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Andrew Voss is a local hop farmer here in Arvada Colorado and he is also a member of my the Olde Town Mash Paddlers Homebrewing Club. He is a very experienced hop farmer and I invited him on the show to talk about how to grow your rhizomes into hops you can brew with. So get ready for those late summer wet hop beers and get growing some hops.
Are you growing or planting hops this year?
— Homebrewing DIY (@HomebrewingDiy) April 9, 2020
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Show Transcript (A.I. driven it will have errors.)
Colter Wilson: It’s April and about now all of the Homebrew shops around you, if they’re still open and selling things because of the coven 19 are probably starting to sell hop rhizomes. So today I’m talking to Andrew boss of boss farms here in Arvada, Colorado about how to grow hops in your backyard on Homebrew DIY.
And welcome back to homebrewing DIY, the podcast that takes on the do it yourself aspect of homebrewing gadgets, contraptions and parts. This podcast covers it all on today’s show. We’re talking to Andrew Voss of boss farms in Arvada, Colorado. About his tips and tricks for growing hops at your house, using rhizomes that are available right now from your local Homebrew store.
But first, I’d like to thank all of our patrons over a Patrion is because of you that this show can come to you for free week after week. Why don’t you head over to hope brewing? DIY is patrionPage@patrion.com forward slash homebrewing DIY. Once again, that’s . Patrion.com forward slash homebrewing DIY.
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So once again, that’s podcast@homebrewingdiy.beer. You can also follow us on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Just look for the handle at homebrewing. DIY, all one word. Also, if you listened to last week’s show, I talked a bit about the SAP or the shelter in place, beer festival that’s happening on the 11th of April from 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM just one more announcement that that is happening.
It’s the shelter in place, beer festival. All of the proceeds from the ticket sales and t-shirts sales are going to go to help the employees of the craft beer industry here local in Colorado. And it’s a pretty simple to participate. Buy a ticket, hop on Twitter, Facebook throughout the hashtag and enjoy a Colorado beer from 12 to six on this Saturday.
So go over to sip beer fest.com for more information and get your ticket today. All right, so now let’s jump into this week’s interview. We’re going to be talking to Andrew Voss of Voss farms here in Arvada, Colorado about how you take your rhizomes and turn them into beautiful succulent. Tasty hops.
I’m sitting here with Andrew Voss of boss farms, a local hop farm here in Arvada, Colorado, and we’re going to talk about all things hops today. Welcome, Andrew.
Andrew Voss: Hey, thanks for having me.
Colter Wilson: Hey, thanks for being on the show. I think the best place for us to start right now would be, let’s get a bit into your whole brewing history and how you started a hop
Andrew Voss: farm.
Yeah. Homebrewing history started well after the Huff farm. Actually, I, uh, always been a beer drinker. Um, but, uh, I’ve always been more of a grower and a gardener, and I was living in downtown Denver for years. Trying to do as big a garden as I could. Uh, that’s when I finally had a chance to upgrade my home.
And, uh, 2008 during the recession, prices were pretty good. So I found two acres in Arvada and, uh, wanted to do an Apple orchard. But after a big hailstorm, those Apple tree starts got all killed. So I planted hops. Uh ha. I planted them at the same time as the Apple trees. And after the hailstorm, they came back so much more vigorous than the Apple trees.
I said, Hey, hop farm. Makes a lot of sense. Craft breweries were Virgin.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. That’s a kind of a key time in the craft brewery time for Colorado as well in the mid two thousands. Right? Yeah.
Andrew Voss: Yeah. It just made sense to, to grow the hops. I thought probably like a lot of people that consider having a hop farm that I would, uh, make money hand over fist, be able to quit my day job with it.
But that wasn’t the case. And we can talk about that a little bit later, but. Let’s just say a, the home brewing started after the hop farm because so many brewers would come and help me with the hops and harvest time where they’d get rhizomes from me and just come check it out. And they’d ask, so what do you like to brew?
And says, no, here’s the deal. I grew hops. I give them to you. You come back later with FTC six pack and it’s all good. But eventually I snuck into homebrewing maybe six years ago.
Colter Wilson: And how, how often are you brewing? Like is it. Something that’s like periodic, are you Bruin throughout the year,
Andrew Voss: you know, it goes in spurts of, had a lot of barrel projects that, you know, take 40 gallons on my part to make.
And so it usually goes in spurts. Uh, I’m due to brew my summer stuff now. I usually have a big brew day on the Kentucky Derby day. I’ll still do it the first weekend and Saturday, but, uh, usually in the fall I’m trying to make a bunch, get them indoors in the crawl space, the basement to ferment. And, um.
Probably, I don’t know, probably brew every other month, but 10 15 gallons at a time.
