loosely defined as “hoppy lager” is fertile ground for innovation and nuance as brewers chase their Platonic ideal of a crisp, crushable, yet fully hop-expressive beer. Like a preserved butterfly, the ideal hop-forward lager is delicate and difficult to pin down—though the pursuit of that beauty is worth the steady patience required.
For many brewers, a core challenge lies in balancing elegant lager fermentation with the brightest possible hop expression. Time is of the essence, yet it exerts a push-pull: Lagers demand slow fermentation and conditioning time, while hops’ volatile compounds insist on a short window from tank to tap—or so the conventional wisdom goes.
As it turns out, brewers are approaching this balancing act in different ways, testing old assumptions and applying new hop products to their beers in ways that ensure hoppy lagers deliver what they’re supposed to: the best of both lager crispness and prismatic hops.
Shifting Ground
How brewers achieve this goal can depend on which vein they’re mining. Is it West Coast pilsner, Italian-style pilsner, India pale lager (yes, still a thing), some variation on those, or something else?
It’s an increasingly diverse landscape. In June, the Brewers Association updated its style guidelines for Hoppy Lagers in the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup competitions. It carved out a subcategory called West Coast Pilsners, which competition director Chris Williams describes as a “relatively newly developed but well-represented style.” (In fact, it’s so well represented that Williams says the BA is likely to give them their own category in 2026, depending on the number of entries this year.)
To accommodate the new substyle, the BA also made slight tweaks to the existing India Pale Lager category, aligning its hop parameters more closely with the IPA categories to eliminate overlap with West Coast pilsners.
These revised guidelines demonstrate just how much subtlety there can be within a term as seemingly straightforward as “hoppy lagers,” from ester levels to sulfur presence to hops’ particular characteristics. To strike a clear note, brewers should begin with their final, cohesive lager in mind—then, working backward, ensure that each technical decision about fermentation and hopping serves that end and that all components are in proper synchronicity.
When done right, complete lager fermentation needn’t conflict with hops that smell and taste like they’re at peak vibrancy.
What Is It You Seek?
Before approaching questions of fermentation time and hopping, brewers should first pinpoint their target.
West Coast pilsners, for example, can burst with IPA-level hop aroma; a warmer, faster fermentation—even with a lager strain—could help accentuate the fruitier notes of particular hop varieties. If that means sacrificing a slight degree of snappy lager character, well… drinkers who want that aromatic hop onslaught probably won’t mind.
In contrast, Italian-style pilsners and other hop-forward lagers that hew closer to European traditions may still be reaching for intriguing hop expression, but brewers (and judges) tend to place more emphasis on refined lager fermentation in these beers. They’re generally fermented cooler for longer and with dry-hop techniques that don’t approach IPA thresholds.
Still other brewers are charting their own paths through a broad family of hop-forward lagers—those that aren’t Italian-style pilsners, aren’t IPLs, and aren’t West Coast pilsners. Fermentation and hopping approaches can vary based on the desired sensory results.
- At Heater Allen in McMinnville, Oregon, owner and head brewer Lisa Allen has explored single-hop pilsners, spotlighting IPA hops such as Nelson Sauvin or Lemondrop but using them only in the kettle.
- At Offset Bier in Park City, Utah, co-owner Conor Brown makes what he calls a New World pils using Citra, Simcoe, and Mosaic in the boil, as well as an American light lager called Silver Dagger that gets kettle additions of Riwaka and Zumo. (He’s also brewed a few West Coast pilsners, but Utah laws that limit draft beer to 5 percent ABV make them challenging—a bit more alcohol can help support their hop loads.
- Sunriver Brewing in Sunriver, Oregon, has released West Coast pilsners, Italian-style pilsners, and some lagers that head brewer Patrick Raasch says are “in-between.” Loosely describing these beers as New World pre-Prohibition pilsners, Raasch explains that they are more heavily dry hopped than Italian-style but not as intense as West Coast. He uses a hop blend that’s “less punchy and more nuanced” than the big Strata, Mosaic, or Nelson Sauvin bomb he might apply to a West Coast pils. He might instead hop these New World lagers with Sterling plus Comet, Cascade, or Citra to impart “Noble dankness, but with a contemporary twist.”
Identifying these less-defined hoppy lagers with a style label that makes sense to drinkers can be a challenge.
“It bounces around a bit,” Raasch says. At Sunriver, they’ve called these ’tweeners West Coast pils or Italian-style at times, despite not really hewing to either style. “We’ve used ‘hoppy pilsner’ before for some of these in-between ones, but we’re still trying to figure out what resonates.”
Even if most taproom guests won’t care about those semantics, the challenge of what to call them is a by-product of brewers’ creativity and desire to bring a fresh approach to the hoppy lager universe.
West Coast Considerations
Considering its reputation as a hop-forward California brewery, Santa Rosa’s Russian River was a bit late to the West Coast pilsner party.
Owner and brewer Vinnie Cilurzo says he was an early skeptic of the style, despite the brewery’s long success with STS Pils—which technically could be considered an Italian-style pilsner, though they don’t market it as one.
However, after enjoying West Coast pilsners from fellow California breweries Highland Park in Los Angeles and North Park in San Diego, Cilurzo says that he has since seen the light. The Santa Rosa brewery released its own version, Russian River 110, in June 2025.
Because it has more in common with an IPA in terms of hop expression, Russian River brews 110 more like an IPA than a lager. For example, the West Coast pils ferments at 58°F (14°C), while the STS ferments at 49°F (9°C).
