PORTLAND, Ore. ( MainStreet) - You can have your game-day 30 packs, German beer holidays and pumpkin-pie-spiced ales, but you're missing the best beer of the season if it isn't made with hops straight from the field.

The hop harvest is upon us, which means it's also fresh/wet hop beer season. As hop farmers take topcutting machines to their bines, load them into trucks and get ready to take them to barn-sized kilns for drying, some of their partners in U.S. brewing are stepping in to take some of the heat off. On harvest day, some brewers will take freshly cut bines, pluck off their hop cones, throw them into boiling wort and use them to make some of the most unique beer of the season.

By taking those hops while they're fresh -- some brewers argue that "fresh" means the freshest dried hops of the season, but brewing pioneer Bert Grant and his Yakima Brewing Company thought otherwise more than 20 years ago -- brewers can tweak a beer's aroma, reduce its bitterness and let the citrus, pine and spice flavors of a hop run free. A result is an overall more flavorful beer without the harsh hop bitterness.

It's why, August and early September, beer lovers in Idaho, Washington and Oregon get out their ladders and snips; cut down wires and twine strung to poles, barns and garages; and began harvesting big green piles of hops for their own batches or as donations to breweries. Situated outside Portland, Ore., TheStreet's beer reporting bureau planted a few hop rhizomes - basically, hop roots - of our own three years ago and watched our fledgling Cascade and Willamette hop vines slowly strengthen. With a first-year yield of scarcely a cup of mixed hops, our first crop landed on the back porch of Lucky Laborador Brewing Company in Portland - where pickup truck beds filled with surplus hop vines were transferred to tables of beer-fed volunteers for picking, sorting and weighing before going into its multi-hop mish-mash called The Mutt. Last year, a windstorm took down our bines and left them to wither. This year, our first strong season yielded enough fresh hops for a pale ale.

According to the Department of Agriculture, Oregon, Washington and Idaho alone account for nearly 44,000 acres of hops and nearly 58 million pounds of those fragrant green cones -- both up significantly from 2014 despite drought conditions in the Pacific Northwest. However, there are 12 million more pounds of hops that go into the nation's 80 million-pound total, which means that revived hop farming in Eastern Long Island, Connecticut and even Central New York are yielding results.

If you're wondering where you can find some of the freshest beer of the hop harvest season, we've compiled the following list of ten beers just to get you started:

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Harvest Wet Hop IPA -- Northern Hemisphere Harvest

Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico, Calif.

If this isn't the beer that started it all, it's certainly the oldest of its kind remaining. Back in 1996, Sierra Nevada introduced its first "fresh-hop" or "wet hop" Harvest ale. That was followed by years of arguments about whether a "fresh hop" could ever be a "wet hop" if the harvesting process dries it or if that "wetness" even makes a difference if the fresh oils and resins remain regardless. It was also followed by years of great beer.

The 6.7% ABV Northern Hemisphere Harvest Ale is still made with fresh Cascade and Centennial hops from Yakima that go from the vines to the brew kettles in 24 hours. However, in 2008 Sierra Nevada began producing a Southern Hemisphere Harvest Ale with Pacifica, Motueka and Southern Cross hops flown in from New Zealand. This year, it's expanded its Harvest offerings to five varieties, including one from Idaho, a selection of experimental hops and a batch of wild hops.

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Thundercone Fresh Hop Ale

McMenamins, various locations in Oregon and Washington

This year, we took a quick trip to the six-barrel Cornelius Pass Roadhouse and Imbrie Hall brewery in Hillsboro, Ore., and spoke with brewer Brady Romtvedt about how McMenamins turns a 24-hour hop run from Sodbuster Farms near Salem, Ore., to the chain's 20 breweries across two states.

This year, McMenamins used Simcoe hops -- whose resinous lupulin secretion is loaded with the high alpha acids that make beers almost pink-grapefruit bitter --to make its 6.2% ABV Thundercone. There's still a whole lot of pine aroma on the front of it, while a combination of pilsner and caramel Munich malt make it somewhat darker and more potent than you'd expect from an average pale ale.

