Hoptrip day 2

Crosby Hops: Dry Throats & High Hopes

When you wake up at the crack of dawn on a hop trip life is full of great possibilities. Mike goes for an early run. John’s sips away his jet lag with Portland’s infamous third-wave coffee. Tjebbe and Paddi make the last preps for today’s hop selection session at Crosby Hops whose farm is about 40 minutes outside of Portland. 

Portland is a cool city, but it’s the Oregon countryside that draws in all the visitors. Ten minutes outside of town and you’re in open countryside. Morning fog hangs over the hillsides, every living thing across the rich and fertile Willamette Valley shines green when the sun breaks through. This is hop country, friends. 

Let us say this from the start: Uiltje loves Crosby Hops. We love their whole vibe, their commitment to small and medium-sized brewers, the whole fifth-generation family farm thing. Last year we walked away from our hop selection session with a lot of quality hops plus a secret stash of Oregon-grown Strata, Amarillo CGX and Comet. That beer, called Oregon Trail Ale, recreated the Oregon fresh hop IPA experience at our brewery in Holland. It sold out in seconds because it was a damn fine beer. 

Put simply, we pulled onto the Crosby hop farm with dry throats and high hopes, and we didn’t leave disappointed. 

While we can’t – okay, we won’t – share which hops we selected, we can say as one of the first visitors of the week we were presented some beautiful hops. To be sure, the selection session began months ago with advanced preparation and phone calls. We also showed up with our own intricate grading system that impressed the folks at Crosby. But all this prep leads to this moment of selection. Locked away in a well-ventilated room, Mike, Paddi and Tjebbe got to work while John picked VP of Marketing Christine Collier Clair’s brains on the future of the family farm (that interview will appear upon return).

By the end of the session agreements were made, hops purchased, and Blake Crosby was in the house hanging out. Blake, fifth generation farmer, is the guy responsible for turning Crosby Hops into a growing tour de force in hopland and a major champion of the Oregon scene. He pushed through Crosby’s patented CGX system and set up partnership with the likes of the Hop Quality Group to reboot heritage hops as well as explore new varieties across his 800 acres of farmland. 

The session ended where it always does at Crosby: at the TopWire beer garden where fresh hop IPAs flow freely. We sipped a few beers, sniffed some experimental hop varieties and talked potential collaborations with some friendly brewers also in town. Most important, we scored another few boxes of potentially groundbreaking hops from Blake himself, and you know what that means? Coming soon, another fresh hop IPA collaboration between Uiltje and Crosby Hops is in the works. 

And to think we still have a week to go. Good god Oregon is lovely.