Hoptrip day 5

After searching the city for a decent cup of morning Joe, we discovered that the best brew comes from, yep, a brewery: Single Hill. Write this down: Catalyst Coffee. Americans head to Starbucks, but this beautiful gem is where you’ll find all the arabica-addicted Europeans.

Once properly fueled, we drove down the road to Yakima Chief Hops for our most intense session of the trip. We first met up with Tiffany Pitra for a hop sensory session, then locked ourselves in a room for half a day to select hops. Interestingly, YCH recorded our choices in real-time on a digital sheet and instantly sent them to the farmers whose hops we had chosen. This system brings a welcomed transparency to what is often a opaque process. We discovered the hops we chose comes from one of our favorite farms. 

After four hours sniffing hops we headed to the YCH taproom and were psyched to see that Russian River’s Pliny the Elder was fresh on tap. We happily suspended one of the strictest rules of our trip - that we never, ever ordered the same beer – and enjoyed a Pliny together. That Pliny also opened our eyes and we realized we had never tagged YCH’s taproom walls with our brand name like so many other brewers. We immediately set out to rectify the situation with a piece of chalk. 

Beat and sensorily beat up, we skipped the annual brewer’s dinner for a more intimate affair at Loze Farms out of town. Loze is one of the valley’s top hop producers and invited a load of people over to celebrate the harvest’s end. The surroundings were fantastic, as was the home-made tacos they treated us to. But the center of attention was an ice-filled truckload of craft beer from up and down the West Coast. With Junior Loze’s permission we performed a barnyard version of a ‘tap takeover’ by rebranding the vintage truck Uiltje. This act of. Mischief went down so well with Junior’s father, Leon, that we were invited back for a proper collaboration next year that involves working the farm.

With fresh hop IPAs in hand, we headed up the hill to enjoy one of the most remarkable sunset any of us had ever seen.

Tomorrow is our last day in Yakima with a selection session with BarthHaas. Afterwards, all roads lead to Bale Breaker Brewery for their annual Post-Harvest Party. There we will hang out with hop farmers and local brewers and sip the Citra® Slicker Wet Hop IPA brewed by Seattle’s Cloudburst Brewing specifically for the event. Yes, we will be there.