We tasted a few more off-flavors, then Nicole asked us to leave the room and wait. When we came back, she’d rearranged our samples, which gave us the chance to do a blind tasting. As I started smelling and tasting, some answers seemed obvious. But I wasn’t always completely sure. Even so, I knew I’d learned a lot in just a few hours. I certainly knew more than I did at the Widmer taste panel just a few weeks ago, which made me feel like I’d just taken my first steps down a new path. When we went through the answers, I’d identified five out of the seven samples correctly. Not bad. Somehow I’d mixed up DMS and acetaldehyde. In what universe does a green Jolly Rancher taste like creamed corn?
I said goodbye to Nicole, not knowing that the next time I would see her, she’d be spiking beers for me to taste at the Cicerone exam.
Unlike many beer bloggers and other beer writers I followed online, I led the life of a shut-in, mostly because I wanted to be home for dinner and Oscar’s bedtime. That meant I wasn’t attending Portland’s constant stream of bottle releases, tap takeovers, beer tastings, beer dinners, and beer festivals, which made me feel out of the loop. I realized that, since most of my beer drinking was happening at home, I needed to transform my afterwork beers into learning experiences.
I found the Beer Tasting Sheet online, which, despite its uninventive name, seemed like a good way to evaluate beer. Unlike the Sensory Validation Ballot at Widmer, this tasting sheet didn’t focus only on off-flavors: it presented four categories—Appearance, Aroma, Taste, and Mouthfeel—each with subcategories and then a group of words you were supposed to circle to describe the beer. For example, the head could be: none, diminishing, lasting, fizzy, rocky, creamy, no lacing, or lacing. The words forced me to investigate. For example, I’d never heard of a rocky head, a descriptor that describes the dips and valleys of a super frothy head, the craters on the surface of the moon. The sheet did feel constricting at times. One beer I was drinking had a head that looked like meringue, but that word was not an option. The words were training wheels; at some point, I’d come up with my own descriptors. Besides, the sheet had a space for notes, where I could get creative. At the bottom of the sheet, though, was an area I’d start to resent. The Overall Description of This Beer had just six words—Crisp, Balanced, Fruity, Malty, Hoppy, and Complex—plus the aggravating instruction to “circle one.” How was I supposed to describe an entire beer using just one word? “Malty” was never going to cut it.
The Beer Tasting Sheet was created by Rob Hill, a Certified Cicerone who works with an online retailer called Total Wine & More. I e-mailed Rob to find out how he had developed the particulars. He told me he started with a wine sheet Total Wine & More had developed, then tweaked it for beer, in the hopes it would become a tool for staff and customers in beer classes. He said the first draft of his sheet was rejected by the powers that be at Total Wine & More, who thought it was too “geeky.” Rob pushed back and showed them other tasting sheets; the benefit of his approach was that it provided people descriptive words for beer they might not have known otherwise.
“The challenge was that the aroma and flavor sources, and obviously the words and adjectives used, were irrelevant to beer,” he told me. He also said that by forcing people to categorize a beer with just one word, they could more easily figure out what types of beers they liked.
I got into the habit of filling out a beer sheet every time I drank a beer at home. The sheets forced me to do simple things like look up beer styles, breweries, and the proper glassware for whatever I was drinking. My friend Dusty, who was visiting from Utah, watched me go through the ritual of swirling, sniffing, then filling out the sheet.
“It’s like a mindfulness exercise, only with beer,” he said.
The exercise did remind me of a “meditation lab,” part of a course on Buddhism I took in college. One time, the instructor instructed us to chew a single raisin for ten minutes. My raisin may have made it three minutes before it dissolved into sugary nothingness, but before then, I’d noticed its changing texture and saccharine quality. I’d even started to notice the interestingness of the mechanics of my own jaw.
What the beer sheets weren’t teaching me were the right and wrong answers. Without a guide to tell me if what I was tasting was toasty or roasty, I was just guessing.
