Growing HOPS

hey folks this is Josh Tony rich farmer welcome to the farm vlog today we are here with herb Atwell at Mountain Valley hops in Axton Virginia and I thought I'd take it to a place and show you how hops are grown so we're gonna take you around the hop yard here we're gonna show you what's going on well teach you a little bit about how hops are grown and we'll also take you into the brewery and introduce you to this guy so come along on the farm vlog today we're gonna have some fun and we'll teach you a little bit about hops hops for beer not hops like a bunny all right all right herb so tell me a little bit about what you got going here these are hops how long have they been established what do you have here tell me about it well these are cascade and they're about four years old we started the field about four years ago we started as a hobby got some rhizomes we planted them they came up and it was something that was new to the area so we were like well let's let's we've got some land and didn't know what to do with it and it's like let's try some and see so these are cascades like I said there's about over hundreds of our variety different varieties of hops and we're just finding out you know which ones will grow in the area which ones won't they're you know worldwide so different areas in the world have different types of hops and that's what actually makes different types of beer okay and you were telling me that hops and IPA thing the India Pale Ale which is like the type of beer that everybody likes right now came about in in the old days back when they shipped beer from England to India is that right correct they found that hops is also a preservative not only does it provide the veterans for the IPAs but it also the lower alpha is also provide flavoring and aroma to so many types of beers also the IPAs came about when the Europeans were shipping beer to India and the the Asian countries and they put extra hops in there to preserve the beer so that would be you know drinkable when they got there of course it became bitter it was really an IPA that's where IPA Indian Pale Ale that's where that comes from so that was pretty interesting tidbit on a little beer history that I never knew about now is it okay if I pick one of these pick pick pick one of these that one that'd be the best and you can open them up these pops have an oil in them the oils called Lu pium you can actually see that I'll let you know that rule show that up in there so that's actually what that yellow it's a yellow it's an oil actually gotcha and the some types have a higher concentrate of that and that's where you get your bit rings for your IPA others don't have a higher out there you know around four or five alpha ok those right there you use them for bittering I mean for aroma and flavorings so this stuff is really really sticky guys and I don't know if you can see it but there's like it's like pollens like a yellow sticky pollen and hops are remember the cannabis they only in fact all these ladies out here females yeah so all these are females cool so if you had a male in the bunch would that ruin your don't want a male you don't want them to pollinate you don't want to get anything with seeds or anytime think don't have any but they usually they will grow they will grow about 20 feet their lives are 20 foot this year we had an infestation of Japanese beetles that got us early you know we did an early harvest arrest urban use the crop so we as you can see we've cut them all I left them about four feet because I figured we get some more in it looks like we are doing pretty good so we will probably get a second harvest out of it and just won't be all the way up to the top okay and he was telling me the infrastructure that you have to put up for these is pretty significant there's a cable system running across the top there's a cable system across the bottom he uses drip irrigation this season he pulled the hops off because they had an infestation Japanese beetles and you don't want to put any kind of herbicide or insecticide anywhere near these plants before you consume them so you took the hops that you harvested here and you made some we made we add kind of fresh fresh hot brew we picked through we picked them on Thursday morning we brewed Thursday afternoon and we actually put them right in a hot in the in the brew itself so that's like a once in a year then did you get when you do a fresh hop and you still have some of that oh yeah actually it's we kicked it yesterday nice so it still got about four days to carbonate it should be ready probably this weekend or by next weekend it'll be ready on the rest of them we did dry and we will be vacuum-sealing then we freeze them and we use them throughout the year and they'll last about a year year and a half in that state now do you sell hops do you ship hops out or anything like that we don't the first two years we were up we actually sold hops to the local brewery actually it was two witches and ambled okay then the slug but yeah because they're good guys and that was the only brew that was around and that was kind of inspired us to go to the next steps with opening up a brewery well guys we'll put a link down below in case you're wondering where this place is we are near Martinsville Virginia we're in Southwest Virginia near Danville or Martinsville Virginia kind of close to the North Carolina Virginia Line and the foothills of the Blue Ridge and in a minute we'll show you the view out here it's really really cool we have a tasting room they have live music on Sundays it's a great place if you want to come and tour a hops farm and educate yourself I've never even seen hops but I've been curious about growing them on our farm because tobacco used to be the big cash crop around