(upbeat music) - [Speaker 1] You can come and sit in the middle of a hop field and drink a beer that's made with the hops that you're literally sitting around.

You can really find beers that you can't find elsewhere.

- [Speaker 2] They can be a part of the culture in the Yakima Valley which includes hops and wildly creative craft beer and all the personality that goes with it.

(uplifting guitar music) - I'm Kevin Quinn, one of the co-founders of Bale Breaker Brewing Company, and we're here in Moxee, Washington, hop capital of the world just outside of Yakima.

(slow-paced guitar music) The weather here is amazing.

We're here in the high desert.

We have, you know, it's sunny most all the time.

We only get eight inches of precipitation a year.

We got the Yakima River, we can stand up paddleboard on or fish, and there's just a great community here too.

In terms of, like, brewing and agriculture, that's huge here in Yakima, number one producer of hops.

My wife, Meghann, and her two brothers are Pat and Kevin, are fourth generation hop growers.

They're great grandparents started Loftus Ranches in 1932.

Then in 2010 or so, we had talked about putting a brewery on the hop farm.

No one had done it at that point, and so Meghann and I and her younger brother Kevin and Pat as well just started, you know, working on the idea of building Bale Breaker and putting it in one of the hop fields.

(gentle guitar music) We're here in Field 41.

We owe it to every brewery that came before us to make sure that we can do all that they can.

When any consumer has a first experience with craft beer, it's a great one.

If we have knowledge here 'cause we're older or we're larger and we have a lab and we have sensory, and then if we can then, like, share that knowledge or we can do something to help other breweries make great beer so that everyone that comes to the Yakima Valley or to Washington, that it's a great experience, like, we're gonna do that.

One of the things we do is we produce quite a bit of beer.

When you ferment beer, yeast, like, grows, and you only use some of it.

If other breweries in the valley need yeast, like, they just bring their yeast springs here, and we fill it to 'em and we give it to 'em.

And then like we can run alcohol and we can run bitterness.

It's only right that we do it.

Hops are a very interesting plant.

At the start of the year now, we gotta put twine in 'cause hops are a climbing plant.

(gentle guitar music) Then at harvest time, we cut the bottom of the hops with a bottom cutter and then the top cutter goes through, and its cutting blade is up at 18 feet at the top of the wire.

And it cuts the top of the vines down, and they drop into the truck.

Then they go to a picking facility where the hop cones are knocked off and then they're sorted and dried.

And then it's that dry bale, roughly 200 pounds, that then goes to the hop processors.

So then these hot products can then be stored, and we pull on them for the whole year until the new hop crop is ready.

Hops are a manual farming process.

Every hop needs to be touched by a human's hands twice a year.

When you think of how many millions of hop vines are in this valley, is crazy.

It's all the farm workers that we have in this valley that really make the agricultural engine of the valley work.

We make hop-forward beers.

We have enough, like, malt presence there to balance the beer and make it a good drinking experience.

But, like, we're trying to showcase the hops.

Hops impart so much more to beer than just bitterness.

It's the spice of beard, it's what gives it all the flavor.

(upbeat music) - I'm Kevin Smith, co-founder and head brewer Bale Breaker Brewing Company, and I'm here to talk to you about beer.

So beer in general is a very blank slate.

There's a lot of creativity that's left open to the brewer.

However, beer styles can fall into two very distinct categories.

And the two main categories are ale and lagger.

The differences between ale and lagger mainly lie within what yeast is used to ferment the sugars.

Here at Bale Breaker though we do focus on ales mostly, and the type of ales that we focus on are hop forward.

Being situated on a commercial hop farm, we really like to celebrate that plant and what it can do to the beer.

In hoppy beers, there's a wide range of variety in terms of strength, bitterness and aroma intensity.

On the bottom end of the scale there is the pale ale.

It's typically lower in alcohol, lower in bitterness, and has just a mild gentle hop aroma to it.

The next step up is the India pale ale.

That is probably the most widely known and consumed ale in the American craft beer scene.

There is an older brother or bigger brother to the IPA and that is the Imperial or Double IPA.

Those beers just take everything that constitutes an India pale ale and takes it a little bit more to the extreme or a little bit higher level.

It'll have higher alcohol content, it'll have more intense bitterness and an overall larger hop experience in terms of flavor and aromatics.

Over the last five or 10 years, there have been some differentiations in the IPA category.

Most notably, the Hazy IPA has risen to popularity.

So the Hazy IPA typically tends to showcase flaked oats and white wheat.

Those two types of malt are really high in protein, and it provides a little bit of a haze.

So visually, it stands out from the West Coast IPA because it is not clear.

While the West Coast IPA tends to showcase the bitterness that hops can bring, the Hazy IPA tends to lean on the softer side, and it doesn't like to showcase intense bitter characteristics.

So everyone's palate is different.

So be adventurous, try new things.

You might be surprised at what you fall in love with.

Craft beer has a whole lot to offer, and so follow your palate and enjoy.

(gentle music) (patrons chattering) - Beer brings people together and brings community together.

We never got into this wanting to be the biggest brewery.

Would be a positive force in the community and help be something that people are proud of that we're here in the Valley.

That's good.

It makes you feel good.

- [Announcer] "Made There" is made in part with generous support from Yakima Valley Tourism.