For more than 20 years, Epic has had a fairly uncomplicated obsession: hops.

Not hops as decoration. Not hops because IPA happens to be fashionable. Hops as an ingredient worth pulling apart, comparing, experimenting with and occasionally pushing far beyond what seemed sensible at the time.

That philosophy has led us through new hop varieties, new ways of using them and, over the years, some genuinely new hop technology.

Now it has led us to Cryo Fresh.

With Electric Pony IPA, we are using Yakima Chief Hops’ new Cryo Fresh Mosaic for the first time. This is also the first commercial beer brewed with Cryo Fresh in New Zealand.

But Electric Pony didn’t appear out of nowhere. It sits at the end of a pretty long trail of hop experiments.

The One Trick Pony idea

The story starts with a joke.

Years ago, Epic was described as a “one trick pony” because of our habit of making intensely hop-forward beers. Instead of arguing with it, we leaned into it.

The phrase became the name of a series built around a very simple idea: keep the beer essentially the same and change the hop.

That meant drinkers could taste different varieties side by side and focus on what the hop itself was contributing, rather than trying to mentally subtract different malt bills, yeast strains, alcohol levels or brewing techniques. Epic described the approach back in 2014 as something closer to comparing grape varieties in wine.

The original series moved through hops including Zythos, Mosaic, Comet, Equinox, Brooklyn and Loral, with each release acting as a small sensory experiment. By 2016 Epic was still explicitly describing One Trick Pony as a single-hop series using the same base recipe and swapping the hop variety.

That was the point.

Strip away the noise. Put one hop under the microscope.

Mosaic changed the conversation

One of the most important hops to pass through the One Trick Pony series was Mosaic.

When Epic first brewed with Mosaic, it was still a relatively new commercial variety from the 2012 US harvest. At the time, getting an allocation required getting in early.

Mosaic went on to become one of the defining American aroma hops of its generation, capable of throwing everything from mango, citrus and passionfruit through to blueberry, pine and deeper resinous character.

It also became one of those varieties we kept returning to.

That makes Mosaic the obvious hop for the next evolution of One Trick Pony.

Only this time, the experiment isn’t simply a new hop variety.

It is a new version of the hop itself.

First came lupulin powder

Epic has a bit of history with unusual hop products.

In 2017 we released Magic Dust IPA, using Mosaic LupuLN2, an early Yakima Chief product created using cryogenic separation to remove much of the leafy material and concentrate the lupulin.

At the time, Epic described it as a new brewing technique for New Zealand, with the vegetal matter separated away to leave the lupulin-rich fraction containing the oils and resins brewers actually want.

That might sound fairly normal now. It absolutely wasn’t then.

Traditional T90 pellets contain the entire dried hop cone, milled and compressed. Lupulin-rich products changed the equation by allowing brewers to load beer with hop aroma and flavour while adding far less vegetal material.

Less green matter in the fermenter means less beer absorbed into hop sludge, less trub, and potentially more aroma impact from the same physical volume of hops.

Magic Dust was essentially Epic asking:

What happens if we remove a lot of the plant matter and keep the good stuff?

The answer was obvious enough that we kept going.

Then came Cryo Hops

What began as LupuLN2 evolved into what most brewers now know as Cryo Hops.

Yakima Chief’s current Cryo Hops process uses cryogenic separation to concentrate the lupulin fraction of dried hops. The resulting pellets contain close to twice the lupulin concentration of standard T90 pellets, allowing brewers to push aroma and flavour while reducing the mass of hop material going into the beer.

We followed Magic Dust with beers such as DDH Dust, using Citra and Simcoe lupulin powder in a heavily dry-hopped IPA. Contemporary listings described it as double dry hopped with Citra and Simcoe lupulin powder, continuing that exploration of concentrated hop products.

Cryo eventually moved from experiment to tool.

Today it is normal to see a mix of T90 and Cryo hops in modern IPA and hazy IPA recipes, including beers in our own range.

Which brings us to the newest version.

So what exactly is Cryo Fresh?

Cryo Fresh combines two different ideas.

The first is fresh-hop brewing.

The second is the Cryo Hops process.

Normally, hops intended for year-round brewing are harvested and then kiln-dried before being baled, processed and pelletised. Drying stabilises the hop and makes storage and transport possible, but fresh-hop brewers know that there is a distinctive character present in a hop straight from the field that changes quickly after harvest.

Fresh-hop beer is built around capturing that fleeting window.

The problem is geography.

If you are brewing down the road from a hop farm in Yakima, you can get freshly cut hops into a beer rapidly.

If you are brewing in Auckland, things become slightly more complicated.

About 12,000 kilometres more complicated.

Fresh, un-kilned hops are highly perishable. Once harvested, the clock starts ticking. That has traditionally made an American fresh-hop beer in New Zealand practically impossible.

Cryo Fresh is designed to break that rule.

Yakima Chief starts with freshly harvested, un-kilned whole hop cones. Rather than sending them through the conventional drying process, the fresh cones are immediately frozen. They then undergo Yakima Chief’s patented cryogenic separation process, which isolates the concentrated lupulin while protecting essential hop oils in a frozen, nitrogen-rich, low-oxygen environment. The result is a pellet made from the concentrated lupulin of a fresh hop, rather than a dried one.