Unintentionally, my Beer Tasting Sheets chronicled the details of time spent with my favorite people. When I opened a Duvel, a Belgian golden strong ale Tony gave me for my birthday, it was a Friday night. On my tasting sheet I wrote that Oscar was taking “milk notes.” (We would pour his milk in a special glass, and if he was in the mood, he’d comment on its attributes. “It smells like milk!” he once yelled.) As for the beer: “Crisp lightness meets total richness. Perfectly appealing. HEY Belgium!” Another sheet recorded a Monday night: “Oscar wants to play flashcards. Tony cooking hamburger mac (celery seed).” The beer, the Black Widow Porter from McMenamins: “Weird fruity, peachy thing. Seems cloying. Good aroma. Some tangy/tart, bitter notes. Nice light body. Chocolate milk.” In hindsight, I can’t imagine any brewery selling a porter with those attributes, but I give myself points for trying.
HOP HUNT
The hop gardens turn gracefully towards me, presenting regular avenues of hops in rapid flight, then whirl away.
—CHARLES DICKENS
SINCE IT WAS LATE SUMMER, it was time for the hop harvest, which begins during August and lasts into September. In the Pacific Northwest, Yakima, Washington, is hop-growing central, and for years, I’d wanted to witness the hop harvest there. I couldn’t imagine the scale (or the smell), and there was no better time to immerse myself in one of beer’s most important ingredients. I hoped a visit would help me begin learn to how to distinguish hop varieties by smell and taste, and understand more about how the plants were grown and harvested, all things I’d need to know for the Cicerone exam. Before I left, John Harris told me Yakima happened to be a famous stopover for drug runners traveling between Mexico and Canada. Not one to be deterred by drug traffickers, I set off, unarmed, to witness Yakima’s hop harvest.
During six months of the year, a hop farm is an unspectacular tableau of barren soil washed with rain—the kind of place where soldiers could conduct boot camp exercises in the mud. Long, muddy ruts hold eighteen-or twenty-foot-tall wooden poles that rise from the earth at regular intervals. The poles are connected at the top with long wires. In March, the imaginary soldiers would exit as rows of hop shoots protrude from the soil. Farm workers string coconut-fiber twine from the high wires to the ground near the shoots, because as soon as the plants poke through the topsoil, they long to head skyward, like astronauts determined to defy gravity without losing any long-term connection to the earth. Charles Darwin once kept a potted hop plant in a warm room where he was confined with illness. He recorded how the plant spiraled while growing vertically, noting how the “internodes,” the joints where the plant extends its arms, would “bend to one side and to travel slowly round towards all points of the compass, moving, like the hands of a watch, with the sun.” That spiral helps the plant clamber up the strings with an uncanny relentlessness. In just a few months, a hop plant develops sixteen-to twenty-five-foot tall “bines,” vines with stiff hairs that help a plant climb.
But it’s the hop cones that have transformed modern beer making. Hidden underneath the tiny, fluffy green leaves of a hop cone, a yellow pollen called lupulin contains the alpha acids and essential oils capable of adding bitterness and an exciting range of aromas and flavors to beer. The flowers resemble marijuana buds, which isn’t surprising. Humulus and Cannabis share DNA as members of the family Cannabaceae.
Hops are worshipped around the globe, not only for the range of flavors and aromas they bring to beers, but also for how they’ve altered the brewing landscape. Today, very few beers are brewed without hops. The plant is fetishized around brewers’ kettles, at festivals, and in backyards. People wear hop bines as crowns and toss hop cones into French presses filled with beer for immediate infusions.
Beer lovers jump into piles of dried hops, where they have their pictures taken. They buy hop soaps, hop cheeses, hop candies, hop sodas, hop murals, hop paintings, hop Tshirts, and hop jewelry. Some of them even eat pickled hop shoots, possibly on pizza.
I love hops, not only for what they bring to beer, but because, for me, they are a local product. Hops are grown commercially in dozens of countries, everywhere from Albania to South Africa. In the United States, about 70 percent of the country’s hops are grown in Washington, with Oregon growing another 15 percent. A few years ago, I had the chance to visit some Oregon hop farms, including Goschie Farms in Silverton. The fourth-generation family farm is run by Gayle Goschie, one of the few women in the hop-growing business. Gayle was the first woman in her family to take over a significant part of hop-growing operations (the farm also grows wine grapes, but hops take up a greater acreage). “There was a certain nod from older generations to me,” she once told me, “because they saw my sincere interest in growing hops.”
