The sovereign crowned a second time, at harvest. Wet hops cut at first light and used before the day was out, still green and heavy with oil. Pineapple and passionfruit tear through a wall of pine resin and cracker malt. The grove gives everything it has.
The Oak King wins at midwinter and loses at midsummer. That is the whole arrangement. From the December solstice he gathers strength every single day until the longest day of the year, and on that day his brother comes for the crown and takes it, and from then on the light leaves the world by degrees. Most retellings stop there, as though the defeat were the end of him. It is not. The interesting half of the Oak King is what he does on the way down.
He spends it. Everything he built through the bright half of the year goes into the ground, into the branch, into the fruit. Late summer is not a sovereign in decline. It is a sovereign emptying the treasury: the grain filling out, the apples going heavy, the entire green weight of the year cashing itself in ahead of the frost. A king who hoarded through the harvest would be no king at all.
The hop harvest sits squarely in that stretch. In the Willamette Valley the bines come down when the cones are at their most swollen and resinous, past their peak of growing and exactly at their peak of worth. Once cut they cannot wait. Fresh hops do not keep. They go in green and wet, or they go to nothing at all. It is the most generous and the least forgiving moment in the growing year, which is to say it belongs to him.
Fresh Hop Oak King is a Fresh Hop West Coast IPA at 6.8% ABV, brewed with wet hops brought in at the height of the harvest. Pineapple, passionfruit, and citrus tear through a wall of dank pine and cracker malt, and the finish comes as dry as the season it was pulled from. The crown is already changing hands. This is what the sovereign spends on his way out.
