Hop Harvest to Fresh Hop: Hopworks' Bitchin' Camaro (Video)

Hopworks' Tom Bleigh recently headed out to Goschie Farms to pick up organic Crystals for their fresh hop beer, and the brewery made an exceptional video about the hop harvest.  There are a few of these out there, but this is one of the best I've seen.  It also shows the great relationship brewers and growers have formed--and illustrates just how cool it is when your brewery is 42.5 miles (as the hop truck drives) north of the farm.

Oregon Hop Harvest

Each year I look over my shoulder and see that the rest of the country is gaining on us.  Oregon is no longer such a rare and special beer place.  Other cities have dozens of breweries, great alehouses, gastropubs, and so on.  And a few are even near a field or two of hops.  But exceedingly rare are the cities a mere 45 minutes from a major hop-growing region.  (Even Seattle is over two hours from Yakima.)  We have come to revel in this proximity.  Each year, buses of hop tourists ferry down to the fields to gape in wonder.  (Today Ninkasi is taking a busload down.)  On Monday, the good folks at Full Sail packed us into two buses provisioned with ale and lager and down we went to Sodbuster Farms where owner Doug Weathers was our host.

Below are a few choice pictures from the day.  John Foyston has some more (including one of me that is unusually not terrible).  I'm loading a short video onto Vimeo that I'll post when ready.  [now live.]  Enjoy--

Now that's a field of dreams.

They're Cascades, in case you were wondering.

The professionals know how to grow 'em big.

No finer table garland. The lunch was excellent, too.

Easily the most impressive part of the tour is the hop kiln.
Two feet deep, the size of a football field--can you
imagine the aroma?

Friday Flick: Hop Harvest

Since we have a minor theme of hop harvesting going on, here are a couple of videos for your perusal.  First up, a promotional vid from the Oregon Hops Commission.  It's a bit long, but actually quite edifying if you can spare 8 1/2 minutes. (The music is weird and there is a minute and a half of blank tape at the end--but it's still worth a look, I swear.):

If you can't spare ten minutes, here's a shorter video by Ritch Marvin that covers the same material in 3 minutes. Ritch, incidentally, won best in show at this year's Oregon State Fair homebrew contest. He picked up the hardware for a Berliner Weisse.  Congrats to Ritch both for making a superior beer and having the good taste to brew a Berliner Weisse (something I fear is beyond my modest brewing talent).

Has the Pacific Northwest Lost Its Hop Monopoly?

Since I was out not laboring on Labor Day, I missed a potential story hook: the rise of hop farming outside the Pacific Northwest. Colorado, Wisconsin, and New York and New England--and probably elsewhere that I missed, too. These are small concerns and the industry--such as it is--is in the fragile incipient stages. Hop acreage in these states is miniscule by comparison to the Pacific Northwest. (Oregon has 4,600 acres under cultivation and Washington a booming 24,300; Colorado has 75 and Wisconsin and the Northeast similarly measure their acreages in the tens, not thousands.)

Still, these are real numbers. An acre of hop fields produces over 2,000 pounds of hops, so that wee Colorado planting is going to produce around 150,000 pounds of hops. That's not going to go far at Budweiser, but these growers aren't working with In-Bev, they're working with craft brewers:

Hamm said the association is a "loose group" of mostly part-time hop growers who are working toward establishing their own full-fledged operations to supply the state's craft brewers.

Those brewers, like Odell Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, would like to buy as much Colorado-grown hops as possible to support the fledgling industry.

Joe Mohrfeld, Odell's head brewer, said the brewing company has worked with Colorado State University's specialty crops department to obtain hops for its "Hand Picked Pale Ale" and other special seasonal beers.

I'd like to highlight three aspects of this development that strike me as very promising:

1. Localizing of beer. I have long longed for the return of more traditional modes of brewing, in which local ingredients went into local beer. Until rail, refrigeration, and industrialization (that is, for 98% of brewing history), beer was necessarily local. The beer tasted of the land in which it was produced. Because each agricultural region is unique, different strains will grow better in different places, and the beers will naturally adopt a local flavor.
   
2. Terroir. At some point Stan Hieronymus will complete his book on hops, and I'm hoping my understanding of terroir takes a quantum leap. What I do know is that the hops that grow well in Yakima aren't the same hops that grow well in the Willamette Valley, nor do identical strains produce identical-tasting hops when grown in these two regions. What do Wisconsin Cascades taste like? What about New York Willamettes (a bizarre thing to write). Will we see Sauk Goldings?
   
3. Local businesses. One doesn't want to overstate the wholesomeness of craft brewing on the jobs market. Given the choice, most people would probably rather clean kegs for Budweiser than a seven-barrel craft brewery: the salary and benefits will inevitably be better. But what craft brewing has done is fragment what had become an amazingly clean, streamlined process of producing beer. This gives thousands of entrepreneurs new ways to enter the market. Thanks to craft brewing, we have new distributors, new alehouses, new events coordinators to run all those fests, and now, new hop-growers. (Which includes, lest I fail to mention in, the burgeoning group of organic hop-growers.)
   

I'm not sure other regions of the country will ever constitute much of a commercial threat to the hop growers in Yakima and the Willamette Valley. (So the answer to my title is no.) But they can have a substantial impact on the way beer tastes and on the kinds of beers that are in the market. And in that we can happily rejoice.

Beer Blogging's Fringe Benefits

I get invited to a number of events, most of which are staged in the plausible hope that good press will result. Less often, someone stages an event purely for fun and I get invited, too. Yesterday, Full Sail's John Harris took a group of mostly publicans out to the hop fields to see from whence our favorite spice comes--but I think mainly to drink some of his fine beer and enjoy some barbecue and fun.

The one bit of useful news is that we got a chance to sample the first batch of Lupulin. This one is made with First Gold hops, that English dwarf variety I mentioned last week. (John got the hops from the very field I visited.) He will have a second batch a week or two later made with a different hop (possibly Centennial; I forgot to jot down the info). John added an initial dose of dried Warrior hops to bitter (which some might regard as cheating, but which seems to produce far more stable, consistent results), then used First Gold the rest of the way. This is a far more bitter iteration of Lupulin than any that have come before. It's sharp and woody and has a bell-like clarity. A pure, ringing note to sound the start of fresh hop season.

Below are a few select photos from the day (click to enlarge). Angelo has a ton more.

On the bus ride down, John tells us, "no horseplay!" Actually, I think he was talking admiringly about pinot noir.



At harvest, a crew comes by and severs the bines at the root so the harvesting machine can pluck them right up (see below). In this ceremonial severing, a dramatic swing by one of the folks on the trip.

The harvester collecting bines.

Hops drying. These are magnums, with an alpha of about 18%. Full Sail's Sandra Evans was collecting bags to take back to the brewery to use for educational purposes, and slid me a bag to collect a few myself. I owe Doug Weathers, the owner of Sodbuster Farms, at least a six pack of the imperial stout I plan to brew with them. Thanks Doug and Sandra!