We've been in hot growing for four years now, met Matt Hall two years ago when we did the
beer dabbler.
From there it just became a friendship and a business adventure together.
What happened to be the same time when Washington, Oregon was devastated with a hops disease
that wiped out a lot of their crops.
Hops prices absolutely went through to rough.
There was a tremendous shortage in hops and I thought, wow, what an opportunity to get
into growing a plant that, first of all, I think is one of the most beautiful plants
that grow.
They're extraordinary to watch.
You can literally watch them grow day by day, they grow that fast.
The plant is a perennial.
You can dig up the rhizomes after about a four-year time span, which is where we're
at right now.
So we can expand ours pretty much double what we're at at this point next year.
We'll start out in the spring of the year, getting the strings starting up.
About 300 lines we have to run down off the top of the cables and then train each and
every plant.
We've got to train and grow clockwise up the string.
Sometime in July, they'll hit the top of the line and they'll start spreading out from
there and then the cones will start developing.
That's when you're very worried about storms.
You're very worried about insect infestation.
So we have 77 chickens at free range through the hops field and they pretty much keep the
insects down.
They take care of the grasshoppers, anything that will do any damage to it.
We will incorporate right around 50,000 ladybugs two to three times a year and let them go
out in the field and ladybugs just love eating aphids.
If there are no aphids, they fly away and that's okay too.
You kind of watch it and you'll see that they start to change color right now is when they're
doing it.
They'll go from a dark green to almost a lime green color.
When you feel them, they got a nice soft feel to them, not a wet, spongy feel.
You'll cut down the vine, cut the top off and cut about the bottom two or three feet
off the ground.
We use large sheets to drop them on so they don't ever hit the ground.
We will then pick the hops off the vines.
We'll continue picking.
It'll take two to three days to get them all harvested.
Whatever the brewery doesn't use, we have a drying rack that we will put them on.
In our hops house, we can get it to about 115 to 120 degrees and about eight to 10 hours
time with rotating them every hour throughout the night.
They'll be dry in the morning.
From there, we will kick on the air conditioner in there and cool the whole room down.
At that point, we're sitting in there kind of shivering and start doing the vacuum packaging
and then get them into the freezer.
