Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their 2nd century of service to the community, Member FDIC.

[Music] [Music] Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm producer/director Scott Knudson.

In this second episode in a series continued from last week, Grant Goltz of Birchbark Canoe continues cultivating hops then harvests with friends for a Hackensack brewery.

[Music] It's been a few weeks since we've looked at the hops.

There's been a lot of warm weather and they've really taken off growing.

Almost everything is all the way up to the top cables.

In fact, they're growing past and hanging on over.

They'll start filling out at the top a bit more now.

And now the ones that are hanging over will find their way and start crawling along.

So they look thick at the bottom, now, but later on, in a couple weeks, they'll be this thick up at the top and they'll be getting ready to start putting on the little burrs that eventually turn into the cones.

You can see the nice big leaves are on them.

They're bigger than your hand, a lot of them, and these are looking really good.

I'm happy with the growth on them.

They've got a nice, dark green color.

Now they'll put out little side shoots after they get up there.

And they're starting, oh, here and there, you can kind of, there'll be shoots coming out where these big leaves come off.

Like, here's the little starts of them.

They're only about that long now.

Find some up here, a little closer.

Here's some little short ones like this.

And these will start growing what we call little arms coming out, and that's where the flowers are going to form.

You see where these two leaves are coming out, see this tiny little short thing, there's 2 of them here, those will grow into about 2 feet long.

And that's where the the cones will eventually develop.

It's been so hot and humid.

I'm a little behind.

Normally, I'd have them cleaned up a little bit more at the bottom, get a little bit more air circulation.

But it's just been this heat.

This summer is just kind of made it hard to really keep up, but they're doing good.

These are all female plants.

There's no male plants.

Hops have male and female flowers on separate plants, and when you grow hops for using, if you have male plants, then the hop cones get fertilized and they'll develop seeds and people don't want to have seeds.

It doesn't really hurt the use of the hops, but it's harder to know, if you got hops with seeds and hops without seeds and you put in your hops by weight, the hops with seeds are going to weigh about 3 times as much.

So you can't really calculate what you're doing when you're using them.

So the idea is, when you plant hops, you only plant female plants.

I did have 1 male plant that got in when I bought the roots for my original hops I started.

And the flowers are way different.

Like, the female flowers look a little fuzzy.

They call them burrs.

And we'll see that in, oh, another 3 weeks or so.

And then those burrs develop into the--look like little green pine cones, and, whereas the male flowers, they come out and they look like a bunch of flowers with branches and stuff.

So what I had to do is keep an eye on that one, and every time I saw a male flower starting to bud out, I had to pick them off and cut.

And then I eventually marked those vines and tried to dig them out, then in the off season.

I got them down to almost eliminated, but then I redid that row and the end of the row, where the few male shoots were coming.

I just threw all those roots away and replanted the roll with what I knew were, for sure, female plants.

So, they're growing really good.

I don't think last time we looked at these.

There weren't any leaves this big, but I've been giving them some doses of fertilizer, organic fertilizer, and they've really taken off.

And you see that purple color on the stem?

That's the Centennial hops.

The Cascade hops are totally green.

They're a couple rows over.

Usually, they don't put on any flowers in the lower, about 4 feet or so.

So from about here on up, and this top part, will get a lot more bushed out and get big leaves on it, when it does that.

Here we are at the Cascade hops, and they've grown a little bit.

They're a little bit ahead of the Centennial.

I talked about those little arms that they grow out.

And see here's some arms starting again.

But up here, this is one, you know, that's grown out farther.

You can see, if you look, you can see it's starting right at the base of this leaf.

It's coming out.

Then it's getting these little buds.

Buds here.

Buds here.

Buds here.

And that's where the hop cone clusters are going to start growing.

It's got a long ways to go yet, but there'll be hop clusters here.

There'll be hop clusters here.

This will grow a little more and it'll be more, and the whole plant, then, will fill up.

And, actually, if you look farther up this, you'll see these things sticking out.

Anything that sticks off to the side are these branches that bear the cones.

There will be some cones on the main stem, too.

I mean this will fill right up.

This will look like a Christmas tree decorated with all these little green cones.

It'll just be solid up on the, about the upper half of these plants.

But that'll be probably in 2 or 3 weeks.

You'll start seeing the start of where those hops are going to come.

Here's another short one just coming out.

And they start right at the base of a leaf from on the main stem.

Yeah, we're starting to get the flowering on the hops now that will form the cones.

And here you see these little bitty buds coming here.

They're just starting to develop.

Up higher, you can see they're farther along.

There's these little, fuzzy, little things They call those burrs.

They're the beginning of the female flowers.

Now those will grow into the hop cones, and that's the part that we'll end up picking.

But they'll get a little bigger before they start forming into cones.

