"It Was Too Flavorful" — The Stories of Oregon Hops
Still from “Superabundant” by Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Last year I pitched an idea to Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) about a podcast series. My clever idea was a slightly-exaggerated claim—clickbaity, if I’m being honest: How Oregon Invented IPA. It was really a framing mechanism to discuss the story of American hoppy ales going back to the 1950s, when the USDA began breeding the hop that would become Cascade. When we tell the story of American brewing, I often hear people emphasize California’s breweries, sometimes Vermont’s, and usually Yakima hops. Oregon played a large and overlooked role in this story, however, and I wanted to re-center attention on the Beaver State.
OPB didn’t think it merited a whole series, but they did agree to a single podcast episode that tied beer and hops together. They went beyond the podcast and created a suite of content that that tells different pasts of the story:
A 13-minute video for OPB’s Superabundant series that focuses squarely on hops and hop growing. It’s a gorgeous video and you get to see the people I interviewed. The video is embedded below, but stop into the YouTube channel to check out some of the other videos they produced—I especially like the one on truffles.
A 15-minute podcast that describes Oregon’s role in developing hoppy beers.
And, finally, an article I wrote for OPB that touches on the same themes.
The content all speaks for itself, but I thought blog readers might like a background story on how this project came to be, and how OPB puts them together. It was certainly fascinating to me.
Last year, as I was thinking about how to bring greater attention to Oregon’s remarkable history and culture of beer, I decided to pitch our local NPR affiliate about a podcast series. A few inquiries led me to Sage Van Wing, the executive producer of podcasts at OPB. It was June when we first spoke, so the timing for doing something hops-related was perfect. OPB was in the planning stages for a new podcast series that would feature Oregon stories. I was a little disappointed that they wouldn’t really dive into the Oregon beer story, but one episode sounded great. (This story-pitching is part of freelancing. It takes a lot of time and almost never turns out like you expected.) I’m not sure when they decided to add the video piece, but that was even better.
The hop harvest gave us a window to begin the project, which OPB podcast producer Julie Sabatier led. Julie is pure radio through and through, and even launched her own podcast twelve years ago, long before they were a thing. (I highly recommend this episode about the PDX airport carpet.) We discussed the shape of the story and who we should interview, and then she contacted those folks and set up the interviews. I am used to doing all that myself, so it seemed miraculous to have someone else take the lead. All I had to do was show up and conduct the interviews.
We scheduled the interviews over the course of the late summer and fall. Because we were doing video along with audio, we set up with a film crew headed by MacGregor (Mac) Campbell. I did the interviewing, but off-camera, and we just plucked the audio from those discussions for the podcast. As you can imagine, we had about ten times the footage from those interviews than we actually used, and you don’t see the adventures along the way, like when a flock of extremely loud starlings landed on the then-bare wires of the hop fields outside the barn where we filmed John Henning. We had to stop recording and go out in the fields waving our arms while yelling to chase them off.
I had no real involvement in the video piece, except when Mac asked me to do an interview for it. Naturally, I hate seeing myself on screen—though mercifully, it’s short. The podcast took longer, and Julie had me come into the studio to read the voice-over. Reading the written word is a challenging task for the unskilled. You’re supposed to inject various cadences and emotions into the reading, which is both unnatural, and, for the introverted writer, uncomfortable. The final product sounds odd because the reading contains personality—but I’m not sure it’s my personality. (No doubt that is beside the point in these things.) Julie was kind and patient as I slogged through read after read.
Mac Campbell, cameraperson Jeff Kastner, and hops researcher John Henning
Jeff filming the crew adding fresh hops to Breakside’s Fresh Hop Talus Logic
The mic after filming the fresh-hop footage (that’s lupulin all over the mic)
Gayle Goschie on set in front of a wall of Cascades.
For me the big takeaway is how many hours of highly skilled labor goes into these things. The editing process had to take longer than shooting the footage—and each one of those shoots took hours. Thanks to my dull readings, we took two sessions just to get usable voice-over. That required booking a studio twice, along with a sound recorder and Julie. All the audio files were transcribed and even before I saw them, Julie had highlighted the key quotes she thought were valuable. The video includes archival photography and animation, which someone had to put together. How long does animation even take? (Probably a lot!) And of course, all of this happens even while these folks are working on other stories.
To put this into context, Patrick and I sit down, record a conversation on fairly average equipment, do it in a single shot, and send it to producer Will Romey, who cuts out the extraneous bits, improves the audio, and adds music. If this were OPB, we’d record our interview in a studio, record separate intros and outros, edit all of that so that it was seemless and absent all the uhs and umms that festoon our podcasts. Instead of taking the 90 minutes of set-up and prep it takes us to create an hour-long podcast, it would probably take six or eight to create a product like OPB does. I was so impressed with their professionalism.
Remarkably, everything they put out is free. I hope you reward their efforts by clicking through and listening/viewing/reading these pieces. They put a lot of effort into this, and that’s all they ask. Again, here are the links: video, podcast, and the print article.