EPISODE S.3, E.16

[LIVE FROM HOP & BREW SCHOOL (PART 1)]

Toby: (01:30)
Super happy to be able to carve some time out from the folks here at YCH. Obviously, we’ve got a unique and strategic partnership; these guys and girls at YCH are like family of ours, so it’s great to have them on. Parts of their team are pretty common guests on the show here. We’ll just jump right into it. We’ve got Pat Jensen, Missy River, and Karl Vanevenhoven. How y’all doing?

Pat: (01:54)
Great.

Karl: (01:55)
Great. Thanks, Toby.

Missy: (01:56)
Good, thank you for having us.

Toby: (01:56)
You guys, all at the same time, good. What’s the old saying? Jinx, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight; you owe me a Coke, right?

Karl: (02:03)
Okay, drink a beer.

Toby: (02:03)
There you go, which we are having a good time doing. We’re learning a lot here; the high five is one of them. Ryan was definitely having us working on our elbow technique, and high fives.

Heather: (02:18)
He did teach us how to do high fives yesterday.

Toby: (02:21)
Yeah. One of the things we were super excited about is… obviously listeners won’t get a chance to hear this until after the fact-

Heather: (02:29)
Mm-hmm.

Toby: (02:29)
… but there is a presentation you all are doing today, specifically around… what do you call it? Mythbusters?

Karl: (02:36)
I don’t know if trademark wise we can say that, but yeah.

Toby: (02:39)
Karl, no one listens to this podcast, so it’s going to be all right, okay? It’s all good.

Heather: (02:43)
Literally tens of people, no one else.

Toby: (02:46)
We wanted to pick your brains and talk to you a little bit about the content of that presentation. Specifically, when we were looking at the line up last week in preparation for this, it’s one of those topics we thought would be really good to have you all sit down and chat about. I guess let’s start with Missy. Tell us what you do, what you do here at YCH, and then we’ll move on.

Missy: (03:06)
All right, thank you. Missy Raver, I am the Senior Vice President of Grower Relations, Quality, and ERM, which is Enterprise Risk Management. I oversee the quality department, the laboratory, all of our certifications, grower relations, our Green Chief program, and our new adventure into Enterprise Risk Management. I’ve been here 20 years; I started right out of college as a lab technician. It’s my 22nd harvest, so I’m really happy.

Heather: (03:34)
So, you do everything.

Missy: (03:35)
I do.

Heather: (03:35)
Okay, just to clarify.

Missy: (03:37)
We also call me the chief cat herder, because I have to keep the growers-

Heather: (03:40)
Oh yeah.

Missy: (03:41)
… I have to keep the growers moving in the same way, which can be hard.

Pat: (03:45)
All right, I’m Pat Jensen, Director of R&D. Basically, we have three components of the R&D program. One’s sensory; another is actually brewing, because you have to test products if you’re making new products, or new varieties; and third is analytics, basically a little more different than a QC lab analytics. We dig really deep down into hop aromatics for the most part, and even hop diastase activity. I’ve been in the hop industry for 18 years; Missy was my very first boss.

Missy: (04:18)
Yes.

Pat: (04:19)
And then I trolled around the industry a bit in other venues, and I came back, and now I report to Karl.

Karl: (04:26)
Thanks, Pat. With that, I’m Karl Vanevenhoven, I’ve been with the company 24 years, so my career is the only one with a legal drinking age. As it sits today, I’m the Chief Operations Officer. I’m managing production, R&D, engineering, capital projects; just got back from a three year stint over in Belgium, to build our European headquarters. American hops are growing in popularity in Europe, so we needed to have a bigger place to house them all. Anyway, thanks for having us here today and doing this podcast.

Heather: (05:03)
Thank you for joining us. You said this is the 18th?

Toby: (05:06)
Yeah.

Heather: (05:08)
It’s my first, so I’m very excited. Can you tell us a little bit about Hop & Brew School, how it got started?

Karl: (05:15)
Yeah, I can start with that since we’re sitting in the original game room of Hop Union. It’s a good place to do this. It started in 2004 and basically, it was an opportunity to provide education. One of our missions at Yakima Chiefs is to connect family farms with the world’s finest brewers. This is a huge opportunity to do that, and somebody pointed out yesterday that not only are we making that connection with the brewers and us, and the growers, but also there’s just tons of brewer collaborations that come out of this too, because they’re all meeting each other, rubbing elbows, having a beer.

Karl: (05:49)
It’s just a huge opportunity to gather. Thank goodness we can do that again these days. Just a lot of things to learn; it’s such a collaborative industry, that’s why we’ve all be in it so long.

