Single Hill Hillstory: Energy Cone 2025

*The Single Hill 2025 Energy Cone collab crew loses their minds over CLS Farms Zappa hops.*

Single Hill Hillstory: Energy Cone 2025

*Single Hill Brewing’s cofounder and “Director of Liquids,” Zach Turner, suggests Brandon Wiley, Bottleworks’ manager, should grab a breakfast burrito for Dwayne Smallwood of Bridge & Tunnel.*

Every harvest has its own scripture, and in Yakima, scripture is written in resin, sweat, and steam. Single Hill Brewing’s Energy Cone is no ordinary IPA — it’s a once-a-year hymn to the hop gods, first dreamed up in 2020 with Bottleworks and Full Throttle Bottles, brewed in furious, sticky communion with those who live closest to the bine. What began as a spark between a brewer and two Seattle bottle shops has since grown into a rite of harvest — a fresh hop hazy stitched from green cones, steel, and the unruly fraternity of shops who can’t help but throw themselves headfirst into chaos, preferably in red Devo hats when the time is right.

Single Hill has been threading hops into story since 2018, a Yakima brewery planted in the very soil that fuels the world’s beer. They are harvest-obsessed, experimental without losing balance, and deeply tied to the farms around them — the kind of place where brewing isn’t just craft, it’s geography. Every September, they become a pilgrimage site for brewers and bottleshops chasing the volatile magic of wet hops, and Energy Cone is their wildest hymn.

The 2025 vintage began as all proper Energy Cone chapters do: nine a.m., Yakima air sharp with September promise, coffee still warm, Devo hats tucked like talismans in the bags. Single Hill’s brewhouse thrummed with anticipation as we gathered — Bottleworks Manager Brandon Wiley and Full Throttle Bottles owner Jon Olken in 2020, stitched wider with Bridge & Tunnel Bottleshop & Taproom owner Dwayne Smallwood, extended further with Peaks & Pints owner Ron Swarner last year, and now joined by Bill Weed of the Walla Walla Beer Parlor. Peaks & Pints bartenders Erin and Matthew, as well as Full Throttle’s Prophet Paul, flanked, bartenders turned pilgrims, as we shook hands, cracked early beers, and let the mash tun roar awake. All day long, Single Hill co-founder Zac Turner and marketing director Andrew Pytel were with us, swapping stories, steering caravans, and turning a harvest brew into something more like a family road trip.

*Single Hill Marketing Director Andrew Pytel keeps a close eye on Full Throttle Paul’s sunglasses to eliminate last year’s hijinks.*

By midday, the kettle was baptized with fresh, wet Citra from Loza Farms and Sauve & Son Farms whipped up with CLS Farms Zappa, Cornerstone Ranches Cashmere, and Carpenter Farms Citra — green lightning stripped from the bines and hurled still breathing into steel. The brewhouse smelled like citrus thunder and pine cathedral, hop oils atomizing into perfume that clung to our shirts. Fresh-AF hops, kiln-pressed hours before, layered in their own brand of neon clarity, stacking juiced fruit atop dank resin in a fugue only Yakima proximity can conjure.

In the afternoon, we walked among the very fields that fed our brew, fingers sticky, sun gilding every cone. Hop harvest is never gentle — it’s chaotic, perishable, fleeting — but that’s the thrill: to trap a moment of September inside a can before it vanishes. And Energy Cone, year after year, has proven it knows how to do just that — medals from GABF, Washington Beer Awards, Yakima’s own Best of Show all testify that this beer is less recipe than living artifact.

Dinner came with laughter and the inevitable donning of the red Devo hats. Five shop owners clinked glasses, absurd and radiant, whipped into a kind of holy nonsense. Dwayne vaulted onto the comedy stage and spun his Astoria-to-Yakima haul into an impromptu stand-up set, part road-trip confessional, part harvest fever dream. Because that’s the Energy Cone story, really — a myth brewed anew every harvest, fleeting and unforgettable, citrus and resin stitched to memory with sweat, hops, and a touch of joyful ridiculousness.

*Erik Sauve, vice president at Sauve and Son Farms, tells Full Throttle Bottlers owner Jon Olken, right, where he can and can’t photograph his Devo doll.*

And now, weeks later, the beer itself emerges: Energy Cone 2025. Expect saturated grapefruit blaze, tropical mango sigh, dank green forest floor, and that unmistakable “just-picked” crackle that fades too fast to hoard. Drink it fresh, drink it now, drink it as scripture — and find it pouring at all five bottle shops who helped conjure it. Because next harvest will demand another story, another brew, another chapter in the hillstory of Single Hill.