Hoptrip day 6

Because few people have ever spent a week sniffing hops, it is hard to appreciate the art of selecting them. Especially in a place like Yakima Valley, where the smell of hops is literally in the air. The hop selection sessions are long and intense. You must train your brain to find the nuances you want. To prepare, you avoid all coffee and spices, even perfumed deodorant is banished from the premises. 

For our last hop selection in Yakima Valley we head to BarthHaas,

one of the world’s largest hop suppliers. It is the crack of dawn

and while we are dying for coffee we avoid it to spare our noses.

As always with BarthHaas, we are warmly greeted at the door

and piled with BarthHaas merch. After that, it is all businesses.

We isolate ourselves in an enormous shed in the warehouse and immediately go to work on the hops laid out and waiting for us.

Paddi, Mike and Tjebbe if all into a routine, each silently

claiming their space, meticulously laying out the canisters of

hops and sniffing and scoring each batch. Sniff, scribble, sniff,

score. When done, they compare their notes and eliminate the

lowest hops on their list. They debate the merits against the

qualities they are looking for. It is professional and efficient. They only stop sniffing when they have reached a consensus. If they are still

unhappy, they request more and do it all over again. So it goes

for hours on end until we have the hops we want. 

The session was a success, and afterwards we head up to

BarthHaas’s Longmire Ranch, a new hop farm and harvest

facility in the Wenas Valley. We toured the greenhouse, drying

rooms and the truly impressivePerrault Hop Harvester - with a footprint so large it takes up an entire warehouse. Naturally,

we sample a few experimental hop varieties. 

That evening, all roads in Yakima lead to the Bale Breaker

for the brewer's annual Post-Harvest Party. The party is packed with

brewers from around the world but also local farmers and field workers who made the harvest possible. The Post-Harvest

Party is a great tradition and offers the rare opportunity to

drink fresh hop IPAs with the workers who grew and processed the hops. It is the unofficial end of the season. All the farmers we spoke say

they are done for the season. Of course, in the spirit of solidarity, we

celebrate this fact with a fresh hop IPA. 

Our hop selection in the Yakima Valley may be over, but our trip

to the Pacific Northwest is not. In the morning we will head

in separate cars to Bend and Portland to gather more insights and inspiration for our upcoming collaboration with Deschutes.