Heather: (06:00)
Absolutely. That’s why we’re here too.

Toby: (06:03)
Yeah, and I’ll tell you, we just got off the bus from out at Loftus Carpenter Ranches, and just good people. A lot of it is family generational farms, they’ve been around a long, long time and still having family working. Hell, at the Carpenter’s we probably met six or seven of the family members. It was really cool.

Toby: (06:24)
Let’s just jump into your presentation that you all will be doing a little later this afternoon. What are some of the most common hop myths?

Heather: (06:34)
That require busting.

Toby: (06:35)
That require busting?

Karl: (06:38)
I’ll throw one out there and Pat, and Missy, can dig in on some of the technical side of it. There’s a myth out there that aged hops aren’t good. We’re harvesting the ’22 crop right now, and everyone wants ’22 crop, and ’21 is already in some brewer’s rear view mirror. That’s a myth that we’d like to bust today.

Missy: (06:58)
Yes, that’s true.

Toby: (06:59)
Yes, please do. I think there’s wonderful hops out there at Country Malt Group, and I’m sure up here at YCH, just wonderful hops that are a little bit older, and it seems that brewers just shy away, and I don’t have any idea why.

Karl: (07:12)
Yeah, and actually, I should probably have provided definition first. There’s aged hops-

Toby: (07:16)
Okay.

Karl: (07:16)
… which, of course, are required and necessary for making traditional beers, like a gose and lambics. When we’re talking about aged hops in this myth, is packaged hops.

Toby: (07:27)
Okay.

Karl: (07:28)
Hops that have been treated well, packaged well, stored cold. We have a three year shelf life on those for a reason, because these geniuses to my left here have done all the analytics and looked at it. With that, I’ll turn it over on the technical side of a good type 90 or cryo hop pellet that’s two years old, in a sealed foil pouch.

Missy: (07:48)
Yes. Let’s start at the beginning. As Karl said, we do a excellent job of pelleting quality hops. When they come in a harvest, it’s not a first in, first out with hops. We pellet the variety that stores the worst, first, so it’s stable once it gets into that package.

Pat: (08:06)
That’s worst in, first out.

Missy: (08:09)
Yes, thank you, Pat. What we’re trying to protect there is the oil, the alpha, want to keep it at low HSI, so we’re very deliberate about our pelleting schedule. We make sure that we preserve the quality. All the packaging are under 2% oxygen, so there’s no oxygen to degrade the hops, and that foil that it stays in is really solid for three to four years, five years. We’ve seen, even after three years… the best before date is three years, but even when you go back and test it, the HSI hasn’t gone up a lot, the alpha is still there, the oils are still there, aroma is on par; still can make a really good beer.

Toby: (08:51)
And I think you can find some pretty decent discounts, if we’re honest here, on some older crop that’s been stored well, right? Especially in these times where everything’s a little higher cost, it’s important to look at, for sure.

Heather: (09:03)
Karl, you just said that there was a silver medal winner at the World Beer Cup?

Karl: (09:08)
Yeah. I’m a 5% owner in Varietal Beer Company and it just so happens that we have another Yakima Chief employee that’s part owner, as well. He works in our planning department, so he has a keen eye for what he likes in hops, and he also has a keen eye for some discounts. We had a beer called Sup Cuz and it took silver medal at GABF, and it was 86% old crop hops.

Toby: (09:40)
Oh, wow.

Karl: (09:41)
And when I say old crop, they were two to three years old; a couple of them were four years old.

Toby: (09:46)
Congratulations. That’s a great name, by the way.

Karl: (09:50)
And you could probably add the fact that it’s an agricultural product. Some crop years would still be outperforming a current crop year; it just had a better year in that variety, and that could happen at times.

Toby: (10:03)
Right. Leading into the next thing, too, we’re talking about the longevity of hops stored well, is this hops storage index. I went a little bit in detail yesterday in one of the presentations, but let’s talk about HSI.

Missy: (10:19)
Okay, I guess I’ll do that.

Heather: (10:21)
It’s all on you.

Pat: (10:33)
If I get into this, I could go into this for hours.

Missy: (10:33)
Yeah, Pat can get a little technical, and-

Pat: (10:33)
We’ll start off with the abridged version.

Missy: (10:33)
He’ll throw out some structure and some charts for you. Hop Storage Index was a measure that was developed in the ’70s to measure how-

Pat: (10:40)
’79.