“We noticed we don’t need to ferment it as cold, so we can flip the tank faster,” Cilurzo says of 110. “We’re also getting some more fruity notes while still maintaining clean, classic flavors that we get from the lager yeast, which is 34/70. … And when you ferment just a little bit warmer, you’re also able to blow off some of the sulfur.”
There is an upper threshold, though. Cilurzo says he’d previously bumped the temperature as high as 68°F (20°C), but that resulted in “more rough edges” and less of a clean lager character. Still, they dry hop the 110 in the 60s°F (16–21°C); once it’s cleared diacetyl tests, they crash the temperature like they would for an IPA. It then cold-conditions for about five days before the team clarifies it with Biofine, an approach that’s in line with how they finish IPAs.
West Coast pilsners don’t need as much lagering time as other types, Cilurzo says. “Nothing good happens to a beer that just sits on IPA hops for too long.”
West Coast pilsners are also prime candidates for advanced hop products. Russian River 110 gets two pounds of dry hops per barrel—a lot of green matter for a mid-strength beer. To reduce it, Cilurzo and his team replaced about 20 percent of the Tangier hops with Abstrax Quantum Brite. It doesn’t hurt that this also increases yield.
At Sunriver, Raasch says flowable products such as DynaBoost and HyperBoost from Yakima Chief Hops, SubZero Hop Kief from Freestyle Hops, as well as cold-side products from Abstrax and Haas are important for imparting layers of hop complexity to West Coast pilsners while reducing vegetal matter—so important, in fact, that Sunriver named its recent Citra-hopped pils Flowable.
They brewed that particular beer with Citra CO2 extract, Citra T-90 pellets, Citra Cryo pellets, and, naturally, Citra 702 flowable.
“We’ve been layering in some of those products just because they add some nice complexity,” Raasch says, “but they don’t mask the pilsner qualities entirely.”
Resolving the Tension of Time vs. Hops
Hop-forward lagers more aligned with European traditions tend to get more emphasis on longer fermentation and conditioning times than on dry hopping—if they’re dry-hopped at all.
These styles are closer in profile to classic lager styles, and they should taste like them—no Italian-style pils is likely to win a pale ale category.
“It is subjective, but if you’re going to invest the time, energy, and money to make a proper lager, allow it to present as a proper lager and don’t overpower it with hops,” says Tim Adams, founder of Oxbow in Newcastle, Maine. “Pilsners are very hop-forward beers, but you’re well aware that you’re drinking a lager.”
Oxbow’s own Luppolo was the first U.S. beer to be labeled as an Italian-style pilsner, a style inspired by Birrificio Italiano’s Tipopils.
“The word lager is a noun and a verb,” Adams says. “There’s no exact definition of the minimum amount of time a beer needs to be cool-conditioned to count as lagering, but I think it should go without saying it’s more than just a couple weeks.”
Oxbow lagers Luppolo for six weeks. However, Adams says that time doesn’t diminish the brightness of the beer’s hop character, for a couple of reasons: First, the hops with lower alpha acids are relatively stable compared to their higher-alpha American or New Zealand counterparts; second, proper cellaring practices that minimize oxygen incursion ensure that those hops remain nearly as expressive as the day they first went into the tank.
“Allowing it to remain fresh in the keg or package has a lot to do with what flavors aren’t there, aren’t getting in the way,” Adams says.
At Unsung Brewing in Anaheim, California, founder and brewer Mike Crea says a major key to the success of Clawburst—which won silver at the 2025 World Beer Cup—isn’t quick fermentation time. Instead, it’s yeast health.
Unsung ferments its lagers with the Andechs strain; for Clawburst, the team repitches yeast harvested from Lumino, the brewery’s Mexican-style lager. That yeast is “already jacked and ready to get going” once it’s pitched into Clawburst, Crea says. At first it ferments relatively warm, around 63°F (17°C); when it gets halfway to terminal, Crea gradually drops the temperature down to 54–55°F (12–13°C).
“With the yeast being so healthy,” he says, “it tends to run on overdrive for weeks, even after dropping it 10 degrees or so. And it cleans up really well.”
Brewers aiming for more refined lager character tend not to see conditioning time as conflicting with hop expression. Instead, their focus is on smoothing all the beer’s edges to allow the hops that are there to fully reveal themselves.
For Brown at Offset, drinking unfiltered, unpasteurized Pilsner Urquell at the source provided the lightbulb moment that changed his approach.
“You taste how much hop expression exists in that beer,” Brown says. “Well, the last hop addition in this beer is probably 30 minutes from the end of the boil. We’re obviously taught in IPA brewing that you have to add the hops super, super late … in order to get hop expression.”
Extended lagering of dry-hopped beers can lead to an undesirable grassy character. To avoid that at Heater Allen, Lisa Allen says she’s turned her attention toward earlier additions. She also tried “dip hopping” a Callista-hopped Italian-style pilsner a few years back—she says it helped to bring out a well-integrated fruitiness.
Although her lagers spend eight weeks in the fermentors and lagering tanks, she doesn’t worry about them losing their hop vibrancy.
“When making a hoppy lager,” she says, “if you’re going to give it enough time, you really shouldn’t be afraid of boiling hops or using hops hot side because you can still get a really expressive hop that way while avoiding some of that grassiness or biotransformation.”
In 2023, Allen participated in a Yakima Chief Hops roundtable alongside Bierstadt’s Ashleigh Carter, Goldfinger’s Tom Beckmann, and Highland Park’s Bob Kunz. All four brewers on the stage said they lager their beers for eight weeks—not a dissenter among them.
“We wondered, ‘Why is eight weeks typically the mark?’” Allen says. “I don’t know—it just comes together.”
