Centennials in 2010

Plenty of cones on the Centennial bines that are doing well this season. (Photo taken this morning.)

But alas, for third-year plants, this summer has seen one mound woefully stunted and another sort of sputtering. The remaining two mounds have fairly robust bines and a decent amount of cones.

Also, this year marks the first appearance of some unwanted visitors – Japanese beetles. The folks at Rutgers said a couple of years ago that if your plants don't have pests, just wait, the bugs will find them.

And so they have.

Hops slideshow

These Centennials are almost ready to pick. The bines are producing in waves, so by early to mid-August another harvest will be likely.

Portrait of a Lone Hop in the Rain

More hops

It's been a rainy late spring, but the Centennials have held up fine, with cones coming in all over the place. These images are of some of the smaller bines.

Rapid deployment

Last year, it wasn't until the second week of July that cones took shape on our Centennial bines.

This season, it's been surprisingly fast: the first week of June. These are early ones, but cones all the same.

Centennials 2009

Shots of this year's Centennial hops, their second year in the ground. Back in early spring, they really started rocketing skyward. Burs and sidearm shoots came the last full week of May. Cones will probably start taking shape by mid-June.

Here and there

Homebrew Day ... Big Brew ...

We missed it Saturday. Somewhat intentionally, given there has been too much to get done lately.

Originally, our plan was to do a video piece about that ridiculous (and insidious) $15 annual permit the state says you have to have to brew at home. But, alas, too much to do, not enough time to fit everything in. (But that damned permit remains on the list of things to give video treatment to.)

At the top of the to-do list this wet weekend was putting up a new trellis for our Centennial hops, which have come back quite strong from last season. We were late getting to the trellis work, but the 4 x 4’s are up now, as are the lines for the bines to climb.

Odds & Ends
Here’s a sweep of somethings we’ve been trying to mention lately but have – sigh, again – been strapped for time.

• Brian Boak (Boak's Beer) sent these photos of his fermenter’s delivery to Butler at High Point Brewing last month. We’re fairly certain it has beer in it by now. Or maybe in bottles (gotta pay for that stainless steel, you know).

• Flying Fish makes New York magazine’s Approval Matrix. It’s at the bottom right of that Web page, a mention of the Exit series beers.

We have to admit, our eye was immediately drawn to Rachael Ray being on the judging panel at the Tribeca Film Festival (guess she only judged 30-minute films), and that capsule of Rick Perry’s dimwit secession talk. (Hey Rick, remember the Alamo? Texas already had a crack at going it alone. Didn’t work out.)

We’ve suggested that a bottle or two of Exit 4 be sent to the governor’s office, with label samples. The aim is to get it in the NJ State Museum, which is, if memory serves, where a lot of unsolicited items sent to the governor’s office end up, since the governor can’t actually accept them.

We also suggested sending a bottle to the Colbert Report. It’s easy to picture Stephen tossing it into one of his roundups between the show’s opening and the closer, the guest interview.

Lastly, that beer fest we mentioned was in planning stages for this month (thereabout) at the Turtleback Zoo in West Orange ... it was postponed for a variety of reasons, and may come to fruition sometime in the fall.

However, High Street Grill in Mount Holly has a spring festival set for May 30th, a follow-up to their successful winter beer festival.

And of course, the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild is doing lucky 13 – the 13th incarnation of its annual festival, that is – on the 20th of June aboard the USS New Jersey at the Camden waterfront. (More on this later.)

At last, Harvest Ale

This was worth the trip.

Almost three months ago, Weyerbacher Brewing, Easton, Pa., came out with a harvest ale that brewers there had dosed with Nugget and Cascade hops grown by owners Dan and Sue Weirback on their Lehigh Valley farm.

It’s the hops-growing project we video-chronicled back in August, an intrepid endeavor that now lets Dan and Sue add “agri-consultant/hops specialist" to their resumés, should any other craft brewer tempted to sow the soil seek some how-did-you-do-it advice.

Fount of ideas
Weyerbacher is a brewery that doesn't stand in one place too long. And planting an acre of hops fits their explorer identity. They have a flight of brews you'll always find on the shelf, but they love to push new ideas and styles, dressing up their packaging with artwork that's reminscent of the LP record's early 1970s era, when album cover artwork was as expressive and expansive as the music.

