I grew up in a teetotaling family, believing that consuming alcohol led one to imminent debauchery.

Things have changed.

Brewing beer has developed into an obsession in my country.

It can be seen in every city and small town in the U.S. from the kitchen jugs to the 20,000 vats.

Beer has taken on a life of its own.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Beer has been with us for about 10,000 years, but not always in the presence of huge rock bands.

Tucson, Arizona is the setting for the annual Beer Festival.

Craft brewed beer is teaching us a lot about beer that we now need to know.

(Music) What we have represented tonight is about 60 different brewers and over 200 different types of beer, along with twenty food vendors.

The microbrewers come from all over, mostly from the western states, Colorado, New Mexico, some California, some Nevada.

I know what I like in beer, but my friend historian Bill Beezley knows about beer, its history and its culture.

We've got all these marvelous brewers around.

This is just a macrocosm of the U.S. You could go anywhere in the U.S. anytime of the year almost now and see a micro brewing festival or craft brewing festival.

There all over the place of all sizes, a few brewers.

All the giant brewers.

Everyone.

If they're 6,000 people here, in the big cities there must be 10 times that.

I think in some of them, there are easily 60,000 people.

But what a fine new phenomenon, the stars of them are not the big, big breweries, but the small ones who make things just a little bit different and that's a, no longer can the industry be controlled by a few giants.

Well, they still control about 80% of the beer.

Well, yeah.

But beyond that they try to hit the niche tastes, people who want to have real flavor, real IPA flavor with hops, for example, is what people are interested in tasting.

We not only have microbreweries that sell to local communities.

We have individual home operators.

One person breweries, that brew for two reasons: they like to brew and they like beer.

One such enterprise and brew master is my friend Bruce Parks.

He's not exactly competition for Budweiser or Coors or Miller.

I brew in my house here.

This is a garage that I use and this is in Tucson, AZ on the west side of town.

Beer making is part art and part science.

The process of making beer involves taking malt, which is a partially germinated barley, primarily, put into a container, add hot water to it and let it sit around for somewhere around an hour at about 150 degrees -152 degrees.

After that time, you drain the liquid from the malt and in that you've taken the sugars out in the malt and that's what your draining away from it and typically you take some additional hot water and rinse the grain to try to extract as much of the sugars as possible.

Then you take that liquid and place it in a container onto a burner or stove, you heat it up and boil it for generally about 75 minutes or so and during the boiling process, you add hops to that.

And you generally add hops towards the beginning and at the end.

There are bittering and flavoring hops.

After the boiling process, then you cool it down to a temperature that is admissible to yeast.

The temperature has to be at a level that the yeast will survive and proliferate.

So after you cooled it down you transfer, the wort, the liquid into a container, leaving some of the solids behind, put that into a fermentation vessel and then you add the yeast to that and wait for a week or two.

You can add more hops in the middle, or just stop at that point, but generally takes a few weeks minimum before the beer is created.

I brew, because I like beer and there's the creative part, do whatever you feel like doing, explore some of the boundaries, try different things and see how it ends up.

I'll have a chance later on to sample the product that Dr.

Parks is brewing.

First though, I have a chance to drop in on a local brewery that has developed a fine regional reputation.

Over the last couple of decades, Americans have discovered that there's more to beer than a liquid in a can.

All over the country microbreweries are showing up and Tucson, Arizona is no different.

This one is not located in a Victorian style dwelling.

It's in a warehouse, it's called Dragoon Brewery.

They've got good stuff.

I've always wondered ever since I thought beer was good to drink, which was when I was 24, I think.

I'm sure.

How do you make beer?

Well, beer is a pretty simple process.

You crush barley, malted barley, extract the sugars through a process.

Take the liquid out and boil it, add hops and you've got beer.

Your control over that process is quite exact.

Yes, absolutely and we do know what the beer is going to taste like going in.

Congratulations to Dragoon.

Thank you.

And since hops is so essential for the flavor, I have to go to Yakima.

I'm going to visit the hops because this time of year, they're harvesting hops.

Yes!

It's just about done.

Yakima, I go.

Yakima is located in the semi arid desert of Eastern Washington about a three-hour drive east of Seattle.

U.S. highway 82 follows the Yakima River that originates in the Cascades with Mt.

Adams and Mt.

Rainer and ultimately ends up in the Colombia River about 100 miles away.

The combination here in the Yakima Valley of the soils, the climate, and the availability of water for irrigation make it possible to raise crops that seem to do better here than almost anywhere else.

Yakima is perfect, perfectly suited.

The soils are very fertile, thanks to the volcanoes.

There's plenty of water for irrigation.

There's plenty of cold in the winter to kill off pests and then there are those long days, those warm days, come summer time and you've got the ideal situation for growing hops.

The Yakima valley produces about 75% of the U.S. hops, which equates to about 25% of the world's production.

We have about 900 acres of hops currently.

Most of the farms in the Yakima valley are in the 600 - 1,000 acre range.

There are a few people that are larger than that though.

