BY WILLIAM DEAN
The farmers arrived with bags and buckets stuffed with long, twisting bines loaded with hops.
Freshly hewn from backyards throughout Clatsop County and beyond, the crop was diverse – a jumble of Nugget, Comet, Cascade and other varieties.
Normally, such ingredients would require careful sorting and measuring – for the sake of the beer recipe.
Not on this day.
Cohoperative Ale will be made by Astoria’s Fort George Brewery using a crazy blend of homegrown, hand-picked hops. A single, glorious batch.
“We kind of throw custom to the wind,” said Colin Rosenberger, the brewer charged with making the special pale ale. “It’s nice to have this creative, carefree moment in fresh-hop season.”
Fort George’s annual invitation to local hop growers dates back nearly to the founding of the brewery in 2007.
On a sunny and warm Wednesday, one of the last days of summer, the rite was held in the courtyard beside the Lovell Building.
Brewery employees aided by volunteers immediately set out to separate hops from bines. The process took more than six hours, yielding some 50 pounds of the fragrant cones.
“It’s a tedious thing,” Rosenberger warned beforehand.
He was right.
One thing soon became clear: The cones smell great, but they’re a bit sticky. Hands quickly became coated in a greenish residue.
Observation No. 2: There’s no easy manual way to pick hops. They’re scattered all over the bine. Patience is required.
After plucking, the hops were moved to a cold storage room off the Lovell brewery.
Fresh hops degrade quickly, so it’s important to use them within a day or so in order to extract maximum flavors and aromatics. With that fact firmly in mind, Rosenberger made sure the hops were in the 8 1/2-barrel brew tank by noon the next day.
Brewed with pilsner malt, the ale should be ready in about two weeks.
“Whatever they brought us is what it’s going to taste like. I can only do so much,” the brewer said with a laugh.
The backyard farmers’ reward will be a 32-ounce crowler of the brew, plus the satisfaction of having contributed to the process during the beloved Oregon hop harvest. The rest of the batch will be available on tap in Astoria for a limited time.
One of the contributing farmers was Dustin Buehler, who arrived at Fort George with a big smile.
“This is my favorite day of the year,” he declared.
Buehler lives in Portland, but he doesn’t know of a similar event there, so he drives to the coast this time every year with a large pile of backyard Cascade, Chinook and Centennial hops.
“What else am I going to do with it?”
While he flirted with the idea of home brewing, Buehler, a lawyer, discarded that notion when he had kids. “I wish,” he said. “There’s no time.”
He wound up staying the longest on cohop day, cheerfully chatting and plucking on the patio.
Despite being on vacation, Eilise Lane showed up to lend a hand.
“My friend said it’d be a fun thing to do, hanging out and talking to people,” she said.
The friend works at Fort George, where she apprenticed as a brewer about a decade ago. She now owns a brewery in Indiana, where she’s been spreading the gospel of craft beer.
Anne Merrill of Los Gatos, Calif., had a different experience. She felt a strange calling when she stumbled onto the scene Wednesday afternoon.
“I’m a hop magnet,” she explained.
The magnetic pull began when she and her husband wandered into a fresh hop festival in Hood River years ago. The couple had such a good time they now get excited whenever they come across the lupulin-packed cones.
So, despite just passing through en route to Cannon Beach, Merrill felt she had no choice.
She jumped in to do some hop-picking on the patio, enjoying it immensely.
“It’s my small contribution to a beautiful beer,” she said.
