Rolling in the green: Hop season has arrived!

I originally started drinking craft beer because it just plain tasted better. It still does, but now there are other reasons to drink craft beer that are at least as important to me. I like the do-it-yourself aesthetic of the beers, preserving a traditional craft, lest all beermaking become impersonal and mechanized, and no one remembers why or how certain steps are important to the final product. Sure, the brewing of many craft beers is mechanized, especially at the bigger breweries, but the brewers there have an understanding of the process from end-to-end and a tasty final product (rather than simply profits) as their end goal. This is stark compared to the giant macro-breweries where many employees conduct a single task in conveyor-belt-like fashion, without ever understanding how it fits into the big picture. It reminds me of the great Cathedrals in Europe that could likely never be replicated today because the craftsmanship that went into them died out, and even if a sufficient number skilled craftsmen could be found, no one would be willing to fund such a project today. Luckily, in beer, the craft is more alive than ever, and there’s a growing number of consumers willing to pay for a craft beer. The best of all, craft beer (most of it at least) is still many times more affordable than, say, high quality wine, keeping it within just about anyone’s budget for at least an occasional treat, if not a daily staple.

I also like the way many craft brewers shows greater respect to people (their employees and their customers) and the environment than the macrobrewers. Sierra Nevada uses fuel cells for electric power and heat, runs heat and C02 recovery systems, and is proactive about maximizing water and energy conservation through efficiency. New Belgium is 100% wind-powered, incorcoporated green design elements in the brewery building, and treats their wastewater. Several smaller breweries such as Wolaver’s and Eel River are organic. And the hops shortage has prompted an increasing number of breweries are experimenting with self-production, kick-starting an appreciation for local hops that mirrors the local produce movement that began in farmers markets years ago. By contrast, Budweiser’s claim to greenness is that it uses 8% renewable energy (compared to NB’s 100%), and that they recycle aluminum. That’s about it.

Me and my brother Dan cutting down hop bines

Yesterday was a celebration of all of these elements I love about craft beer: great taste, great cultural tradition and craftsmanship, and great use of local eco-friendly ingredients. This was all courtesy of Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing, a one-man operation based in Sonoma County, that has achieved cult-like status for churning out one astoundingly well crafted beer after with its improbably small employee count. Yesterday was the first of two days devoted to picking his ¼ acre of hops, which will go into a fresh hop beer that will be ready some time over the next several weeks. Don’t ask me what kind of fresh hop beer, because not only do I not know, but as of yesterday even Brian didn’t know. He said he’d have to smell the crop we picked, think about it, and figure out what he wanted to make. It is exactly this kind of attitude, a respect for one’s ingredients that bases the final product on what the ingredients are suited for, rather than forcing them to fit some preconceived plan, that I love about craft beer production. It’s a world away from our current notions flying in raspberries from Chile in December, instead of focusing on making treats from fresh and local winter crops.

Cutting the bines

We started by cutting down the vines, excuse me, the “bines”, from the wires on which they were trained. This was the first thing I learned yesterday: the difference between a vine and a bine. Grapes grow on true vines, which climb using tendrils or suckers, and become hard and woody. Hops grow on bines, which climbs growing its shoots in a helix around a support and remain tender, green, and plant-like instead of woody. We made my brother do much of the cutting work, both because he’s an aspiring hop grower himself, and because he’s young and hearty. : ) I gave this job a try though, and cut down about half of the first row, of the four rows we harvested yesterday. Our tool was a bit makeshift (an exacto-knife duct taped to the basket of an apple picker), but it worked. This is another one of my favorite features of craft production: if the right tool isn’t handy, improvise! MacGuyver would be awfully proud. It’s one way to get around the fact that the benefits to scale are so great that while it used to be that self-production was the economical choice, today it’s an unavoidable fact that most things can be obtained most economically from Wal-Mart, McDonalds, or Budweiser. The cost of the equipment and supplies for hand-sewn, hand-grilled, and hand-brewed items ensures that today, a do-it-yourself lifestyle costs more, not less, than having others do it for you. At least homebrewers generally embrace the idea of tinkering, recycling, and jury-rigging such that almost anything tool be constructed or mimicked with a little improvisation instead of purchasing a shiny, new, expensive made-for-one-purpose only device.