I associate hops with IPA, Indian Pale Ale.

What's the origin of that term?

So the story goes that IPA's came about when the English had troops down in India and as they were sending beer for the troops, they were having trouble with keeping it fresh, so they were adding extra hops into the beer.

The troops then developed tastes for this really, strongly, hopped brew that they were getting and so when they came back they were still wanting to have that same type of a drink so thus, India Pale Ale.

The beta acid in the hops have anti-bacterial properties against gram negative bacterias.

So that's one of the reasons that they started using hops in beer in the first place, was not only did it add flavor, but it helped prolong the life of the brews.

So it tends to kill off the stuff that makes the beer go bad.

Exactly.

These machines are specially made for hop harvest.

We call them a top cutter because well, they cut the top of the vine and so they originally started out their life as a 915 national wheat combine.

They were stripped down so the frame was used and then it was transferred into a top cutter.

Before you had this mechanized equipment, you used to have to harvest all these by hand.

Yeah, it was really labor intensive and it's not a very fun job.

So as you can see if you actually touch the vines, they're really spiny and kind of prickly.

And that enables them to hold on to the vines, though.

Yeah, it helps them climb up the string, but it will also scratch, and itch and it's kind of like touching a nettle.

So if you do that for eight hours a day that's going to be really irritating on the skin then.

Once the hops have been taken out of the field and brought into the facility on trucks here, they are going to go into the picking machine where each vine is actually hung upside down on to a hook and then the hooks travel up on the tracks and are fed into the main picker, which is two sets of picking fingers that will come and strip everything off the vine as they're traveling around in a big mesh.

Then once everything is stripped off of the main vine, there are several different processes that are going on in the machine that take the individual cones off of the side arms and then separate all of the leaf and stem material out of it so that you just have the final product of your green cones that then go out into your kilns where they're dried.

So the propane is what we use to dry our hops and as they come and are laid in here on the floors green, then we will use the propane to apply the heat underneath the floors and the heat will rise up through the floors and through the hop bed until their dry, which takes about 10 - 12 hours.

We're looking at 8-10% in that range, because if you dry them to wet or to dry, when they're baled up, they can spontaneously combust.

They can combust from too much moisture?

Yes.

Wow!

Yeah, that's not good.

No, no I'd hate to see the hops go up in flames, that would be painful.

It makes everybody sad.

Once the hops have been dried and they're in the correct moisture range, they come out to the baling room and we let them sit out in the bailing room for about 24 hours.

When we're ready we start bailing the hops into the 200 lbs bales that we have sitting in here.

So now they get loaded on and they're ready for shipment and they're out of here.

Yes.

Well, it's like clock work.

8:25 in the morning and the taco truck shows up.

Now why would that be Bill?

I don't know, but when I hear that little beep, I'm trained already to know that means tacos, whether it's Oaxaca or up here in the Yakima Valley.

Well, the vast majority of the workforce in the entire valley is of Mexican origin and they bring their foods with them.

Thank Heavens, otherwise it would be an utterly culinary desert here.

So you can get here almost the same type of tacos that you can get 2,000 miles to the south in the state of Michoacán, which is where many of the people are from around here, bringing the food to the people that will make them feel like they're at home.

Here we are about 100 miles from the Canadian border and you can get very high quality Mexican food.

Two weeks ago I would not have known what is growing here, I would not have recognized hops, the way it grows in vines.

They train it to grow up 18 feet high, nor would I have known the amount that they can get from an acre of planted hops.

It's quite an amazing crop.

Yakima, Washington is clearly the overwhelming hops capital of North America.

Yakima was also known for a long time as being the center of production of the best apples in the country, but those apples were primarily red delicious and over time the red delicious didn't stand up to being very delicious.

Now there are new varieties, for instance the Fuji.

That's a real apple.

You can see little homesteading places here that were settled by the European settlers.

When Lewis and Clark came here in the 19th century, this was all land owned by the Yakima people.

Obviously, it was very fertile.

They recognized it was fertile land and had great potential for agriculture and it was just too valuable for white settlers not to want to come in and take it away from the Indians.

So ultimately, this one section on and one section off was the solution arrived at.

Yakima people still do well here, but it was their land and they no longer have the domination over it, which was really their historic birthright.

The Yakimas originally only raise subsistent crops and only gradually began to include beans and potatoes as well.

One crop that they were probably unfamiliar with surprised them.

If you have never asked where the mint comes from in your toothpaste or in your Life Savers or in your Tic-Tacs or créme de menthe.

You should have.

Most of it comes from the state of Washington, most of it in the world comes from here.

This is the mint.

These leaves I can chew them and it tastes just like mint.

Once they are put into a press, their oils are made into that essence of mint that permeates many of our products to make our breath better.

But when it comes to harvest time, Yakima is all about hops.

You know right now you can see we have a couple of trucks in so we have the fork lifts unloading the trucks and then our receiving crew is going to be going through and doing several checks, but before the hops came here, you know you were out at the farms yesterday.

