The Wonder of Harvest Time
Until about fifteen years ago, only a vanishingly small number of regular people—even brewers—had ever visited a hop farm during harvest. Never mind that for Portland’s brewers, this spectacle was a mere 45 minute drive away. Changes in the industry and the rising popularity of fresh-hop beers changed all that, and now growers welcome visitors down every year. On Wednesday, podcast co-host Patrick and I visited one of Coleman Agriculture’s farms south of Salem for an annual visit. For those of you who don’t happen to live this close, I thought it might be nice to offer a visual tour. It lacks the intense scents that mark these visits, but you can use your imagination for that.
Hops are an unusual crop. The bines climb up wires that soar overhead. (Yes, bines. They are vines that grow in a helix, surrounding wires like a snake; vines send out tendrils as they rise.) It’s such a specialized industry that all the equipment is provisional or purpose-built. Growers can’t buy off-the-shelf cutters and pickers. The first step is getting the bines out of the fields. Trucks drive down the rows, clipping the bottom of the bine, then return and clip the top, collecting the whole bines in trucks. During our visit, they rumbled by at regular intervals, arriving from distant fields.
Next, the hops have to come off the bines. Up until about WWII, that meant hands, many, many hands, plucking and collecting in baskets. You may have heard about poorer London families decamping to Kent for a month to pick the hops? The same thing happened in Oregon, as Portland families poured into the towns south of the city for the annual harvest. Automation arrived around 1950, and now machines uses rotary tines to pull leaves and hops off the main stem of the bine, and blown air to trap the flat leaves to belts while the hops bounce away.
Workers string the hops upside down on hooks so they open up—the easier to remove from the stem. At Coleman, the picker is a pretty tight affair. I’ve been to other pickers that are easier to get a look at—but this gives you a sense. (For the few of you viewing this on a computer, you can click to enlarge.)
Workers stringing up the bines.
Look closely and you can see the tines of the picker raking the bines.
Once the hops have been fully separated, they go to the kiln. At Coleman, the kiln is designed to fill a chamber beneath the bed of hops with warm air that blows upward. The goal is to reduce the moisture level to around 8%.
The drying bed of hops.
The chamber underneath
Once the hops are dry, they cool. A conveyor belt moves them from the kiln and deposits them into a cooling room, where they’ll sit overnight before baling. Two short videos:
Everything about the experience is a feast for the senses, but the kiln and cooling warehouses are a highlight. The kilns are hot, and the hops vent a wet, sticky aroma that intoxicates. It’s also something else to see giant piles of hops. On the day we visited, they were harvesting Amarillo. Each hop has a window for harvest, so growing different varieties is important not just for sales, but phasing the harvest. Right now you’ll notice a lot of Strata fresh-hop beers on the market. Strata is one of the first hops to ripen. Mosaic, on the other hand, is one of the latest—so look for fresh hop beer with Mosaics to come last.
Here’s Patrick to give a sense of scale
Hops falling, as if from heaven.
And the ubiquitous field porn, because no report on hops would be complete without seeing the emerald gems basking in the soft Oregon sun. Plus a bonus picture of Gayle Goschie, a grower I visited earlier in the season.