these parts and it's not so much the big cash crop anymore we'll see hops maybe the thing to grow here on the farm on our farm I would like to see the hop industry take off in Virginia because I think it's a pliable crop to actually make money on if it's done right and like some of the downfalls or that most breweries want to use pelletized hops which is processed right we use whole hops we dry these guys out we could say we vacuum seal them and we freeze them but we have to filter them our system is small enough where we are able to put these in a filtered bag and we when they don't get in the system and clog it up the pellets dissolve so that's why a lot of breweries really like the pellets honestly I'd like to see a processing plant down here yeah I think that would enable more people to grow hops and do something with them because I think that's one of our things as people just don't know what to do with them if they do grow them if they you know get that information about what they're about so this is what hops looks like these are the least hops beautiful beautiful plant these are the actual hops and it's a flower all right it comes out as a flower and then it turns it turns in to the hop cone cool awesome so just a just a beautiful plant a really beautiful plant and it's kind of sticky almost tobacco's kind of sticky too if you've never handled tobacco and there's also some other herbals that are popular in Colorado and California that are sticky too so similar to those stickiness I guess and also too if you peel and this is called a bond with the bean out of V okay like a vine even though it looks like a vine it's called a bond and the bond has got little if you feel it it's like kind of like a little prickly so there's no tears don't fool with it no animal really eats them so we don't even have to worry about really fencing them in so that's why you know you know the deer come through here but they just need a trace and clover and stuff that's here they don't fool with these well guys I hope you learned a little bit about hops here and I hope you learned a little bit about growing hops we're gonna talk a little bit about the soil and the pH and the drainage so you have an irrigation system here we use an eighth inch steel line here we use it also for tie off so we can tie our strings up and also on the top but we also use this to connect the drip line system into now every year you cut the vines down to the ground and you mulch it in is that right yep man into the end of the season we'll cut them all the way to the ground I mean right to the ground we like to put some nutrients here and we'll try to put so these guys like a lot of nitrogen okay so we'll put some nitrogen based fertilizer in have used rabbit manure we've used actually llama manure from one of the farms to try that but we did the rabbit seemed to work really well and then we'll cover them with mulch and then in the spring they'll start popping out let them grow about a foot to 18 inches that first growth we want to get rid of we cut them back down again and then they really come out those are the ones that we actually train and you have to train them so you actually have to start them in a clockwise motion once you start them on a string then they know what to do and they take off gotcha so when I first came out I looked at the hops here and I saw how they were climbing up these strings and this is a coconut bass string as it was climbing up the string it seemed that every one of them was going in a clockwise motion so you know I asked him are they right-handed or left-handed hops or something like that is there you know but he's he said he has to train them all the way up these vines and you're at about 20 feet high at the high point in the hops here so really cool really cool we'll go in and we'll talk about the brewery and the brew area here in just a second I hope you guys are learning stuff so tell me a little bit about the infrastructure that we've got here for the hops well the infrastructure on the hops the hops grow about 18 to 20 feet tall we do a wide system or V system so that the it gives you a little bit better airflow it hopes hopefully it mediates the downy powdery mildew a little bit better so it kind of airs them out a little bit you get them dried a little bit quicker with air coming through them also this the we use a small eighth inch gauge on the bottom we use it we taught use it for tire off for our strings and we also use it for our drip irrigation we use a coconut core to hold the weight of the hops so all natural string that's very very tough yeah I'm gonna walk you around here a little bit and we'll talk to you as I walk and show you the infrastructure that we have here growing hops take some infrastructure you've probably got somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 worth of infrastructure here on a third of an acre of hops so it takes some infrastructure imagine if you're gonna do it on a 50 acre plot you're gonna have some money in this and you're gonna have some time in it and these guys it's just the two of them is just a man and his wife and it keeps them busy real busy we have had volunteers that's helped us throughout the season for harvesting we had about 25 people come out this is a small enough field where we can hand harvest so we can come and pick them by hand bigger fields anything over probably a third acre you know when you get into a half acres and all that they also make have a machine that will actually they'll actually harvest them it actually pulls the cones off of the vine and drops them in a hopper so it's all automated so you don't have to do the have you just cut them down lay them in this machine and it'll actually it's it's a harvester cool now we put him on the spot