Their harvest brew, as far as the label goes, doesn't exactly follow that arc, but then this was a brew that depended on Mother Nature to do her part, namely allow that acre of nurtured hop bines to produce enough cones in a first-year growing season. So early on, it was a gamble whether there would be a beer at all, and hence a simpler label, compared with, for instance, the drama and intrigue of Insanity, Prophecy or Heresy. But isn't harvest time an inherently simple moment anyway?

A 6.2% ABV India pale ale, the brew met those freshly picked, still wet, hops in the hopback, in the limited run brewed for release in the Pennsylvania-only market.

Happily, and thankfully, Dan saved us a case, which we picked up yesterday. Indeed, it was worth the wait. Tasty, citrusy hoppy, kind of resinous, almost chewy, but above all, a quaffable beer, two bottles downed upon arriving home.

Sometimes when you have a beer that’s all about hops, you’re temped to keep swirling the glass to kick up the aromas. This one is definitely that kind of swirler, but the pleasure is in churning up some foam, taking a bite of that, and following with a hearty swig.

The backbone is definitely IPA, with some maltiness on either side, and some bitterness in the finish that’s neither harsh nor overwhelming. But the beer’s more earthy-complex thanks to the fresh hops added for a signature flavor, straight from that hand-picked harvest on that August Saturday afternoon.

Next up
Dan says they're now working on Fireside, a 7% ABV brown ale with 10% smoked malt, just enough to rauch things up for the snows of January, but not too much that you won't reach for another. Where there's smoke, there's Fireside.

After hop-picking, revisited

Meet the new video. Same as the old video.

Not quite ... New intro, new ending, new cover shot here and there in this re-cut of the Weyerbacher hops saga. The director's cut, ha!

It’s basically an updated version, with footage from their Aug. 23rd harvest day and a quick interview with Dan Weirback as he snipped bines and flung them into the bed of a pickup.

Shots of the young hop bines in the original cut have been replaced; likewise most of the shots of mature hop cones in the original intro – which came from footage of our plants – have been replaced with those from Dan and Sue's hop yard.

There’s also some additional comment from the Rutgers agriculture folks, John Grande and Ed Dager, who have our enduring gratitude for helping out with the piece. The Snyder Farm did its hops project several years ago, and no longer has them growing there in Pittstown in Hunterdon County. But it’s great to see the farm's research get put to new use and great that John and Ed were willing to revisit it.

Anyway, grab a hoppy beer, an IPA, and watch.

UPDATE: Upon checking Weyerbacher's Web site, we learn that Dan says the harvest yielded enough hops to brew three batches of the Harvest Ale, an IPA (6% ABV); it will be available in bottles, starting this Saturday (Sept. 13th). Alas, it's only available in Pennsylvania.

shIPAle

We managed to get our hands on a growler of The Ship Inn's Northwest IPA.

Lots of Cascade flavor in it, and was sort of like Flying Fish's Hopfish IPA colliding with SlyFox's Phoenix Pale Ale. It has the subdued IPAness of Hopfish and the flavor of PPA.

All things considered, it was certainly worth the side trip to Milford, as we returned to home base from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, where we went to check out Weyerbacher Brewing's hop harvest.

Handcrafted beer? You bet, especially when you pick the hops all by hand. The folks from Weyerbacher brought the crop in by cutting the bines and plucking the cones from morning through the afternoon.

Good thing there was pulled pork, cole slaw and a sixtel of their AutumnFest beer for sustenance, and some half-joking, half-serious comments of "have anything hoppier?"

We’ve followed their efforts to grow hops since April, and now all that’s left is to taste their Harvest Ale.

Check out the stills (we shot more video, too, that's coming as a sort of sequel to what we've already posted).

Two steps closer to beer

Our hops have taken two steps closer to becoming beer.

We picked them on Sunday, and friend of the blog/South Jersey homebrewer Julian Mason has set them out to dry in a screen frame he made.

Julian (who took the pics here) will brew with ours, plus some Cascades and other varieties he and his co-worker Gerry Mann have been growing since May (we planted ours at the end of March, hence our picking them now). That's a beer to looking forward to.

Our Centennials have a nice piney aroma to 'em and should go well with the Cascades. Makes you think of SlyFox's Phoenix Pale Ale (a Pennsylvania beer that's won permanent shelf space in our main fridge; yeah, this is a Jersey beer blog, but there's room for some outside influence).

