Pfister Pfarms - A hobby hopyard

The mobile app is screwing with me, trying to upload those pictures here

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Use a dehumidifier. We do in our oast room, and can dry |1250 lbs wet down to 250 lbs drying a couple days. Each year we learn a new trick to remove a few hours. Trying to get it down to 18 hours next year

The small AC unit did a great job removing humidity from my garage and I was able to get them down to 15% moisture. My sister in law and I spent 3 hours packing QPs of Cascade last night. We made 24.5 packages, or 6.125 lbs dry. I have a half day at work today, so I'll be doing the chinook afterwards. That will be another twenty or so packages. I have the original Foodsaver, the poor little unit is really getting taxed.... One more thing to add to the upgrade list.

Centennials... centennials I'm not very happy with. There was some sooty mold that became more apparent with drying (fugging aphids), but even then I'm not very happy with their aroma when I sample the clean ones. Rather than let bad product get out, those might just be stored in the firepit.

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Just a word of advice, 15% is not dry enough. Hops need to be dried to the 8-10% range., 12% max. In NYS, it is against state regs to package anything above 12% (not to mention needing a license to package as dried hops are a change in form). Check with your state so you don't end up with a freezer of useless hops, or worse yet tarnishing your name by selling a poor product. Other than that, it looks like you had a great 1st year!

Thank you for the heads up. Lab analysis will let me know the exact percentage, my cave man method no doubt has a percentage error. A better (small) scale is on the list of things to aquire.

Local laws are definitely something that I will be looking into for 2016 as that crop I legitimately intend to sell.

Keep up the good work! It looks like you are on the right track! And please, don't take my advice negatively, I have asked many questions to other commercial farms, and am still learning while putting in our 3rd acre!

Thank you brian. And for those wondering, I finished packaging today, we did mostly all QPs. The totals are:

12 packs of centennial- 3 lbs
35 packs cascade plus 2 odd packs- 9 lbs 1.2 oz
32 packs chinook - 8 lbs

Now I need lab analysis. Gorst Valley has gotten back to me saying that they can do in towards the end of October, but (unfortunately) have not answered my questions about cost nor sample size required. I will be contacting Midwest Hop and Beer Analysis tomorrow. I understand that they cost a few more dollars than Gorst, but that would be worth it to me not to have to wait 2 months to sell anything.

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University of Vermont (UVM) can turn around analysis in 1 week (at least they have for us). Also check with Alpha Analytics, KAR laboratories, and AG Health Laboritories. All online info on their websites

@Brian - thank you yet again, I'll look into those options as well.

About the pictures in the beginning of the thread, it looks like FB might have altered the URLs of the photos and I have no way of relinking them because HBT doesn't let me edit posts from that far back. I will work to directly upload those pictures again and see if I can't find a way to fit them back in their correct spots. (input on how to do that last part is welcome)

I've been doing a lot of documenting today. Field mapping, timeline notes on when things occurred, sensory perception of the finished product; all the things that you think you would remember but will likely forget by next season.

Also, I have been sketching a few pictures. My father has a pretty good idea for a plugging machine (shhhh, don't let the engineer know that I said that!). Most homemade hop pluggers, my own included, require an incredibly amount of throw to pack the hops because for every inch of tube that you compact them into, you need an inch of ram rod and, quite possibly, another inch of jack travel (assuming that you are using a mechanical or hydraulic jack to get your final compression). The old man said something about using vacuum to achieve this as we were vacuum packing our random shaped quarter pound baggies of hops. So I'll post pictures later as I mull over the execution, but the design concept would be a tube of some sort, large enough to hold the uncompressed hops, then a piston/plug with a seal would be installed on top. Drawing vacuum on the tube would pull that piston down and scrunch the hops into a cylindrical shape.

... So, the million dollar question: How much force is required to compress hops to the point that they hold their plugged shape? Because that would determine the required surface area of the piston and dictate whether or not 27-29"Hg would be enough. I don't know the answer to that yet. I know that in order to get my small hop plugger to hold plug's shape, that I have to crank a clamp down pretty hard. So, how much PSI is "pretty hard"?

Cheers!

Can you explain what the plugger will do? will it compress them into one large pellet?

tjpfeister said:

Now I need lab analysis. Gorst Valley has gotten back to me saying that they can do in towards the end of October, but (unfortunately) have not answered my questions about cost nor sample size required. I will be contacting Midwest Hop and Beer Analysis tomorrow. I understand that they cost a few more dollars than Gorst, but that would be worth it to me not to have to wait 2 months to sell anything.

