Pfister Pfarms - A hobby hopyard

[CharlieJ]

Still Loving this thread. Keep up the Good work.

 

[thaymond]

Put the oast on Castors. It makes transportation way easier!

Looks awesome! Great work!

 

[tjpfeister]

I like that idea, gives a solution for air flow through (or under in this case) the bottom box

 

[thaymond]

I like that idea, gives a solution for air flow through (or under in this case) the bottom box

I found my oast is bulky and cumbersome to move. It isn't super heavy, but it is rather large. The Castors make it easy to transfer from storage to use, and provides airflow to the hops from underneath (if you blow air up through the hopbeds) or airflow out (if you are blowing air down through the hopbeds). The ease of movement makes the biggest difference for me, but the added benefit of airflow is also great.

Keep those pictures coming. Your progress through the year has been inspired. Great work!

 

[WilliamSlayer]

Agreed. Looking forward to your successful harvest (and my own much smaller one), and hearing what ammounts your hard work garnered you!

 

[tjpfeister]

Babies, high school football, and wedding anniversaries have kept me away from the hopyard all week. Thank god we have been getting some rain! I finally did some sampling last night. Picked two random cones from each plant and weighed them wet, dehydrated overnight, then weighed again. They are basically ready for harvest now, but will have to wait til next Saturday when I can assemble a crew.

View attachment 1440422050640.jpg

View attachment 1440422102762.jpg

 

[DarkCoder]

What happen the the pictures on the first pages ?!? Links are broken...

 

[tjpfeister]

Well, dammit. Those are all hosted on Facepage. I'll try to sort it out later.

In the meantime, here's a nice article written about my field:
http://oshkoshbeer.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-season-at-tim-pfeisters-hop-yard.html?m=1

 

[tjpfeister]

Harvest was today... failed at it. Lol, that is to say that we failed to complete it. Tomorrow is another day... But today, today went well. I gathered equipment and painted up the universal sign for hop harvest.

I hurried out to the field and met my first three helping hands, ready to rock. We got our base camp setup quickly and lowered the top cable of the centennials.

The harvest of the centennials went quickly. There were many "angel wings." I served up a lot of Wisco Disco to my now thirsty crew which peaked around 8 people.

View attachment 1440902665648.jpg

View attachment 1440902887597.jpg

View attachment 1440902908397.jpg

View attachment 1440902927047.jpg

View attachment 1440902938427.jpg

View attachment 1440903091785.jpg

 

[tjpfeister]

Around the lunch hour I traded out many friends and replaced them with a handful of family members. We knocked down half of the cascades before serving up lunch. Cascades were numerous and tedious in the plucking (about 30 lbs worth wet). We were all glad to be done with them. At this point it was 400pm and I let my crew go home. The chinooks will have to wait until Sunday.

View attachment 1440903486512.jpg

View attachment 1440903510541.jpg

View attachment 1440903527595.jpg

View attachment 1440903542792.jpg

View attachment 1440903557312.jpg

View attachment 1440903574482.jpg

 

[tjpfeister]

We harvested about 45.5 lbs (wet) of hops today. There are probably another 20-30lbs of chinooks still hanging. I loaded up the "oast." Each 2x2 screen was loaded with 1Kg of a particular type, this took up 21 screens. That leaves me 5 empties where I probably need more like 12, I'll deal with this tomorrow.

A log book was made so that I could monitor moisture content and record final weights of each type. I was worried about, but pleasantly pleased to find that the fans had no problem pushing air down through each column. The temps are coming back up this week, I hope that the humidity does not! Number crunching suggests that I might have around 15 lbs of dried product

View attachment 1440904331478.jpg

View attachment 1440904341675.jpg

View attachment 1440904356695.jpg

View attachment 1440904372005.jpg

 

[WilliamSlayer]

What agreat way to bring together family and friends! It's probably too early to think about, but when you get a chance to stop and rest, I would be curious to know if this ammount meets/exceeds your expectations? Also, what was your favorite/least favorite part of the whole process?
Congratulations on a harvest!

 

[tjpfeister]

@william
I had minimal expectations given the first year status of most the plants, so the answer is "exceeds." But it's giving me a good idea of what to expect next year.

Which process are we discussing? Harvest? I guess my least favorite part is roping volunteers, keeping them motivated, and keeping the teenager from filling my bins with stems, leaves, and broken cones despite repeatedly telling and showing him the proper way to pick.

