Hop School 2009 at Hop Union in Yakima

I was at hop school at Hop Union in Yakima all last week and got to witness the harvest first hand. It was very cool. The future is looking bright for hops this year!

A few pics

Naked City is immortalized on the upstairs wall at Hop Union


...and so is my HBT persona

Awesome! Thanks for sharing!

So many hops. Must...drink...ipa

Dang...what is involved in the 'school'? Is this a yearly deal?

Incredible photos thanks for posting them for all of us to enjoy. Thanks Don.

mac1jw said:

Dang...what is involved in the 'school'? Is this a yearly deal?

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It is a yearly deal at harvest time. Brewers come in from all over the country. It's a two day event with lectures on different aspects of brewing. This year some of the speakers were, Chris White from White Labs, Ron from Cargill Malt, Ralph Olson from Hop Union, Jamie Floyd from Ninkasi Brewing and And Steve Dresler from Sierra Nevada.

Lectures covered everything from yeast propigation, beer analysis, marketing and growing your brewery, beer and food pairings, etc. It was pretty cool

great pics and thanks for sharing!

............. DAMN ..................

Sweet pics!

Did you see Mike Rowe there?

-Steve

SavageSteve said:

Sweet pics!

Did you see Mike Rowe there?

-Steve

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I saw where he signed the wall in the game room.

<--------- insanely jealous

Excellent. Hop Madness is coming up next weekend, but it conflicts with Septembeerfest. Seeing real hop plants right now would be depressing, as mine didn't make it through the hot spell last month. They were doing great, but just stopped growing at when it hit 105F and never got going again. I've got enough for a few batches, but at four years, they should be doing much better.

I was going to ask if this was the same place Dirty Jobs went to. very cool.

Very cool, any cost for this? Id love to make the trip next year, its only a couple hour drive

david_42 said:

Excellent. Hop Madness is coming up next weekend, but it conflicts with Septembeerfest. Seeing real hop plants right now would be depressing, as mine didn't make it through the hot spell last month. They were doing great, but just stopped growing at when it hit 105F and never got going again. I've got enough for a few batches, but at four years, they should be doing much better.

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105? that is like the low temp in July here and I got production out of my first year crop. Do you have Czech Saaz going or something?

Hey Don, do you know what hop variety were in those pictures?

Very nice post. Thank you.

WOW!!! Thanks for the pics. Must have smelled heavenly.

This is the Pic Thread of the DAY!!! Nice pics! WOW!

Pics are down-right beautiful! Thanks for sharing!

-Tripod

I now want to drown in hops...

That was excellent! Thanks for sharing.
How do they strip the hops off the vines?

I will be going home today and putting my head in the bag with my hops and taking a deep breath. Great post!

Loved them.......plan on growing my own next year but not to that extent

Brewsmith said:

Hey Don, do you know what hop variety were in those pictures?

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Those we're probably cascades or palisades. I was at Yakimania at hop union a few days after Don was there and went to the same farm and they we're still workin cascades.