Highway Cleanup & Hop Farm Tour

I went along with the Snake River Brewers on the annual Fall highway cleanup and tour of Mike Gooding's Hop Farm in Wilder, ID.  The brew club sponsors a 2 mile section of Hwy 95 that not so coincidentally runs through a sea of hop trellises.  Very good planning for our civic duties if you ask me.

Picked up about 10 garbage bags full of assorted trash from the roadway including everything from beer cans to strange  DVDs titled "Private Collection."  I'm still waiting to hear what was on those disks...

After the cleanup, we headed over to Mike Gooding's hop farm, where fall harvest is in full swing.  Mike is a great guy, and is very generous in offering tours of his facilities and letting us hang out and have a cookout.
I took a bunch of photos of the process since I was impressed at how efficient it all was.  Plus seeing it all on this scale was amazing.

 A standard hop field.  The bines grow up on hop twine that's tied to the overhead wires.  The bines grow to about 16' tall.  They harvest by cutting bines and twine together and loading them on trucks.

Here the trucks back in and attach the bines to a conveyor that takes them into the processing plant.  The hop cones are sheared or shaken from the bines and collected on more conveyors for drying.

 Here's what a standard drying bed looks like.  About 100' long and 3' deep OF HOPS! They run ~140 degree air through the beds to remove moisture prior to bailing.  I learned on this tour that some varieties (CTZ especially) are so oily that they can actually spontaneously combust if they get too hot.  I had no idea hop farming could be so dangerous.

This is a view of the drying bed from the other side.  The lady is working to fill the second bed with a new batch of hops.  This view shows just how thick the bed actually is.  Her job is to remove stems, leaves, and other debris from the beds so the finished hops are as clean as possible before baling.

 After drying, the hops are brought to a warehouse where they are staged before going to the baling station.  That pile is ~38,000 lbs of CTZ!  We "borrowed" about 5 pounds from this pile and split them up.  can't wait to use them!

And finally, here is the baling station.   The hops are compressed into 200 lb bales and sewn up manually with a reinforced fabric prior to shipping. 

We finished our day by drinking some homebrew and collecting hop samples that Mike and his daughter Diane set aside for us.  This is a huge plus for us homebrewers.  I ended up with about two pounds total of Centennial, Chinook, Calypso, and CTZ .  A great take for making IPAs and Imperial IPAs.  I can't wait to make another Pliny clone with all of these fresh hops!