You can see on the top there's quite a few of those started.

They're just getting going, you know?

Gradually, they'll be down about this far.

These are the Centennials again, that's our earliest hop.

They start doing this, oh, half a week or so before the other ones.

Okay, now here's the Cascade hops.

They're probably about 3, 4 days behind those Centennials.

You can see, way at the top, there's just the start of some of those burrs, hardly can see them.

But they're just the little fuzzies, so they're not nearly as developed.

They'll be about, oh, like I say, about 3, 4 more days.

They'll start looking like those and then, about a week, the Centennials will start showing a few cones developing, whereas this will be about 2 weeks before the Cascades start showing cones.

Yeah, these are the Centennial hops and they're starting to put on cones.

They're not full grown yet.

And if you look up in the top-- you see those things look like little green pine cones up there?

That's the female flowers, actually, which is what get picked when you pick the hops.

And that's where all the bittering and aroma compounds that they use the hops for in brewing and in other things, too.

We have a hop cone off of here It's a small hop cone.

It'll get about that much longer.

But, see this yellow stuff that's in the middle under each one of these?

That's what's called lupulin.

It's where all the the flavor and aroma that are in a hop is formed, in that.

And that's what you are after when you pick hops and when you use them in brewing or something else.

Now, you see, you get down towards the tip here.

There isn't much yellow in there, yet.

Once this forms out a little more, out toward the tip, there will be a lot more.

There'll be good dark yellow stuff all the way to the end and the cone will be a little bit bigger.

And, right now, the cone feels kind of damp.

It's got a lot of moisture in it.

As the hops mature, these bracts will get more papery and there'll be more of a springiness to the hop.

You squeeze it and it'll pop back and it'll just have a whole different feel.

It's kind of one of the ways you can tell it's getting closer to being ready to pick.

These Centennial hops, these are the earliest maturing hop variety that we have, so we usually pick these about a week before anything else.

These will be certainly ready to pick by, oh, the end of the month, or like Labor Day weekend probably we'll be picking these two rows.

Now, the next two rows are Cascade hops and if we look at those, we'll see a little bit of cone formation, but they'll be really small and they mature about a week after these, which is a good thing because it gives us time to harvest everything.

We don't have to pick it all the same day.

It takes quite a while to pick hops when you do it by hand.

One thing I should mention, this year it's been so dry.

We haven't had a lot of rain.

We haven't had hardly any rain.

We irrigate these hops, but I really have the irrigation set up more as a supplement to just keep more uniform moisture in between rains.

This year, without any rain, we're running this irrigation 24 hours a day on these and it's just barely enough to keep up.

You can see they're not really dark, as dark green as they should be, and mainly it's because it's moisture stress this year.

So, this dry, hot, hot summer, it probably will have, probably, about 25% fewer hops to harvest because they're just--there's no way we can water these enough to keep up with how much they need, without any rain.

I think we had a half inch of rain a few weeks ago and that's the first rain we had, probably in a month.

And usually, you know, usually we're used to getting an inch of rain a week almost, on the average.

So, it is affecting the growth.

If you look, here's the Centennials.

And you can see they're making cones.

Here's the Cascades and see, the same thing, they just got these fuzzy little burrs.

Now each one of those burrs will turn into a hop cone when they mature.

But you can see the difference in the development.

These are about a week later than these.

The Cascades are a little slower to cone out than the Centennial.

There'll probably be more hops on these cascades than there actually end up being on a Centennial.

By how thick the burrs are on there, they'll make into quite a few hops.

I'm expecting the cones might be a little smaller than normal this year just because of the growing conditions.

Probably all the good stuff in the hop cones will be a little more concentrated, so, you know, that's kind of a trade-off.

But they're just starting to form now and they'll probably need to grow another about 3 weeks on these Centennials, and the other varieties usually take about a week longer.

Okay, today, we're doing the hop harvest.

It kind of gets spread out over a couple weeks because different varieties ripen at a different time.

So, the hops have climbed up their strings, formed the hops.

The cones are ready.

You can tell when the bracts on the cones start opening a little bit and the cones get a little more fluffy, they're not quite so solid anymore.

You got about a 3 or 4 day window when they're about right to harvest, and if you leave them too long they'll start turning brown and going bad.

So the first thing we have to do is cut the strings down and let the hops, get the vines to come down, so that we can take those on and pick them.

And then we have a whole bunch of friends and neighbors, basically, to come and pick the hops.

We carry these over and people sit around and pull the individual cones off the vines and that's what we'll end up harvesting is just these cones, and then the leftover vines get discarded, compost them and use them to enrich the soil in the years ahead.

I used to go up on a big step ladder and cut them down, and that's a lot of running up and down on the ladder.

So I started started using a long-handled pruner to cut them off.