However, each McMenamins brewer also got to make a fresh-hop brew of their own choosing, which left Romtvedt to make not only a light-bodied, lemony IPA using 85 pounds of Centennial hops, but to infuse a summer IPA called Squeeze Play with 15 pounds of Chinook hops in a barrel. Those two nearly pale, light and lovely IPAs and the darker, more bitter and floral Thundercone are a fine illustration of what a brewer can do with fresh hops if he's willing to experiment a bit.

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Fresh Hop Pilsner

Full Sail Brewing Company in Hood River, Ore.

Why would you use fresh hops on a pilsner instead of a pale ale or IPA? Maybe just to show how much hops matter to a seemingly unhoppy beer.

We had the pleasure of accompanying Full Sail's brewers down to their Sodbuster Farms hop acreage in Salem last year to stand in the fields just breathing in the hops and talking about what kind of characteristics they can add to a beer. This year's fresh hop selection -- Perle hops -- is evident as soon as you take a whiff of sweet fruit akin to apricot or passionfruit. Since the pilsner malt is benign and pale -- kind of the tofu of the malt world -- it allows some of that same sweetness to come through in the flavor, but not so much that it tastes less like a smooth summer pilsner.

Our favorite aspect of the fresh hop in a pilsner, though, comes in the finish. You might hear a brewer talk about hop "spice," but you may never have any idea what they're talking about until you strip some of the residual hop bitterness away. With the fresh hops eliminating that bitterness from the Perle almost entirely, there's an unexpected, but not unwelcome black pepper bite at the end of each sip of this surprisingly strong 7.3% ABV beer. Pilsners look fairly simple, but require a deft hand to brew them with any consistency. The fresh hops in this one show just how complex this seemingly simple beer can be.

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Wet Hop Pale Ale

Blue Point Brewing Company in Patchogue, N.Y.

Anheuser-Busch InBev purchased Chicago's Goose Island brewery in 2011, but dove a bit more deeply into craft beer by purchasing Seattle's Elysian Brewing; Bend, Ore.-based 10 Barrel Brewing; and Blue Point last year. This beer is the fruit of that purchase.

It isn't that the other A-B craft brewers don't make fresh-hop beer. However, Elysian's Chinookie Wet Hop Ale, 50 Shades of Green (with Mosaic Hops) and Nymphogourdiac (Amarillo hops and pumpkin puree) all come from existing hop partners just three hours away in Yakima. Goose Island, meanwhile, sources hops for its Sticky Feathers wet hop beer from Hop Head Farms in Hickory Corners, Mich.

The 200 pounds of Crystal hops in each batch of Wet Hop Pale Ale (as well as the 200 pounds of Saaz hops in each batch of Wet Hop Pilz) come from Anehuser-Busch InBev's 1,700-acre Elk Mountain hop farm in Idaho. While Goose Island is also sourcing some hops from that farm for a second fresh-hop beer, those hops won't be traveling the 2,600 miles it takes to get them to Long Island. It isn't that Long Island doesn't have hop farms: it just doesn't have ones big enough to pull this off (or to give some away to L.I. homebrewers).

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Fresh Hop Ale

Port Jeff Brewing Company in Port Jefferson, N.Y.

As we said, Long Island does have hop farms. Long Island Hops (43 acres), North Fork Hops (three acres), Condzella's Hops (two acres), Farm To Pint (little more than an acre), Wenofske Farms (just under an acre) combined may be roughly the size of one very small Pacific Northwest hop farm, but they're supplying small breweries that don't exactly require a whole lot of production.

While Eastern Long Island's growing conditions can be tough on hops like the Centennial and force early harvests and outright abandonment of certain hops, Port Jeff has been well served in years past by sourcing Cascade, Chinook, Nugget and other hop varieties from multiple farms right in its backyard. The flavors and aromas can get a little muddled, but so can that of collaborative fresh-hop beers in the Pacific Northwest as well. The pine and citrus still come through in this balanced amber beauty, which may be why even more Long Island brewers including Great South Brewery and Long Ireland Beer Company have been willing to give local hops a shot.