Missy: (10:41)
’79, thank you. It’s not quite as old as I am. To really measure how oxidized the hops are. At harvest, we look for an HSI… historically, .25 has been a really good HSI. We see lower now, because the growers have invested so much in their facilities, that the cooling room and how they cool it, and it’s able to age on that cooling room floor, homogenized really well, conditioned perfectly. We see HSIs down .24, .225, so that really increases the storability, as well. That front end quality handling, protecting the hops from the farm.

Missy: (11:28)
Then, when we get them in, and test them, they’re good, they’re on par. After pelleting, the HSIs are still really good. The HSI, as it increases, the alpha goes down, and also lose the oils. If a hop gets beat up in the kiln and it comes in with a higher HSI, we know that it’s not going to store as well. That gets immediately processed and taken care of.

Pat: (11:56)
One thing that I would add, it really works well at harvest time with baled hops. That’s basically what it was designed for, and so, if you leave it in that spectrum it works really well. Like I said, I could talk for hours on this; how it was derived, where it came from. I’ve read every paper on this type of material, so it can get complicated, but baled stored hops it really works well, and with incoming hops making a judgment call on how the hops are being received. It really works well.

Karl: (12:28)
One thing I can add on the operations side. I can’t make HSI go down, I can only work to prevent it from going up. The team works really hard, and we spend a little extra money on the way we process hops, even in type 90 processing we use liquid nitrogen to cool the dye and to cool the hops in the process. That pelleting, that’s the moment where you’re seeing the biggest temperature increase, so we have specs that are the lowest in the industry. We’re 104 degrees or less in our pelleting plants and a lot of our competition is like 120, 125 degrees. Like I said, we can’t do anything to make it go down, but we can take a lot of steps to keep it from going up. With type 90 processing, we can’t improve quality, we can only maintain. That cold supply chain throughout and then working to minimize heat and oxygen has just been part of our values and how we process hops.

Missy: (13:23)
Yeah. Steve Carpenter, who just recently retired, one of his favorite taglines is, “The growers make the quality, our job is to not mess it up.”

Heather: (13:33)
That’s a good one.

Karl: (13:35)
Good use of words, not mess it up.

Missy: (13:38)
PG, Karl. PG.

Karl: (13:40)
It’s hard for me.

Toby: (13:42)
The other thing is too, at YCH, the expectation of incoming, inbound quality of these bales from your growers, right? The expectation is everybody has those SOPs and the expectations of what you all are looking for to be able to pellet and get out to customers, but coming from some of these farms we visited, it’s amazing how quickly it comes off out of the field, into processing, and then into the actual bale, and into storage immediately. I imagine that’s something that also helps, at the end of the day, as far as your storage and longevity, just the way they handle it before it gets here in you all’s hands, right?

Karl: (14:26)
Thanks for bringing that up, Toby. Missy, as our manager of Green Chief, she can definitely expand on that. Like I said, we can’t improve the quality, but Missy can improve the quality on the farm, working with the growers, right?

Missy: (14:38)
Yes, that’s right.

Toby: (14:39)
You’re getting beat up.

Missy: (14:39)
I know!

Heather: (14:41)
We can say she does everything!

Toby: (14:43)
She does.

Missy: (14:45)
Yeah, through our Green Chief program we provide the growers’ feedback every year on their Green Chief reports, is what it’s called, and we actually have awards that go along with that. They get a full report of where they land on their HSI, their alpha, their bring values, selection wise, sensory is a big part of that, so they can really see where they need to improve. Maybe they harvested something a little too early, a little too late. It’s very visible to them and they actually see that as harvest is going along.

Missy: (15:15)
We have the grower portal, we have instant information from the lab, from sensory, from selection. Whatever that brewer is saying about their lot that day, they see it that afternoon, that evening. It’s a really powerful tool for them. We do a lot of work with our Green Chief program on their facility assessments, making sure everything is food safe, the quality is good at the facility, they’re not beating up the hops, a lot of risk assessment, food safety things that we’ve added over the years. A lot of growers are Global G.A.P. now, which is really good.

Karl: (15:49)
Yeah, they’re proactive, I was just going to say. It’s not like we’re sitting there being the watchdog, telling them what to do. They’re taking that quality and responsibility in their own hands, too, which makes our job a lot easier.

Missy: (15:57)
Yeah, and something about hop growers, they’re very competitive. They want to know where everybody else is, “Are my hops the best, or not?”

Heather: (16:04)
It’s a very tight knit community. I’m sure everyone is very close to each other, so they’re looking at what everyone else is doing.