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Sorry about that. We are up to our knees...or maybe mid thigh...in drying and baling hops. We just don't have anyone to spare to run those tests until we get the lab and processing area set up. It all falls under our WI-DATCP inspections.

On that note, I don't think WI has any laws that would affect you if you sold it whole cone. At that point its an "agricultural product". Once you start processing it is when you need to get a food processing license. I'm not sure if making hop plugs counts or not. You may want to check with DATCP sooner rather than later.

@Charlie - it would form a more uniform size package, and wouldn't require repeatedly punching whole cones down into a vacuum bag. I'm trying to remember if I ever posted my other plugger on here

@Dan - thanks for the input, I'll look into details for sure

Thanks! so its more for packaging than pelleting?

Plugs predate pellets, they were a way of storing hops that allowed for additions into the cask through the bung hole. So they are kind of archaic, but homebrewers tend to be a little steam punk cavemanish... The major difference is that pellets are ground and plugs are not (also pellets are heated to form those dense little forms)

These are a few photos I dug up from several years back. These 1 oz plugs were very manageable.

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That's awesome do you have a diy for the plug-master 6900?

hungry4hops said:

That's awesome do you have a diy for the plug-master 6900?

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Yes. I am also interested in your plug master 6900.

Those plugs are cool! Thanks for the photos and explaining their use.

Results are in:

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Interesting! I have heard many "home growers" end up with lower AA than the standard. Knowing now that you got the hops do wn to about 11% moisture, would you do something different with your process?

My alphas are lower than normal, but I'm going to blame the first-year-ness of the plants. Knock on wood for next year.

As to my drying process, I would absolutely alter it, but only to make it more efficient. I think if I would have brought them into the garage (with the AC unit) sooner, I would have wasted less time drying and likely could get down to 8%. So with that in mind, I'll keep my eyes open for a dehumidifier and think of ways to accelerate the process next year.

send some down 43

How are you going to handle the significant increase in yield that you should see over the next two years? Seems like a lot of oast building in your future!

@Sandy - shhhhhhhhhhhh.

I've been stressing in anticipation of next year, but have to just relax for a few weeks before I go back to crunching numbers. The battle plan will likely become timing out harvests of each row at a different time and maximizing oast efficiency so as to avoid bottle necking. I'm open to ideas, but want to avoid doubling the size of my oast as I already lack storage space for it.

I clearly put the cart before the horse, but I did finally get my soil analyzed. One more thing to mull over this winter

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Spent some off-season maintenance time in the field today. We haven't seen any snow yet, which is crazy... But I have a fear of snowmobiles getting caught up in my trellise over the winter, so the boy and I threw up reflectors and flags.

The 9yo also found three 4-leaf clovers in the short time that we were there.... perhaps I am harvesting the wrong crop? Lol

Gophers (or some ground dwelling phukre) has been chewing on my centennials. We put down poison for the varmint and tossed dirt back on the exposed crowns.

Finally, I have concerns over the unseasonably warm weather. A few plants might be beginning to bud. I'm not sure how this will play out, other than any sprouts being frost bitten.

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Blame it on global warming. Last update I saw said it's a mild winter for us in the mid Atlantic. Maybe for you as well?

Same issue here. Just had an ice storm. Maybe everything will go dormant after this. I need a colder winter.

2016 IS UPON US!
...Unless you live anywhere other than Wisconsin, then it's probably been spring for a while; you lucky so-and-so!

First (for this season) let me start by saying that I have to key all of this out on my phone in order to assure that pictures are directly uploaded and links don't go broken again... So prepare for autocorrect mistakes.

Second, technically, hop season has been going on for a few weeks now, but crummy weather, buying a house, raising a baby, and having a pregnant wife (round 2) have interfered with my ability to get to the yard.. Much less document it here. So I will scratch my head and try to document it in relative chronological order.

If you've bothered to follow me this far- thank you and welcome to season two!

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So here in Oshkosh, WI, we had temps in the 60s and 70s right around the end of March. This brought much jubilation as baby #2 is due mid August, and I would have preferred an early harvest!

This was not to be the case. On April 2nd we recieved nearly 4" of snow as a belated joke. The hop buds and aggressive clover cover would just have to wait.

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Crummy weather and below average temps would continue all April. It wasn't until the end of the month that I got back out there to reinspect the field.

65/66 plants survived the winter and we're pushing up shoots, including two of the weaker plants. The one that was lost was a problem during the entire first season, the shovel made room for a new Centennial rhizome from Ritebrew.com

The clover I had planted last year as a cover crop has taken hold of the yard and seems to be doing a good job of choking other weeds out- time will tell.

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So the problem that haunted me all winter long was "how am I going to run 2 ropes per plant next year?" And "how much more will it cost with twice as much rope?"