That distinction is the whole point.

Cryo Hops start with dried hops.

Cryo Fresh starts with fresh hops.

Fresh-hop character, without living next to the hop field

Yakima Chief describes Cryo Fresh as a way of delivering harvest-fresh aromatics without the logistical restrictions of traditional whole-cone fresh hops. The pellets remain frozen and can be shipped internationally, allowing brewers far outside the hop-growing regions to work with something much closer to that fresh-harvest character.

That is where things become especially interesting for New Zealand.

We know fresh hops very well here.

Every March and April, breweries race freshly harvested New Zealand hops from the Nelson growing region into tanks around the country. It is one of the great seasonal rituals of New Zealand beer.

But American harvest runs roughly six months later.

Cryo Fresh potentially gives us another harvest window.

A New Zealand fresh-hop season in autumn.

Then a taste of the US harvest later in the year.

That is a very different proposition from simply importing another bag of pellets.

How is Cryo Fresh different to wet hops?

It is worth being precise here.

Cryo Fresh is not literally the same thing as throwing freshly picked whole cones straight into a tank.

A traditional fresh-hop beer still has all the physical plant material, moisture and immediacy of hops rushed from farm to brewery.

Cryo Fresh takes the lupulin-rich part of that freshly harvested hop and converts it into a frozen, concentrated pellet.

The objective is to preserve the characteristic bright, green, harvest-season aroma and flavour while making the hop dramatically easier to transport, store and use.

Yakima Chief says Cryo Fresh can be used at several points in the brewing process, but recommends active-fermentation or post-fermentation dry hopping when the goal is to maximise the fresh-hop attributes.

There is also a huge difference in physical volume. Yakima Chief gives the example that a 22-cubic-foot cherry bin filled with freshly harvested hops holds around 65 pounds of whole cones.With Cryo Fresh, the same approximate lupulin load can be concentrated into just two 11-pound boxes.

For a brewery on the opposite side of the planet, that matters.

A lot.

Frozen in Yakima. Frozen to New Zealand.

Our Cryo Fresh Mosaic was kept frozen for its journey from the United States to New Zealand.

Yakima Chief specifies frozen transport and storage for the product because temperature control is integral to preserving its character.

When it arrived here, we kept that cold chain intact until it was time to use it in the beer.

That makes Electric Pony a pretty unusual meeting of two brewing traditions.

It has the immediacy and excitement we associate with fresh-hop season, but the hop involved grew thousands of kilometres away in Washington State.

In effect, we have taken a little piece of the Yakima harvest, frozen it, shipped it across the Pacific, and put it into an IPA in Auckland.

That is extremely cool.

Quite literally.

Electric Pony

So naturally, we went back to Mosaic.

Electric Pony is the next iteration of the One Trick Pony idea.

The original experiment asked:

What happens when we keep the beer constant and change the hop?

Electric Pony asks a slightly different question:

What happens when we take a hop we already know extremely well and change the form in which we experience it?

Same family.

New trick.

Electric Pony is a 6.4% Cryo Fresh Mosaic IPA, built to put that hop character front and centre.

Expect ripe mango, passionfruit, blueberry and citrus, layered with grapefruit, pine and Mosaic’s unmistakable deeper resinous, slightly dank edge.

But the part we are particularly interested in is the character that sits underneath those familiar Mosaic markers: that greener, brighter, just-harvested quality Cryo Fresh is designed to preserve.

It is Mosaic, viewed through a different lens.

Or perhaps more appropriately:

Mosaic with the voltage turned up.

Another New Zealand first

When we used LupuLN2 in Magic Dust back in 2017, we were exploring a hop format New Zealand brewers had not previously had access to.

Cryo Hops followed.

Now Cryo Fresh takes the next step.

Yakima Chief officially launched Cryo Fresh in 2025, initially in Simcoe, Sabro, Citra, Mosaic and Krush, with the product designed specifically to make fresh-hop character accessible internationally.

Electric Pony marks another hop first for Epic as the first use of Yakima Chief Cryo Fresh in a New Zealand beer.

That matters to us not because “first” looks good on a press release.

It matters because this is exactly what the One Trick Pony series was designed for.

Take something new.

Put it into a beer we understand.

Remove as many other variables as possible.

Then taste what actually changed.

One hop. Turned all the way up.

Beer trends come and go remarkably quickly.

Hop technology is different.

Every so often, something appears that genuinely changes what brewers can do with an ingredient.

Pellet hops did it.

Lupulin concentrates did it.

Cryo Hops did it.

Now Cryo Fresh opens another door, especially for breweries like ours sitting a very long way from the American hop harvest.

Whether it becomes a permanent part of the brewer’s toolbox or remains something special for particular beers is exactly what experiments like Electric Pony are for.

We have spent years using One Trick Pony beers to learn what different hops can do.

This time, we already know the hop.

We are discovering what happens when we get closer to the moment it came off the bine.

Electric Pony.
Cryo Fresh Mosaic IPA.
One hop. Turned all the way up.