Missy: (16:12)
Yeah, so a big discussion every year is, “My cascade oil was this,” “Well, mine was higher.”

Pat: (16:16)
It’s not about amount; it’s about content.

Karl: (16:25)
Yeah, and Missy also manages our quality help desk. If there’s customer complaints, we want that feedback, and then they do a root cause analysis on that. It could be at the farm, it could be at processing, it could be a number of things, but we’re always looking to get that feedback, because that’s a part of continuous improvement, which is another one of our values. We want the best quality hops and we’re pretty confident we’re achieving that.

Heather: (16:49)
It’s been really crazy this week, just seeing how everything goes down here. Again, like I said, it’s my first time. You’ve never been to Hop and Brew School before and you’re a brewer-

Cheyenne: (16:59)
Yeah.

Heather: (16:59)
… your background is brewing.

Cheyenne: (16:59)
My first time, yeah.

Heather: (16:59)
How shocking has everything been for you?

Cheyenne: (17:02)
It’s been really cool to get to see the background of how much work goes into everything. We’re in the mecca of hop country right now, this is where it all happens, and it’s cool to see so many brewers from all over the world who are coming to see all the hard work that goes into what YCH does.

Heather: (17:18)
It’s been fantastic.

Toby: (17:21)
All right, so I’ve been called a creep few times, but let’s go into the hop creep. I hear that all the time; let’s talk about what it is, and the myths or otherwise, around hop creep.

Karl: (17:33)
All right. Probably the best definition of hop creep is the refermentation that is experienced when you dose a hop post-fermentation, and the enzymes in hops will break down the unfermentable sugars and make them fermentable. Then you have yeast that’s still present at this time, so then you get alcohol. That’s basically the baseline for it. Is it a shocker that something like a plant material would have enzymes in it that could break unfermentable sugars down? No, they’ve known that since 1893 when the first paper was written, actually, about hop creep. They didn’t call that at the time, they just called it secondary fermentation.

Pat: (18:18)
And then the outcome of that secondary fermentation is the production of EDK. Then, with the brewer not understanding that, or not maturing the beer additional time, then you can get formation of diacetyl.

Heather: (18:34)
Everybody’s least favorite. My absolute least favorite off flavor, diacetyl.

Pat: (18:40)
From there, we’ve actually created a method that can look at the hops as they come in. We don’t do this on every hop lot, it’s almost impossible for us to do this, but we do have a method that we created. We incubate the hops in a starch solution, so we can see how they react with starch, and see how fast they can break down those unfermentable sugars. What we’ve gotten is an idea of what varieties contain a lot of this and which ones don’t, plus we found out that seeds are one of the worst contributing factors. Lots with high seed content will just definitely have high diacetyl activity.

Karl: (19:20)
And we usually don’t like a lot of seed; that’s already a quality parameter.

Pat: (19:23)
We work hard to eliminate that, or I should say the growers and the interns at the [inaudible 00:19:27] Ranches work on that.

Missy: (19:29)
We do. We have a whole army of YCR interns that go out into the fields, and just rogue, and rogue, and try to get rid of all those male plants so we don’t have seed in the field. It’s a big effort.

Toby: (19:41)
It’s unbelievable the amount of research and development that’s happening up here. I think brewers that attend Hop and Brew School will get a really good glance at what’s going on. Yeah, as Cheyenne mentioned, a lot of people don’t realize until they get here, and the staff that you have here, the work that goes behind just making sure the brewers get quality product, the best product in the world, by using the stuff here. Thank you, and everything you just said, Pat, went over my head, but… It’s okay.

Pat: (20:12)
Nobody ever understands what I say.

Heather: (20:14)
I’m going to Google it later, it’s going to be fine.

Pat: (20:20)
That’s why my annual reviews are pretty short. “You’re doing a good job, keep it up.”

Karl: (20:25)
It’s happening right now, Pat. But Pat’s been real helpful in how do we mitigate hop creep. Cryo hops are one method of doing that because they have less of the enzymatic properties than the full t90, because it’s more in the bract fraction, right Pat?

Pat: (20:43)
Yeah, bract and plus, if you did have some of the remaining seeds, you remove some of that during the cryo process, as well. It’s just a double win when you go cryo. I can throw out a couple myths that cryo has busted.

Toby: (21:00)
Please.

Heather: (21:01)
Please do.

Pat: (21:01)
When we were developing the technology, like I said, quality has always been number one. Our experience with liquid nitrogen has been a game changer for us, so we wanted to figure out what’s the best way we can produce the best quality hop pellet. Back to the enemies of hops, oxygen and heat. We were like, “How do we do that throughout the entire process?”