On a sunny spring day, we walked among her rows of hop plants, which were just beginning to spiral around strings, and she told me how in 2008 everything changed for the farm. It was the year InBev acquired Anheuser-Busch, a corporate merger that led to a withering relationship with Goschie Farms. Anheuser-Busch’s contracts had been the farm’s bread and butter for decades. Gayle had been watching the craft breweries sprout up all over Oregon; she saw potential. She decided to start planting the kind of aroma hops craft brewers were using in all sorts of beers, especially IPAs, a reinvention that not only kept the farm afloat but pushed Gayle into prominence.
Tony and I had planted hop plants in our front yard four years earlier, giving us some welcome natural summertime shade over a large south-facing window. But this year, the plants grew top heavy and began to resemble poodle tails. I asked Gayle what was happening. “So few hop growers ever complain or question top-heavy hop vines!” she wrote in an e-mail. Like a doctor making a diagnosis without seeing a patient, she guessed that my plants may have been suffering from a shaded base, because even the slightest loss of direct sunlight keeps hop plants from “putting out arms,” which she said would prevent them from “hopping down to the base.” She was right. To the south of the hop plants was a vegetable bed and an overgrown hedge. Gayle also explained that hop plants produce a full yield of hops during their third year, which the plant can maintain for as long as twenty years if it stays free from diseases and pests. Eventually a late-summer windstorm blew my hop plants into my yard, which made them look like tumbleweeds tethered to the ground with a string.
Before humans domesticated the plant and gave it a scientific name, hops grew wild. Since the plants prefer to climb, they would often overtake willow trees. That predatory nature inspired the lupus in Humulus lupus, because lupus is Latin for wolf. In Europe during the eighth century, when farmers were becoming serfs between the Romans’ exit and Charlemagne’s impending rule, hops began to be grown intentionally, possibly for medicinal purposes. Those were the days of gruit ale, which was brewed with herbs and spices such as yarrow and wormwood. Hops would replace those additions for a couple of reasons: not only do hops alter the flavor profile of beer, the alpha acids in the hop cones act as a preservative.
The first written record of a hop yard comes from Hallertau in modern-day Germany, in 786 C.E. In 822, Abbot Adalhard of the Benedictine monastery in Corbie, France, wrote that his monks were adding hops to beer—the first written record of the practice. By 1300, hops were widely cultivated in Europe, from Norway to Austria. Today, farmers grow hops everywhere, from the Pacific Northwest and Europe to New Zealand and China. In 2014 growers produced about 208 million pounds of hops.
When I arrived at a hops-processing facility in Yakima with Meghann Quinn, the willowy president and co-owner of Bale Breaker Brewing Co., something seemed wrong. A truck piled with long, stringy hop bines, still fresh with a crushing green mass of hop cones, sat on asphalt outside a processing building, baking in the sun as an invisible clock ticked. Hops need to be processed as soon as they are picked to maximize the potential aromas and flavors that will end up in a beer. Once a bine is cut from its base, every minute counts.
Meghann ducked into a building then reappeared to announce that one of the picking machines was temporarily down. She seemed nonplussed as she walked to the back of the truck, pulled a cone off a bine and broke it open with her thumbs. Inside, glistening wet leaves sprouted from a central stem in a pattern that reminded me of an artichoke. Packed between the leaves were nubs of bright yellow lupulin.
“Rub the two halves together,” she instructed.
Rubbing one cone between my palms turned my cupped hands into a small bomb of piney and citrus smells mixed with an aroma I don’t often detect in a beer, the scent of a plant with a freshly broken stem. That potent combination is why the mechanics of the harvest matter, why a migrant workforce arrived in Yakima every year for one intense month of labor. Everything revolved around capturing the aroma of this hop cone in its purest form.