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Co-Hoperative Ale

Fort George Brewery in Astoria, Ore.

Remember what we said about the muddles aroma and flavor of collaborative fresh hop beers? This beer is the prime example of how great a thing that is.

Each year, a few dozen or so of Fort George's neighbors take the hops from their backyards, fences and garages and give them to Fort George for a brew that never quite has the same formula from year to year. The alcohol content usually hovers around 5% and the honey malt and caramel grain usually mellow it out a bit; however, the random combinations of Nugget, Cascade, Chinook, Citra and other hops change up its aroma and a bit of its flavor in each batch.

Since Fort George isn't much for putting this in its 16-ounce tallboy cans, the best way to get your hands on some Co-Hoperative is to head to Astoria, grab a seat by the window overlooking the Columbia and sip one while looking for sea lions on the docks. The brewery also produces a fresh hop version of its Optimist and Suicide Squeeze IPAs. If you need something to go, however, its 6.1% ABV Fresh IPA made with fresh Mosaic hops will be in tallboys and ready to go by October.

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Hop Harvest

Empire Brewing Company in Syracuse, NY.

We lived in Syracuse, N.Y., in the late 1990s and had no idea that a city that Central New York -- which looks like Hothfor big portions of the year -- could sustain hops, much less a fresh-hop beer.

Well, The Bineyard hop farm in Cazenovia, N.Y., produces enough Cascade hops to give farm-to-pint Empire Brewing a 6.8% ABV pale ale with all the pine on the nose and grapefruit bitterness on the tongue of its Northwest counterparts. With the Bineyard producing nine different hop varieties and Empire building a hop-growing farmstead brewery of its own in Cazenovia, there could be a lot more fresh hop brew in store for what was once a tiny brewpub in Syracuse's Armory Square. Times change, but often for the better.

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Sensi Harvest

Sixpoint Brewing in Brooklyn, N.Y.

How far do the hops for 4.7% ABV Sensi have to travel? Not as far as you'd think.

Sure, it's maybe 2,800 miles from Yakima to Brooklyn, but it's only about 2,200 from Yakima to Memphis, where Sixpoint is brewed at the City Brewing Company. Also, Sixpoint doesn't exactly let this one linger for very long or make it in huge quantities, so all of that aroma and balanced flavor from this beer's unnamed combination of hops still comes through once you open the can. As we've seen, New York is getting pretty savvy about getting its hands on fresh hops. Sixpoint just happens to be a bit closer to the source than some of its neighbors.

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Harvest Ale

Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Mich.

We mentioned Michigan's Hop Head Farms earlier in this list, but that farm is just one of several that grow roughly 400 acres worth of hops throughout the state. A new hop farm that just opened this year in Williamsburg will more than double the state's current production.

Again, considering A-B has a more than 1,100-acre hop farm to itself, that's really not a whole lot. However, considering Founders had to supplement Harvest Ale with hops from Washington (and its more than 32,000) hop-growing acres last year, the brewer must be pleased to see more hops being planted so close to home. Especially for this pale, clear, citrusy 7.6% ABV dream of a fresh hop beer.

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BrooDoo

3 Floyds Brewing Company in Muenster, Ind.

Yes, 3 Floyds uses fresh hops to get the citrusy fruit aroma and flavor of this beer, but it still seems to be hedging against its location in a relatively hop-free corner of the country. There's far more pecan-and-toffee malt flavor in Broo Doo than you'll find in most fresh-hop beers, even if the bitterness of this 7% ABV beer still manages to check in at mid-range IPA levels. It's more potent and sweet than a fresh-hop beer typically is, but it's somehow more seasonally appropriate than any of its contemporaries dare to be.

This article is commentary by an independent contributor. At the time of publication, the author held TK positions in the stocks mentioned.