Okay, we got a bunch here ready to come down.

Got to find where to cut.

I'm about wearing out my first pruner.

These vines have a lot of--they're tough and they dull stuff up pretty fast.

And the strings that the hops climb are not really easy to cut, so you'll see when I'm cutting, a lot of times I have to try 3, 4 times to get it to cut through.

But it saves me running up and down a ladder about a million times which, I'm getting too old for that, so.

Okay, first thing we've got to do is cut down some hops for the pickers, and there's no hops grown on the bottom part, so what we first do is to just cut these all loose.

Then we cut the tops down.

My pruner here, that I cut with, it's getting a little bit-- snags up once in a while.

But, you just get up.

Hardest part is finding where to cut everything.

There.

Got a bunch cut down.

Now I gotta gather them up and haul them around to the people that are picking them off.

These are Cascade hops.

We picked the Centennials a few days ago.

They got ripe earlier.

In the cooler weather, they grow a little better.

The 90 degree days we had a lot of the summer really wasn't the best growing conditions.

But they're good hops, and the fact that the cones are a little smaller doesn't really affect the use of them.

So we're going to try to harvest these 2 rows today.

That'll be all of our Cascades harvested up.

Here's another batch.

There you go.

Oh, good.

Don't want anybody to run out.

To pick the hops, what you want to make sure you don't do is break the cones.

So you don't want to grab them by the end because a lot of times the cone will break in half.

So you grab them back a little bit behind and then you get the whole cones to come off.

It's kind of a slow process and the big hop growers have machines that do this, if you can imagine that.

But, when we pick by hand, we don't disturb the cones because the stuff that matters is the yellow stuff inside.

That's what gives the hops the flavor and aroma.

So if you break the cones up, a lot of that stuff falls out.

So the idea is to keep the cones as complete and undamaged.

So it's a long, labor-intensive process, picking one cone at a time, basically.

So that's what people are doing here.

So amazing that they've got to go 1 by 1 too.

It's like berry picking.

Yeah.

It is.

It is a lot like berry picking.

Yeah.

Every single one.

Yeah, Scott, we have people here all the way from Texas to help us.

I saw the Texas plates I was like, "Wow!"

Okay, this is our hop dryer.

It's a homemade affair.

After the hops are picked green, they have to be dried before you can package them and store them.

The technical term for the this kind of a device is called an oast.

That's the old world name for it.

Basically, you just need to get air movement through the hops to get them to dry.

Some people add a little bit of heat.

I don't.

I use ambient air temperature.

It takes about 3 days to dry them.

The lower temperature you can dry them, the less volatile oils and aromatics you lose.

So drying them at just ambient temperature is the way I like to do it.

Now the components of this--I'll take the lid off here in a minute--but, in this box is just a blower, and it's mainly sucking the air.

I'll just plug it in for a second here.

It's kind of noisy.

So there's air coming out here and it's pulling air through.

And, if you look inside here, we have hops.

These are Centennial hops.

They're nice and dry, just about right for packaging.

These boxes that the hops are in, they're just screen bottom boxes.

And you'll see I got them stacked 2 boxes high.

There's hops in this lower box.

There's hops in this upper box.

The blower sucks air, and the air sucks down through and it dries the hops.

So these hops are nice and dry.

They smell good.

It's time now to start packaging up the hops.

We've got a vacuum sealer.

We've got bags.

Hopefully, I think I should be able to get a pound of hops in here.

I'm going to label this bag.

Okay, we zeroed that out.

Now I'm going to be packing hops in here.

And it's just a a hand deal.

There's nothing high tech about this.

Hops are pretty lightweight, so it takes quite a few to make make a pound.

I'm gonna keep packing them in as I go so I can fit that many in here.

They smell real good.

Let's see what I got here for weight.

Yeah, I got quite a ways to go yet.

There's a pound of hops, okay.

Now I gotta pack those down a little bit more so I can get it in the vacuum sealer.

Okay.

We'll be picking hops in a couple days that we'll be taking into the craft brewery in Hackensack.

Okay, we got it filled up, now we'll see if this thing works.

And it should start automatic.

Okay, you see it's starting to suck the air out?

See the package is getting smaller?

Now it's sealing it up.

And there you have a pound of vacuum packed hops.

It's just sort of like a brick.

Now it's got all the air sucked out, and remember it was that big bag, this high, full of it, and just sucked right down.

And then this gets stored frozen, and when they're vacuum packed and frozen they'll stay good for actually 2 or 3 years.

It's wonderful.

A big pile like this, how many gallons of brew would it make?

20 pounds equals 10 kegs.

Thanks for watching.

Join us again next time, on Common Ground.

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Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their 2nd century of service to the community, Member FDIC.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.

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