Oh, and also "How will the trellis make it through the winter?" That's an easy one, it did fine. The reflectors and marking tape kept the snowmobiles from getting tangled up in it and frost didn't shove my poles around noticeably.

So, back to the rope. Good news was that Lee from Grow More Hops LLC pointed me in the direction of Legacy Hill Hop Supply, where I was able to purchase enough coir rope for the next two years at a lesser price than sisal is available to me (even bulk amazon prices).

So the big question remained running two ropes per plant on a trellis that was not setup correctly to do so...

Before rocks get thrown, remember that this is a small hobby yard and I had to make concessions to get it built without my wife killing me. I still have a lot of money and sweat tied up in the trellis, so building a new one is out of the question. I would have to deal with the single overhead cable per row of hops.

This means that the V's would need to zigzag down that single run, there was no avoiding that. And mounting stationary equipment to the top cable (in order to thread a continuous spool of rope like they do in some European fields) is out of the question, because that would render me unable to lower that cable with my winch system.

But I had another major concern. I found, back in season 1, that the plants would act as sails and when we got the really powerful SW winds that we get here, it would push the top knots over and clump the plants together. The bottom knot stayed put on account of the plant.

This bothered me all winter and I'm almost embarrassed by how simple the answer was.

If the bottom knot is held by the plant, and my primary wind concern is out of the south, that means the ropes leaning towards the north would be fine. So if I tied my other knot behind that knot, it wouldn't move much at all, because it's tugging against that taught triangular pattern... (I know, that's hard to explain, but it gets better).

Now I just doubled my number of knots and added a potential thing to screw up! Wait... what if... yep.

COMPOUND CLOVE HITCH FTW

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This ridiculously simple epiphany solved all of my problems AND cut my knot tying time in half!

Wait... what could possibly go wrong? Perhaps the teenager and his Epically-blonde step-father could make an 18" miscalculation on the first knot and screw up the entire row so that it is now forming N's instead of V's ... yep, dammit. But this mistake would breed a result that would simplify the remaining 88 ropes that needed to be hung!

I went to the hardware store, Menards, and grabbed an extendable painters pole that can reach 22'. I drilled and tapped the end to accept an modified eyebolt and created a hop-shepard's pole!

Not only did this pole make it simple to shift over all of my misplaced top knots, but it aided in the grabbing of the top cable for the other two rows! (I'm too embarrassed to mention how I used to grab that to pull it down.... just picture a rock and a rope...)

So here's the best part- besides solving two current problems, this tool can also be used for a potential third. *IF* the wind grabs ahold of sagging ropes and moves them, late season, then I can easily put them back in place now- no ladder.

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So my other concern with my existing trellis is that, with twice as much hop plant "sail" that East/West winds could potentially tax my 4x4s to their breaking point.

Though the north and south poles are double-guyed, the center poles were only held in place by gravity and the cables passing through them.

So yesterday, the 16yo and I got out the ladder and the drill and shivered in the (again) cold while we added guy wires to the center poles to help mitigate that east/west sail threat.

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Finally bringing us up to today:

With no available help besides my 10 month old daughter, I employed the use of my Shepard's pole and the top cable winches. I could tie all of my knots at ground level, then reposition them once the cables were raised.

The last step is getting the bottom cables lowered and the bottom knots tied. First row is done. Remaining two rows have the new holes drilled, but still require moving the cables and associated irrigation before the lower knots can be affixed.

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Oh, and I added mobile cup holders to the yard, for the rare occurance when I get help from adults.

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This is awesome. It's great that you are continuing to document this.

tjpfeister said:

Oh, and I added mobile cup holders to the yard, for the rare occurance when I get help from adults.

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Ooooh, mobile cup holders sets this hop farm apart from the others! I need those for my nanofarm getup.

Earlier this week I got the other two cables dropped so that all of the irrigation is about 8" above the ground.

Spent a few more hours in the field this weekend, working on my neck-tan too. Got the yard mowed- not too sure how much more use the mower has left in it. I've done what I can to keep it running, but the engine is tired and I do t have the time and ambition to repair a freebie beater. I'll be trolling Craigslist for a replacement.

I got all the ropes in place and tied off to the lower cables. 138 knots total I think it was.

A few minor tuneups to the trellis and added extra cable ties to the irrigation hoses to keep them from sagging when the sun warms them up. I've got three plastic drums back at the shop, if I buy out their core value ($15 each) I can eliminate the rusty drums that I'm currently setup with.

And I broadcast the first round of fertilizer for the season.

Yatta yatta... pictures and a video tour of the yard.

https://youtu.be/4uoG5lKWSm0