Pat: (21:24)
We developed a cold chain throughout the entire pelleting process and then added separation technology, because when you’re super cold, and it will be -50 or less, you can then freeze that lupulin gland and then you can separate it from the bract fraction. Not only do you have a perfectly processed hop with no oxygen and no heat, but you can concentrate it, which has advantages like hop creep. It also has the advantages of half the packaging, half the shipping, half the cold storage.

Pat: (21:56)
It’s a product we’ve been super excited about, but as we’ve developed it and started getting information out there in the press, we’ve had some naysayers in the industry, and there were some myths that you can’t pellet anything above 20% alpha. When we started pelleting 25%, 30% alpha, we were told that’s not possible. “We pellet at 125 degrees and you can’t do that,” and I’m like, “We pellet at room temperature.”

Pat: (22:22)
There’s two myths there that were busted. That you can’t pellet over 20% alpha and you can’t pellet at room temperature. That’s the difference, and we also have a patent to support that.

Toby: (22:37)
Okay. I’m bouncing around here, Karl, sorry. Maybe this one just came from me-

Heather: (22:45)
It could be just you.

Toby: (22:45)
It probably is.

Heather: (22:47)
No, I think that was Grant. Grant, who’s not here, he’s also on our podcast team.

Toby: (22:52)
I think I know the answer to this, but I will ask anyway and get the experts here to respond. What are the relationship to the hop plant and the cannabis plant? I’ve heard there’s some relation to the two in some form or fashion, and I’ve even heard people go so far as say IPA is a different buzz because part of the hop, or the bitterness, in similarity to cannabis and the effect that has on the body. Yes, no, am I way off?

Pat: (23:24)
No.

Toby: (23:25)
No? Damn.

Heather: (23:27)
They’re not related?

Pat: (23:29)
They are related.

Toby: (23:29)
So I’m half right.

Pat: (23:30)
I can’t remember all my kingdom phylum, all that genre from plant kingdoms. Sorry, but they are in the same family. If you were to Google it, Cannabaceae, I think that’s how you say it, you’d find there’s several more plants besides cannabis or humulus lupulus, which you’d find in that, or the hops. I think hackberries fall in that same family, essentially. As far as both of them have trichomes and they grow like a gland, just one has the enzymes to make the cannabis, or what we know as marijuana THC. Humulus lupulus is more alpha beta driven, so you’ve got humulone and lupulone. Those ones aren’t psychoactive, they’re great for bitterness, they can make you sleepy, there are some other in the [inaudible 00:24:24] world that they look at. Plus, there’s other components in the hop that actually are health beneficial, outside of just bittering, and both have the terpenes, of course. You always hear dank, and usually when people refer to dank they’re trying to go after that marijuana like smell-

Toby: (24:40)
Mm-hmm.

Pat: (24:40)
… and they’re trying to get it from hops, at times. They’ll have similar terpenes. I guess that’s the best way to put it. Sometimes they both have the thiols and sometimes one will come off as more skunky, obviously in the marijuana. That’s usually why most people will say something like, “Corona might smell like green bud,” because it’s skunky.

Toby: (25:01)
Interesting.

Pat: (25:02)
But that’s from a reaction with light, with iso alpha acids, thiol group, and you form this compound called 3MBTE. It’s not really called that, that’s the abbreviation. 3-Methylbutanethiol.

Toby: (25:21)
That was good.

Karl: (25:22)
You passed your evaluation, Pat.

Toby: (25:25)
Pat, I think you were presenting yesterday, right?

Pat: (25:27)
Yes.

Toby: (25:28)
There was a lot of those, that I had no idea what you were talking about. You did very well.

Pat: (25:35)
I know, on the presentation there was one structure that was wrong. We thought it was funny, because I just caught it the day before that presentation, and it was still wrong. We didn’t correct it for some reason, but anyway. They’ve been giving that presentation for a year, nobody’s ever said-

Toby: (25:48)
That’s because no knows what you’re talking about. Yeah, okay, so half of that myth was busted.

Heather: (25:56)
Yeah.

Toby: (25:57)
The second half is a, “Maybe I’m just drinking too many IPAs?”

Heather: (26:02)
But Pat just said that hops have health benefits, so I feel like we’re being healthy.

Toby: (26:08)
Like we should drink more?

Heather: (26:08)
We should probably drink more IPAs.