The growers were doing a lot of the hard work, growing the hops all year, nurturing the hops, but then their work really begins this time of year where they're doing the picking, the baling, the drying and you can have a perfectly good hop but it's vitally important that all that happens at the farm.

So what we're doing at the receiving process is where checking the moisture twice on every bale.

We've got a sample of hops that we can look at.

Look for, you can see that's nice and dried out.

You can see the nice resins in that lupulin gland there and just a nice green sample of citra hops here, grown here in the Yakima valley.

And that's a propriety kind, someone's own individual strain that they own.

The hop breeding company created this variety over about 10 years of work in the fields.

So when I see on a description of beer, citrusy, spicy all that sort of thing that refers to something coming from the hops itself not something they've added in the process.

Absolutely, so brewers are looking for these varietal characteristics and it could be piney, citrusy, fruity, floral, could even be some odd descriptive characters that are not so good and that's the thing about hops and beer, it's subjective so what you may like, I may not but both could be good.

These srirachas typically have a nice spicy, lemon pepper aroma...

These are buyers who have come in from Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan and they are trying to find the very best and these are samples and they have questions to ask.

We're looking for continuity, great cross section there.

Look how yellow that is, all the glands in there really going to make this aromatic product here.

Srirachas, lemony character, we're going to look again for continuity in the cones.

We're going to look for anything abnormal and then we're going to kinda open it up and look at the strig, look for pest pressure anything like that and then like Carl mentioned open them up and see you how beautiful and yellow that is and to really get that aroma again we're going to heat that up, so we're going to put that in our hands and just rub it vigorously, make some heat and then we're going to smell it by, smelling our hands.

What we have here is super critical, super hop extract.

So this you take the essence of hops, that's right in here.

Right, the properties in hops that brewers want for their beer is soluble in super critical CO2.

So by using this product, they can really nail their bitterness and they can get some of those solids out of their brew kettle.

And that makes life easier for them, but does it give them a product that's equally good.

Absolutely, because using super critical CO2, the alpha, the beta and the oil are soluble in the CO2 and of course we're breathing CO2 right now.

CO2 is in beer, it's a wonderful extraction solvent for hops.

It's almost like it was designed for hops.

So you pass this liquid CO2 over that matter from the hops?

Super critical C02.

Oh, I wouldn't go for anything other.

That's right.

It's the best.

Anyway, at the end we get this.

Yes.

Having seen the harvesting and processing, I feel as though I've been through a TV documentary.

To get to a brewery where you can actually sample the beer.

We must drive clear across the valley.

This small brewery called Bale Breaker is a mom and pop operation.

This is not a simple, mild mannered cottage industry microbrewery.

This is brand new, latest technology, fabulous brewing.

I know we're going to enjoy every moment we're here.

In the middle of a hops field.

Exactly.

Bale Breaker was opened April 2013 by myself, and my brother, and my husband.

We have been a long time hop growing family here in the Yakima valley.

My great grandparents first planted our family's five acres of hops just down the road from here in 1932.

So we have a love of hops and a love of craft beer and decided why not build a brewery right in the middle of our hop farm.

So you've given me a can of beer, but you call it something else.

Cans are basically like mini kegs.

The two worst things for beer is, especially hoppy styles of beer like we brew here at Bale Breaker, is light and oxygen so... That means no bottles.

Exactly.

We think that cans are superior to bottles.

No light, no oxygen gets into these little mini kegs and so we think it withstands the flavor of the beer a little better.

So the Bale Breaker Craft Brewery, Yakima.

New.

New place.

New IPA to try.

What more could we want?

Thank you.

You're welcome.

What, is this heaven?

This is heaven and I think this epitomizes what is happening in the craft brewing industry, so much new.

Right.

New and this one is right in the middle of the hops farm.

All around it, all three sides with vast acres of hops.

900 acres of hops.

And so I think we should make a toast to Fritz Maytag, who was the owner, founder, not really the founder, but the owner of Anchor Steam Beer and started all this in 1965.

Completely by accident.

A toast to Fritz A toast to Fritz and Anchor Stream.

Oh my goodness.

So here we are, taking advantage of this revolution in brewing in the U.S I'd say we're right here surfing on the high wave of the brewing industry, but thank you.

After WWII, the American beer industry engaged in a campaign to make beer drinking respectable.

They adopted the slogan, "In this freedom fun loving land of ours, beer belongs.

Enjoy it" Looks as though Americans are taking that slogan seriously.

The home brew... Hey, that is good.

The micro brew... To the industrial producers, it's coming true.

Join us next time In the Americas with me David Yetman.

There's another part of Panama almost hidden, where we can find cowboys, endangered day glow frogs, gold laced dresses, real Panama hats, major league class baseball and dirty devils.

The Azuero Peninsula.

Hops are a really fast growing plant and other the right conditions they can actually grow to 11 inches in a day.

11 inches a day?

That's like bamboo.

Yeah.

It's pretty phenomenal.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

To order call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and the program title.

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