The crew, picking the hops from the bines

Next, we set the bines in a pile under a sunshade, sat ourselves down in some chairs, and started picking. The shade was key, not just for protecting the hops from drying out in the sun, but also for our own protection. It got up to just about 100F yesterday, and sitting in that glare for hours would have been tough without any shelter. The hop picking circle was a lot of fun, and really brought out the communal aspect of agriculture and hop production. As Mike, who was sitting next to me, mentioned, it reminded him of an actual harvest process from real agricultural times, in which the family and neighbors would gather round together, work in concert, and bond over the work, telling stories and teaching the process to the kids. Of course, the one aspect that was missing was the back-breakingness of that work. We had only about half the hops on a ¼ acre of land to harvest, or as Brian put it into context when I asked him what recipes he would make, “Recipes? Plural? Haha, no, this will yield one 14 barrel batch of beer.” But still, I had to agree with Mike. It reminded me of the barn raising scene in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (a staple of visits to my grandmother’s house as a kid), minus all the color coordinated outfits, singing, and dancing, of course. Over the course of the morning, we picked Cascades, Chinooks, and a Canadian Red Vines, which we separated into buckets and placed in Brian’s refrigerated room, which was a welcome temporary respite from the heat.

The freshest Death ever

We also savored Moonlight beers straight out of the tanks. Death and Taxes was the first Moonlight beer I ever tasted, and it has remained my favorite, across the two years I’ve lived in SF and through yesterday. It’s a black lager with a rich, balanced blend of dark flavors that never fails to surprise me with its boldness and simplicity. The aroma is full of coffee, but the taste follows through with a rich smokiness. Tim, another of the hop picking guests, mentioned that as a former smoker, the trace of tobacco flavor in the D&T keeps him from ever wanting a cigarette. The tan head on the beer is dense and long lasting, and even though the body of the beer is light, it is full of crisp, dry flavor. This is a lager I can (and do!) love, and a session beer (4.2% ABV and light bodied) that doesn’t compromise flavor. If I had had this beer in England at the GBBF, I wouldn’t have come home lamenting low ABV beers. I can’t quite convey in words just how rich and thick the flavor is in contrast to the light body. It is truly a feat.

We sat around in the early afternoon, after the last of the hops had been picked, sampling beers fromBrian’s stash that he brought out disguised with paper wrappers to make us guess what they were or what was in them. Since many were oddball beers that he had picked up in his travels (kelp beer, gooseberry beer, heather beer, etc.), we were often way off. But as the selection moved closer to home, the group was surprisingly accurate and quick. Death and Taxes from a bomber (it is usually only available on tap, so he thought it might throw people off) fooled almost no one, and Adair needed just one sip, and Tim just a smell, from one of the newly available bottles of Pliny the Elder to guess what it was.

Gravensteins

On the way home, I made my brother Dan put off the nap he was craving for just another half hour so we could take a detour to Sebastopol for Gravenstein apples. I’ve been dying to make cider for months, and now that it is apple season the time feels right. I got a giant box that by my best guess is about two bushels (or eight pecks). Never mind that I only got online to try to figure out the requirements of cider making after I had all these apples. Problem number one: I need an apple press. Problem number two: you need a blend of sweet, tart, and bitter (bittersweet or bittersharp) apples to make the best cider. So, I’m going to hold onto these for a couple weeks, eat some of them, and pick up a whole bunch more when I head out to Dobbins for NCHF. That’s apple country and I figure that I can get a whole variety of apples out there of the types I need, and that I can get them to press them for me, so that I can just bring home the juice. Problem number three? All this cider isn’t going to be ready to drink for months. But that’s ok, I can wait. And having two weeks until I pick up the rest of my apples is giving me a bunch of new ideas. I think I’ll also make cyser, which is apple mead, and that I’ll split my batches of cider into several fermentation vessels so that I can make some sweet, some dry, etc.