Walking through the Hollister Hop Yard is a magical experience. The two acres are closely planted with double rows of tendrils growing 16 feet high, each covered with grape-like clusters of flowers resembling green pine cones. Supported by 2,400 hop coir coconut fiber twines, they pirouette elegantly in the wind, releasing an inviting aroma of citrus, mint, rosemary and pine.
The hops are springy to the touch and, when cut in half, expose the yellow lupulin glands which are filled with resin and essential oils.
“The oils inside the hops produce the flavors,” said Erik Ehn, who co-owns Hollister Hop Yard located at 294 McMahon Road with his wife Aileen. “They produce floral or citrus tastes and give you the bitterness. A lot of people prefer a medley of hops when you’re using four or five different ones because then you’re getting a lot of different flavors. The craft is in how you use the hops.”
The Ehns became interested in hops while living in Colorado.
“Colorado is a craft brew area,” Aileen said. “It seems like there are breweries on just about every street corner. We got to know a lot of these small brewers and grew about a dozen plants in our backyard. Erik loved it and when we moved here in 2017, when Erik began working for an ag-technology company in Sunnyvale, he said ‘I know what I want to do here—I want to grow hops.’”
Hops are rhizomes, like ferns, and they grow on bines—long flexible stems. Unlike vines, bines do not have tendrils and support themselves by wrapping around things.
“We spend a lot of time prepping the vines,” Ehn said. “They go dormant in the fall and start to come back in April. We cut back the first shoots, then train the next three up the coconut ropes, hand-tying them. You quickly find out who the best knot tyer in the team is.”
Once the plants begin their growing season, they can gain a foot a day until they reach around 25 feet. The Ehns grow many of the popular “C” hops known for their tropical and citrus notes including Cascade, Cashmere, Cluster, Crystal, Comet, Columbus, and Chinook hops. They also grow Nugget hops, a mainstay of home brewing.
Harvest time is determined by touch, smell and taste.
“The hops need to pop back like a dry sponge when you squeeze them,” Ehn said. “Next, you check to see if they easily tear in half, then fold them over and see if they fall apart. If they do all that, they are ready. You can also steep them in hot water, like a hop tea, to get a sense of the aroma and the taste of the hops.”
Harvesting is done within a few weeks of maturity and in-the-know brewers can come to the yard to cut their own bines, mixing and matching from the different varieties.
After the bines are cut, they are taken to a huge hop harvesting machine named Martin Luther that Ehn brought over from a brewery in Poland. Long welds running the length and breadth of the machine resemble dueling scars, a testament to the journey here when it arrived cut in half for shipping.
“We did not expect to see it arrive in two huge pieces,” Ehn said. “It took a week to weld it back together and to replace the missing parts before we got it to work.”
In action, the harvester grinds away noisily as it quickly strips the hops off the bine, separates them from the chaff, and deposits them on a long conveyor belt. Before owning Martin Luther, Ehn removed the hops by hand, a time-consuming job that the machine can do in a matter of minutes.
Just-harvested hops, called “wet hops,” need to be used within 24 hours; otherwise they are dried for later use. Wet hops are preferred by many brewers for their freshness.
Hollister’s Mad Pursuit Brewery uses Ehn’s wet hops whenever possible for their Hollister Hopyard Pils.
“Somebody told me ‘there is a hopyard in Hollister,’” said Alex DeLeon, co-owner of Mad Pursuit. “I got to walk through the fields there and pick and smell the hops on the bine. They put each one in hot water so they gave off their aroma. It was completely fresh and amazing. Fresh hops produce a different, fresh flavor in beer and these are awesome.”
Ehn enjoys his connection to the local brewers and their devotion to quality ingredients.
“We want brewers to experience our yard,” Ehn said. “They can pick a bine they like, and run it through the harvester to give them bragging rights that they picked the hops that went into a glass of their beer. It is exciting to have a connection to brewers who are making these very specific beers that they are proud of and which are very unique.”
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August 12, 2021 at 03:00AM
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