here we just stopped by and said hey you won't talk about your hops on YouTube sure so guys if you like this kind of stuff be sure you pound that like button let me know I like this stuff because we're to be going to visit a bunch of farms we have a little surprise for you we're calling it farm stock 2018 and we're going to be stopping at several farms all over the country later on this year and I think you're really really gonna like it we're gonna get some t-shirts and all kinds of fun stuff so be sure you subscribe to the channel pound that like button and we'll just walk around the hops and show you a little bit of the infrastructure here so what we have here is a series of poles and then you have support guy wires with turn buckles on them these wires run across the top of the hops and as he was saying they split up top so one wire one runs all the way across the top and then there's a support basically giant trellis up here that holds these hops in place and allows him to grow them spaced out and we'll get you a little bit better shot of what's going on here so there are two rows of string one row here and then one row over here and they basically support the hops now we're at about four feet high right now and that's what he said we cut them back to after we harvest and this one is just growing really really nice you can look out through here and it's just it's just a lot of infrastructure to grow these hops now if you look down low there's another cable that runs through here and the drip irrigation system runs through if you also look the medium the soil that this is planted in has a lot of mulch in it because it has to drain really fast you can't leave hops wet or they'll get a fungus on them so guys we're gonna walk on over here to the brewery and the tasting room and show you a little bit about what's going on this video is more about hops and what it takes to grow hops and just showing you a little bit about it but we thought we'd take you over here and show you the venue that we have here in case you're in southwest virginia and you want to stop by by the way this is really small this is a real small family operation this is a this fellow's backyard so check out this beautiful beautiful view really awesome check it out look at that you can just see for miles and miles beautiful rolling hills in the Virginia countryside so don't go taste wine come taste some beer also have an outside sitting patio nice and a fire pit and they have live music on Sundays this right here actually was just a storage building when we moved down here about five years ago so we gutted this and this is what we did two winters ago we actually put this up so we you know I was doing homebrew we had two hops yeah we had a tasting room per se so the next thing was well that's uh let's see what it is to do a brewery down here so you guys have all heard of farm-to-table man we've got ground to glass I've never even heard of that cool so the next step is going to check out the brewery area is it okay if we go look at that sure all right so this is the brewery welcome to the brewery this is all homemade stuff but it works we do about 45 gallons at a time first of all what we do is we take grain and we'll mash they will crush the grain here and it just crushes it enough just to break the shell on it it's a grinder this right here is the hot liquor tank this right here keeps your temperature of your wort as it's going through to spark for your grain this is your mash tun the mash basically you've got grain in there you're you're trying to get all the sugars and starches that you can because you're making a base to actually feed East once you go once you you want you to do your mash or put it in your bowl cattle after you goes in the boil kettle this is when you'd actually start you boil you'll actually add your hops in here you add your bittering hops at the beginning of the boil you had some of your aroma and flavoring hops at the end of the boil any other flavors fruits and stuff like that you can also add into this once it boils for about 60 minutes or so then you want to cool it down you're at about 212 degrees at a boil then you want to cool it down as quick as you can to about 70 68 to 70 degrees depending on what you're brewing cool it down in a firm at once we put in the fermentor is where we add the yeast once you have the yeast the yeast does all the rest of the work basically and as you can see this guy right here is fermenting this yeast eats the sugars and the starches it produces alcohol and co2 this is the co2 that's being released from the yeast in the new job so guys what you're seeing here is a large VAT and that's full of beer that's working and this tube is going down into a bucket of water as a water seal and all that bubbling is co2 that's coming off of this beer as it gets done brewing and has to maintain a pretty constant temperature so there's an air conditioning cooling unit back here that helps us work this is a small-time setup it's like you said it's farm to glass and it's awesome guys thanks a lot for watching the channel today I hope you learned a little bit about brewing about hops about all sorts of fun stuff and be sure and click that like button check out online mountain valley hops will leave a link down to the website and come and check this place out if you're in South West Virginia or North Carolina and you're more than a cool place to go on a Sunday afternoon or Friday or Thursday or Saturday or any time you want some beer you can come to Mountain Valley hops so guys come on back and see us here on the Stoney Ridge Farm and mountain valley hops tech in next time all right [Music] we had some ways to lose to me stone Tyrion I've never been served a beer at 9:30 in the morning this will be a first