Toby: (26:11)
That’s what they were saying about wine for a long time too, right? Wine’s beneficial, but not when you drink like six of them, right? Six glasses, or six bottles?

Pat: (26:18)
Well, when you get six they all taste the same-

Toby: (26:20)
That’s true.

Pat: (26:20)
… so none of them taste bad, so you can just keep drinking the rest of the night.

Toby: (26:25)
Can say the same thing about coffee, right? Drink six of them and you get real jittery. Anyhow, okay-

Pat: (26:31)
That’s when you chase it with a beer.

Toby: (26:34)
Upper and a downer, I guess. I got a text coming back from Loftus, from Tim Burke, one of our sales guys, been around a long time. He was asking if there’s any information on a crop update, specifically around what’s going on up here, and how’s harvest looking? His specific question was is there any smokiness? You know, fires, you would have experienced those in the past, but… Everything I’ve heard, and been out, everything looks great.

Missy: (27:09)
Yeah, so knock on wood very loud.

Toby: (27:13)
Pat just broke a fist on there, yeah.

Missy: (27:18)
So far it’s a little hazy today, but definitely not-

Heather: (27:20)
Not smokey.

Missy: (27:21)
… smoke like we’ve seen before. We still have a month to go, so let’s keep knocking on that wood.

Cheyenne: (27:28)
Fingers crossed.

Missy: (27:29)
Fingers crossed, toes crossed.

Heather: (27:31)
But everything that’s been coming in so far?

Missy: (27:35)
So far quality is pretty good. We’re expecting maybe an average crop. Idaho and Oregon are looking pretty good, Washington… We’re just starting. We’ve only really received a lot of hops in that last two days, so it’s still really early. So far things look really good.

Heather: (27:56)
They look good to us, but I’m not an expert, but they looked really good out there today.

Cheyenne: (28:03)
They smelled great too, so… That’s how I judge it.

Missy: (28:05)
That’s how we all judge it.

Heather: (28:10)
We got the opportunity to go and see some of the experimentals too. We got to see the 586 and the 630 today. Can you tell us a little bit more about those? I know they’ve popped into some [inaudible 00:28:22] and the pink boots last year had them in there, as well. Anything you can tell us about those hops, a little bit?

Missy: (28:31)
Karl, do you know more?

Karl: (28:33)
Well, I’ll throw in a pink boots thing, because Wednesday I was down at Varietal and they were brewing a pink boots beer, and fresh Simcoe came in. We actually had a chipper shredder that the girls were all throwing the wet hops through, and just to sprinkle in. If you throw too many in mash tun, use it as a hop back, it’ll plug things up. A little extra exposure on all the freshies in there and the whole brewery smelled amazing, it was pretty cool.

Karl: (29:02)
We had a bunch of these scholarship winners in to brew the beer, so it was a super good vibe going there. Had people in from all around the US and Canada, so it was pretty cool.

Heather: (29:11)
That was the Canadians in?

Pat: (29:17)
Yesterday in our presentation, 586 actually had a lot of survivable components, and it really scores high in ester categories. You’re expecting a lot of fruit coming off this hop, and if you know anything about me, if you have an ester, they always end in eight because they taste great.

Heather: (29:36)
Can you go through all of the things that you said yesterday during that presentation? If it ends in e…

Pat: (29:42)
Yeah, so-

Cheyenne: (29:42)
If it ends in e, it won’t make the scene.

Pat: (29:45)
She’s getting it. Terpenes, those are the most prevalent in hops, and everybody always gets caught up about the terpene profile. Generally, you always get into these conversations about what’s soluble and what’s not, so I just tried to end it by coming up with one liners like if it ends in e, it doesn’t make the scene. Don’t worry about it too much, you’re probably not going to be in your final beer. The other one was if it ends in eight it probably tastes great, because-

Heather: (30:15)
That was the one.

Pat: (30:17)
… esters usually end in eight and they’re generally fruity. The last one is alcohol… so, monoterpene alcohol always end in ol, and if it ends in ol, you might just get it all. You can say that about poly functional thiols, because they end in ol. You can probably get all those, too.

Karl: (30:36)
Thanks for boiling it down to language-

Heather: (30:39)
Wow, that’s awesome.

Toby: (30:41)
The only one I know, and I can’t really remember so it’s not doing me much good, is something about oysters. Certain months that end in something you can’t east oysters, or should not eat them.

Heather: (30:50)
Yeah, because they’re spawning.

Toby: (30:52)
Does anyone here remember?

Heather: (30:54)
I don’t remember.

Cheyenne: (30:55)
I’ve never heard of this.