My favorite part? Well the top cables on winches made smooth work harvesting the bines. But my fav-favorite part is probably fielding the line of questions from now very curious help who want to know why some cones have angel wings and why this one plant started growing boy parts.

 

[thaymond]

...keeping the teenager from filling my bins with stems, leaves, and broken cones despite repeatedly telling and showing him the proper way to pick.

My 3 year old was able to pick properly after being shown how. She broke one cone, apologized and then said she wanted to bury it because it was "dead."

Harvest looked great. I hope the oast lives up to expectations. I was able to get to 5:1 weight in 2 full days on about 9 lbs of cones. Do you have your fans on full or on low? Are you rotating boxes ever few hours to get even contact time with the fan?

 

[tjpfeister]

Finished the harvest today. Chinook were easy to pick, collected 31.8lbs in 3 hours with a small crew, putting the total harvest at 77.3lbs

View attachment 1440990538064.jpg

View attachment 1440990555059.jpg

View attachment 1440990569848.jpg

View attachment 1440990585838.jpg

View attachment 1440990624748.jpg

View attachment 1440990656068.jpg

View attachment 1440990678538.jpg

 

[tjpfeister]

The oast was working great. Obviously the humidity goes up as the air is pushed down through the stack, so the tray closest to the fan dries quickest. I measured every tray, the ones at the top had lost 40% weight, the ones near the bottom around 22%, so I rotated those this evening.

View attachment 1440991178524.jpg

View attachment 1440991186648.jpg

 

[tjpfeister]

Running the oast outside, I didn't think about the bugs it would suck up. Luckily, last night I had empty trays on top which caught the critters. So I added some scrap screen to prevent that tonight.

I also had to build 8 more trays... ugh. Besides MORE work, the 2x4s available for purchase were all pretty crummy, so problems compounded. Trying to push through 17 trays is tough enough for the fans, but the new crooked trays let air escape. Frustrating. Very little air can be felt at the bottom of the stacks now- I'll be building (read: $pending) another fan unit to run three stacks tomorrow night

View attachment 1440991790095.jpg

View attachment 1440991797262.jpg

 

[CharlieJ]

Great Tutorial and Adventure. From 1st year plants, it sounds like you will need a bigger crew next year.

 

[tjpfeister]

@Charlie there is some truth to that, 16 of us put in about 68 man hours into harvesting 62 plants.

Another writeup here:
http://oshkoshbeer.blogspot.com/2015/09/hop-harvest-at-pfeister-pfarms.html?spref=fb&m=1

 

[tjpfeister]

So, frustration ensues. I've been drying the centennial and cascade for 4 days now and the chinook for 3, I am still at 30% moisture across the board. I identified the problem immediately last night when there was no longer stratification through the oast stacks: humidity.

The temps have been in the high eighties but the the dew point has been in the 70s, it's muggy and the hops are approaching a limit. Worse than that, they didn't dry last night. It's so foggy and dew laden at night that when I reweighed a tray this morning, not one gram different after 12 hours of fans pushing fog over them. GRRRR.

I don't know what exact degradation I am causing with the extended drying time, but I'm trying to stay calm about it.

Once the temps came back up, they dropped another 9%. I ran some through the dehydrator and another bunch through the microwave that confirmed my other numbers that I'm still around 30% and thus not ready to package.

In a last ditch effort to accomplish something during the 12 hour over night period, I moved the oast stacks into the garage and rigged up a room AC unit I'm a window to cut the humidity.

I briefly entertained notions of convincing SWMBO to let me bring the stacks indoors, but then I found that either 90F or 30% moisture is deadly to aphids because, surprise! (See picture below). Turns out that if you didn't see aphids all season, they are probably still there. That pile of stuff on the ground ain't lupilin. I'm just glad the little fuggers fit through the mesh when they tumble to their death.

 

[tjpfeister]

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

View attachment 1441249775395.jpg

View attachment 1441249783351.jpg

View attachment 1441249802172.jpg

View attachment 1441249811171.jpg

 

[brian4508]

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

 

[tjpfeister]

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.

View attachment 1441371863664.jpg

View attachment 1441371874188.jpg

View attachment 1441371881767.jpg

 

[brian4508]

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!

 

[tjpfeister]

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.

 

[brian4508]

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!

 

[tjpfeister]

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.

View attachment 1441421137962.jpg

View attachment 1441421156180.jpg

View attachment 1441421156601.jpg

View attachment 1441421171730.jpg

 

[brian4508]

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

 

[tjpfeister]

@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!

 

[CharlieJ]

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