Hop Union and the Yakima Valley Hops Harvest

by Bob Sammy Smith

October1, 2008

In late August Kevin Matalucci, brewer at Broad Ripple Brewpub and Sam Smith of Indy visited Hop Union and the Yakima Valley hops harvest, a process that runs 24 hours a day for a month or more. A tractor comes through the fields and cuts the vines at the base of each plant. A few hundred feet behind the tractor, a truck cuts the top of the vine from the wire. The vine falls into the truck. After the vines are cut from the fields, they're trucked to a building and lifted onto a series of conveyor belts that separate the hop cones from the leaves and vines.

The moist cones, about 80 percent water, rot or mold quickly so they're spread across a kiln, heated with natural gas burners, and allowed to dry for 10 hours.

After drying, the cones, contain about nine percent moisture, are dumped onto another conveyor belt. This one sends them into another warehouse. Then they're poured into 200-pound burlap bags to be ground into powder.

The grinding is an effort to get as much of the oxygen out of the hops as possible. The burlap bags are shipped to Hop Union, to be made into pellets or liquid extract, or sold to a broker, who then markets the hops to breweries.