Toby: (30:57)
No one eats oysters here or is it just me?

Heather: (30:59)
I do. I live on an ocean though, so…

Toby: (31:02)
They’re fresh, yeah. I appreciate you bringing up 586 and all of the development. We got the chance to go on the experimental side of things today, just a portion of it, and really got to sit and explore, and smell the aromas on some of these experimentals, but one thing Mike pointed out too, on 586 the cone is tight, and it’s a really structured cone that makes it easier in the processing. Not only that, but from what he had said, it produces a larger quantity of cone, so the return for the grower on some of these newer varieties they’re coming up with are a benefit to everybody, including the growers, as far as volume, right?

Pat: (31:51)
Yeah. From a sustainability standpoint too. The more yield you can get per acre, the better, because we’re not making more land. Yakima Chief ranches, they look at a lot of things. They’re doing 50,000 crosses a year and that’s a lot of hops to evaluate. The first couple of years are just a fail fast thing. Is it a vigorous enough plant to even bother looking at? That’s number one, and it has to have agronomic properties, it has to be able to produce a yield, because otherwise it’s not sustainable from a profitability standpoint. Then, disease resistance, drought resistance, those are big things that we look for. All those things are looked at before we even get into the sensory and analytical part. And pickability is one too. You were talking about the tight cone structure.

Toby: (32:36)
Yeah.

Pat: (32:36)
It might be everything’s great about it, but it’s this big fluffy thing, and it doesn’t roll down the dribble belts, and you can’t pick it, and it’s not harvestable.

Toby: (32:43)
Right, and we got a chance to walk through all the work and development they’re doing, specifically on the virus free planting. That’s even better, you produce a virus free plant and provide that to some of your growers, as well. It gives them a head start and more productive on site, correct?

Missy: (33:07)
Correct, yes. There’s a big effort going on to replace some of our current acreage with virus free. It gives us a better yield, stronger plant, more robust. Again, trying to-

Pat: (33:21)
Less chemicals on the field, not to mention.

Missy: (33:21)
Less chemicals, yeah.

Cheyenne: (33:21)
Much nicer.

Toby: (33:21)
Yes.

Missy: (33:26)
Increase that yield per acreage so we can protect the land and have enough.

Toby: (33:31)
Fantastic. I want to throw it over to Cheyenne, because she is a brewer by trade, and I know she’s all hopped up right now, no pun intended. What do you think about your first time out here, for other brewers that have not had the chance to experience what the hospitality, and not only that, that YCH provides to a couple hundred people here? Just what you’re seeing out here at Hop and Brew School for the 18th year.

Cheyenne: (34:00)
Yeah, definitely. My first impression, obviously, the seminars, the knowledge that’s shared is so important, and I think that brewers who are so passionate about what they do and what they’re creating, they want that knowledge. Any chance that they get the time to go learn is awesome, but like you were saying, Karl, the chance to network with people, and do collaborations, and meet other brewers and share knowledge that way is invaluable. Having so many people… how many attendees do we have? 200? A couple hundred and they’re so heavily involved in the brewing industry, so getting to collaborate, and chat, and network is the most invaluable part of this experience in my opinion. I enjoy seeing it a lot.

Karl: (34:45)
How’d you enjoy seeing the facilities and the farms, as well?

Cheyenne: (34:47)
I love it. I’ve seen it a handful of times. When I was brewing, I had got to come for harvest and for fresh hop. The growers and the farmers here as so kind and they always offer a tour any time I’m here, so I’ve seen it a couple of times and every single time it never fails to amaze. The work that goes into it and just the innovation, how cool it is.

Heather: (35:11)
Yeah, I think they said we could bring our families down if they want to do some tours of their facilities today, like any time.

Toby: (35:19)
Yeah, I think that Heather mentioned that she wanted to move down here. You literally said, “I just want to move down here.”

Heather: (35:24)
They’re just doing so many cool things on those farms.

Toby: (35:26)
But I think you followed up with, “It’s too cold.”

Heather: (35:28)
I don’t think I said it’s too cold the other.

Pat: (35:32)
Cheyenne, you said fresh hops, so did that mean you’ve been out to farms to pick fresh hops, or have you been in the fresh hop festival, or both?

Cheyenne: (35:39)
Both, yeah.

Pat: (35:40)
Nice.

Cheyenne: (35:40)
I brewed previously in my career; I brewed for about six and a half years, and the fun thing about this time of year with the harvest, as you know, is for brewers there’s an agreement, “Okay, we’re going to do this fresh hop, we’re going to do this variety, we’re super excited.”