Meghann owns Bale Breaker with her two brothers and her husband. One brother, Patrick Smith, wrote a business plan for a theoretical brewery on their family’s hop farm as his master’s degree thesis. After he graduated from business school, he handed the thesis over to his siblings, and two years later the brewery was up and running. Meghann confirmed my suspicion that Bale Breaker was one of just a few American breweries located on a commercial hop farm, a happy event that’s bound to happen more often. Bale Breaker operates as a production brewery, which means the taproom adjacent to the brewery is more like an accessory than a necessity, a place to cater to visitors and build brand awareness, but not a key outlet for selling their beer. The brewery’s two best-selling, year-round beers are a pale ale called Field 41, the name of the hops field that had to be torn out to build the brewery, and Top Cutter IPA, which was named after a key piece of harvesting equipment. When the family built the brewery, they designed the building so the back walls of the brewery could be removed for an expansion. Forward thinking and optimistic, I noted.
As we stood by the weighted truck, Meghann pointed to a farmhouse next door, the place where her grandparents once lived. Meghann had lived there, too, until she was in grade school and her family moved across the street into the house we could see on the other side of field, past a small group of cows swatting their tails. One night in the late nineties, when she was a middle schooler, she woke up to the sound of chaos. Outside, she saw flames rising from one of the buildings we were standing next to on this day, the kiln building where the hops are dried at high temperatures. Fires, I’d learn, are common in the world of hops. The possibility of roaring flames and devastating destruction lurks in the shadows and shapes many hop-processing procedures.
Barring disasters like that one, harvest progresses with a pressing orderliness from late August to late September. In the field, bines are cut by men and machines then loaded into a truck. The truck immediately delivers the hop bines to a processing facility, where the cones are removed and separated from leaves and other unwanted materials. The hop cones go into a kiln, where they are dried at high heat for hours. Once they’re dried, the hops are pressed into large rectangular bales and moved into cold storage. From there, the bales go either to a pellet plant, where they are processed into dense nuggets that look like rabbit food, or straight to a brewery or broker.
Since the first point of contact for the bines from the field—the stripping machines—were stalled, Meghann and I skipped that step and headed to the kiln. At the top of one set of stairs was a room with a nearly Olympic pool–size floor covered in bright green hops. “Citra,” Meghann said. The air was uncomfortably hot and humid, like a sauna, and the constant hum of machines and blowing fans made it hard to carry on a conversation. The floor was divided into subsections that were only visible because the hops in each section were filled to different heights that could be measured in inches. The sections that had been drying longer had lost
more mass and were therefore more condensed than the fresher batches. Above our heads, fabric conveyor belts glowing green with hop cones whirred around the perimeter. Meghann’s father, Mike Smith, the third-generation farmer to grow hops on this land, required that each of his three children work the kiln during the summer between high school and college. I mentioned how it must have been difficult to spend an entire day in the ambient heat of the kiln building, and Meghann said it used to be much hotter, around 140 degrees. Her brother had been working on improving efficiency in the kilning process, and he figured out some ways to bring the temperature down.
As Meghann described how fresh hops enter the kiln building then leave perfectly dried, I started to understand the importance of moisture content in fresh hop cones. Until then I’d assumed hop farmers had a magical sense of when the hops were ripe. Sure, they’d examine the plants with an exacting, scientific eye, but would also maybe do things like talk to the plants during certain phases of the moon. In actuality, the farm crew simply measured the moisture content of the hops with a digital probe. When the cones reach 75 percent moisture content, the hops are ready to be harvested. With equal precision, the kiln dries the hops to a moisture content of 8 to 10 percent, a process that takes six to eight hours. Then the hops are cooled, an important part of the process. If the hops are too hot when they’re baled, they will spontaneously combust, which can produce building-flattening fires. The temperature of hop bales is so important, in fact, I’d later see inspectors inserting long thermometers into hop bales that had just arrived at a storage warehouse—the Smokey Bears of the hop industry. For the record, a hop bale was not what set this building on fire in the nineties. The fire was started by spark from an overheated kiln inside a building constructed entirely of wood.
My Beer Year Page 5