For the record, we picked just under a half pound, basically off two first-year plants. We may get another 4 ounces of the remaining two plants we have in the ground that lagged behind. They've got cones beginning to mature on 'em, and one is still throwing burs that will bud up into cones soon.

That may seem like a small yield, but these, as we noted, are first-year plants, which expend a lot of their energy getting their roots established, as well as flowering. Plus, it takes a lot of hop cones to make a pound.

Still, they were hardy this season. Will be next year, too.

Published images, imagine that

Check out the new issue of Beeradvocate. Our photos of Dan Weirback run with his first-person account of jumping into hop yarding (pages 32 and 33).

And unlike some publications we know of (we're looking at you Ale Street News – ya did it to us again), Beeradvocate obliged us with a credit for the images. Thanks, Jason and Todd. And nice work, Dan.

It's still fun to see our byline or photo credit, even though we've had plenty of pictures published before and been paid for 'em (all of us here at the blog have spent 20-plus years in the news or advertising business in New Jersey; we supplied the images of Dan's hop yard for free, which is why Ale Street's brain fart kind of annoys us).

Anyway, nice way to start the day with the fresh copy of Beeradvocate in the mailbox. Good mag, Alströms; keep earning that umlaut. The rest of you get back to respecting beer.

PS: A storm last weekend postponed picking our hops. Should happen this Sunday with the help of South Jersey homebrewer Julian Mason, who makes great beer and will use our Centennials in some of his brews when the weather turns cooler.

Hops Project (Update)

Some progress to note with Weyerbacher Brewing’s hop yard …

Owner Dan Weirback tells us they’ve got plenty of well-formed cones on the bines and he’s estimating a total yield of more than 500 pounds, maybe even double that. (By the way, that's an upwardly revised estimate from a couple of months ago.)

Looks like harvest time for the mix of Nugget and Cascades is around the third week of August. And if you recall, Dan’s plan is to brew an ale themed to the project, using the hops still “wet,” not dried, as is the traditional form. That’ll happen fairly soon after the hops are picked.

A ready-to-go brew speaks to the horticultural question of what do you do when you’re primarily an end user of hops, not a producer, and not set up to process and protectively store the hops so they don’t oxidize and become more worthy of mulch than beer.

We’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of the hop project since we first learned about it from the Rutgers agriculture folks, whose hop-growing research done at the Snyder Farm in Hunterdon County from several years ago was supplied to Dan and his wife, Sue.

So we can’t wait to taste that beer.

Meanwhile, our own Centennial hops (pictured above) will get picked this weekend.

Centennial celebration

OK, that headline is definitely the cart before the horse, because our Centennial hop bines still have burs coming in all over the place. But so are the cones from those first burs that came in a month ago. That means more pictures (FYI: The photos open huge.)

These are first-year bines that are producing quite well, so it makes us wonder if this year has been a favorable growing season. Maybe it's just beginner's luck.













Meanwhile, in the glass:
Backyard sources for beer this week – Flying Fish Farmhouse Summer Ale and a growler of Tun Tavern's Tun Dark. We're going north next week and scouting for Cricket Hill's Jersey Summer Breakfast Ale, among other prospects.

Hopping on hops, Part 3

An update on our hops.

It’s been a wet season, and that late-spring nor’easter that whacked the shore with a drenching and powerful gusts gave the Centennials we planted a rough time last week.

Fifty mph winds were hard on the young vines, kind of stunned them a little bit and the bines that were just starting to wind around the trellis lines were blown off course somewhat.

It’s a good thing the foliage wasn’t as dense as it can get. The gusts could have ripped them up like the oaks and other trees that lost a lot of just-sprouted leaves when the storm was peaking.

But nonetheless, the hops are doing fine, and eight days after the storm have bounced back rather hardily. The largest is passing 3 feet, maybe higher, while the other three hills are playing catch-up.

By the by, our trellis is wholly unconventional, not much more than a simple frame fashioned from 1 by 4s and braced with some 1 by 1s, spreading about 6 1/2 feet, over a plot about 5 feet wide.

It’s probably about 5 feet (at least) too short in height – it's about 7 feet – but hopefully that won’t matter. There’s room for the hardier bines to branch out if they run out of vertical room as they climb up the lines.

With some luck, the weather will start to cooperate, dry out a little and the hops will really take off, lush and vibrant.