Cheyenne: (35:55)
And then you just get a call from a farmer and they’re like, “Hey, we’re harvesting today, come on down.” Luckily for me, I live about an hour and a half away, so we would hop in the van and we would come running down here, someone else would fire up the brewhouse, and we would get to come pick up all the hops. It was just such a fun experience because there’s an energy that you can’t describe. People are excited, this is what you guys work for all year, and getting to have that energy and experience that is super exciting. Then, of course, getting to drink the fresh hop beers at the festival.

Karl: (36:25)
Yes. I’ll touch on the festival for a second, because I always have to put in a shameless plug, because I’ve been helping with that committee for years. It’s the biggest celebration, and hopefully, I would say we shouldn’t be picking hops in October, so it’s October 8th this year. Hopefully everybody’s done picking and it’s a nice end of the harvest season celebration. We have 70 brewers and a lot of them bring two, three, four different fresh hops. It’s just the most wonderful experience getting to grab hold of that many fresh beers. We actually have a band playing this year called Hop Creep.

Toby: (37:00)
Here we go.

Karl: (37:01)
That is not a myth.

Toby: (37:03)
No, I’ve been to the festival, it’s awesome. I don’t know if we touched on it earlier, but the fresh hops are awesome for those that are within a decent vicinity to come out here and work with you all, or a grower, to bring some home, but you all have developed a process for getting frozen fresh hops out to breweries in Florida. What have you all been working on, how can others experience quote unquote the fresh hop, that don’t readily have access out here close to the pacific northwest?

Karl: (37:40)
Yeah, as amazing as fresh hop beers are, the process for the grower, for Yakima Chiefs, for the brewer… it’s a pain. It’s worth it because the beer’s so good, but I mean, is it even profitable for any of us? Probably not. But it’s worth it because it’s so good. We were kind of looking at it, and okay, it’s seasonal, of course. You have to do it when it’s picked in September.

Karl: (38:03)
We looked at some freezing technology. We worked with one grower and froze the hops on the farm, and we said, “Okay, now we can distribute it at any point in the year” and we got really good feedback from that, but it has to be frozen. That frozen supply chain, talk about not being profitable, it’s not. But it was a novel idea, it was really cool.

Karl: (38:23)
Then we thought a little more about it and the team came up with the idea of, “Well, let’s run it through cryo.”

Toby: (38:29)
Oh, really?

Karl: (38:30)
Using wet hops in the brewing process is really difficult. Most can’t put it in the kettle and most can’t put it in the fermentor. The easy way to do it is to put it into the mash tun and use it as a hop back. You get some really nice qualities with that, but what if you could use it in the fermentor? What we’ve done is we’ve taken those frozen fresh hops, run them through cryo, and made them into a pellet. Now they’re frozen and now they’re easier to handle, it’s not so bulky and then you can use it anywhere in the brewing process. It’s a new product that we developed and the beers are super good, and you can make a fresh hop beer at any point in the season. It’s exciting.

Toby: (39:06)
Nice.

Pat: (39:07)
And if you’re looking for it, it’s called trial 301.

Toby: (39:09)
You all are laughing, but you’re serious. Okay. I can’t tell.

Karl: (39:15)
Doesn’t have a name. We call it trial 301.

Pat: (39:18)
This is what happens when you let R&D do marketing.

Toby: (39:21)
A lot of numbers, yeah.

Karl: (39:23)
Seriously, though, it’s not a fully released product. It’s in this trial phase, it’s in this innovation phase. Is it worth doing? The quality side says yes, but is it profitable? We have to scale it up and look at things. We put them in this trial status and give them a number assigned to it, as we have a number of products in the trial stage, and all that’s coming out of Pat’s R&D team.

Heather: (39:50)
Amazing.

Toby: (39:51)
I just want to thank Pat Jensen, Missy Raver, and Karl Vanevenhoven for joining us. Hopefully we haven’t keep you all from being late for your presentation, but I really appreciate you all coming on. And overall, for not only you all, but YCH, really appreciate the hospitality. You all are wonderful folks from top down, we really enjoyed yourself. For those listeners who have not had the opportunity to come out here, put it on your schedule for next year.

Heather: (40:15)
Do it.

Toby: (40:15)
Yep. All right, we’ll talk to everybody soon, we’re going to get back to the sessions.

Pat: (40:20)
Cheers.

Karl: (40:20)
Cheers.

Missy: (40:20)
Thank you.

Cheyenne: (40:20)
Thank you.