Colter Wilson: That’s a good amount of beer. I mean, to be honest, that’s about how often I brew and about how fast it takes, how long it takes me to get through about 15 gallons of beer. Right,
Andrew Voss: right. If you have friends, right. It helps.
Colter Wilson: It does help.
So Le, the reason I asked you to be on the show today is I really wanted to talk about it is rhizome season right now. I think a lot of homebrewers out there are probably. Growing hops for their first time. What I wanted to have you talk maybe a bit about, if I were a home brewer, I just got some rhizomes for the first time.
It’s April. It’s time to get him planted. W w what would be some good tips and tricks that you could give me as a homebrewer to grow hops? Okay.
Andrew Voss: I’ll go through the basics and pause and make you can make sure I’m still on the right track. Uh, but hops, they’re a very, very cool plan. I mean, there are. Uh, I mean like kudzu, but you can use them for some of, they’re very vigorous.
Think of them as corn. Every year corn grows. It grows very rapidly. It needs lots of water to carry those nutrients. To build the plant. Hops are the same way. You got to give him lots of sunshine, which pulls the nutrients up in the plant, getting him lots of water to carry those nutrients, and you’ve got to give them fertilizer.
Mainly nitrogen. Yeah. Like you would corn. So if you’re going to cite your hot plant at your house, a really good place is if you’ve got a two story house is, uh, along the chimney or a South, uh, South facing East or West, definitely not North facing a, but plan them where they’re going to get lots of sun and you can string them up 15 to 20 feet.
They want to grow vertical. A lot of people try to put them horizontal on a fence and they’ll do that. They get bushy. The taller you can get them, the better the hop cones form at the very top of that plan.
Colter Wilson: Okay. And w when you’re, let’s, let’s maybe start with what is a rhizome and yeah, let’s start there.
Andrew Voss: So a hop plant is a perennial plant. It comes back every year as long as you treat it right for 15 to 20 or who knows what, it kind of reproduces itself. Even if it gets old, you can get a part of it on one side that’s younger. And it forms a crown. Probably the size of a dinner plate is what you want your crown to be.
Roots go off of that. And also things like that are called rhizomes that if you’ve ever seen a strawberry plant, they have runners that that leave out and set new roots. The rhizomes of a hot plant or just subsoil a little bit under the soil, their roots, they can turn into sprouts and they have some root hairs on them.
They have some sprouts coming up every year on a mature hop crown. You want to cut those off. So that you don’t waste energy on those, that the plant could be putting vertical into making the hop cones for you. And by the way, all hop plants that we use to get a hop cones are female, so it’d be nice to them.
Um, no males, if males were there, it’s fine if they pollinate. Not a big deal. You just have seeds in the cones. You can still brew with them. Not a big deal, but you will never get cones that you can use off of the
Colter Wilson: male plant. Okay, so you’ll have, yeah, it would be essentially a waste because if you have, if you’re adding water to a male plant, what’s the point, right?
Andrew Voss: Oh yeah, you do. If you’ve got one in, you’ll know what it makes a little powdery sacks of pollen that bust open in June or July and the, the female hop plan is what you should be taking your cutting off of. I only have female hot plants in my garden except for a few times where I’ve gone and got wild hops.
That looked pretty vigorous. I planted them. And then later that year I realized that they were forming pollen sacks. So I just cut him down.
Colter Wilson: Okay. And that, that, that’s a good place to start. Cause rhizomes when you go and buy hops as a, as a grower, you, you’d never find seeds,
Andrew Voss: right? No. No. You won’t find seeds.
I mean it’s, yeah, cause if you plant a seed, which I’ve done because you know, some wild ones that created it. Yeah. It’s like getting a straight run of chickens. You’re going to get eight roosters and two hands. It’s not worth going by C plus. You don’t know what it is cause it’s not a cologne. Essentially.
A rhizome is a clone of the hot plant. And if someone you know has, you know, you know, it’s a holler TA or you know, it’s a cascade, go over and cut some rhizomes off, save you sell five bucks and just plant those. They’re very vigorous. Now mine are starting to sprout. Um, here it is in early April. It’s been nice.
I’ve got a few inches of growth off my hop crowds. It’s not to say they’re not going to get frozen back, but if you have a friend that’s got them, you can still, at this time of the year, you can still go cut off some rhizomes, put them in the ground, water them, love the roots set. If we do get a hard freeze or even a moderate freeze, just cover it up.
But I’d say now is the time to start planting those rhizomes
Colter Wilson: and then how, how much water does a normal hot plant take? Let’s say weekly.
Andrew Voss: Gallons. They, uh, I, I almost leave my drip emitters. Well, they don’t leave them on all the time, but they do a gallon a minute drip right over the plant. And I haven’t run for two hours a day, probably.
So a couple of gallons a day. Um, you just kind of play by your, the hop plant doesn’t like soggy feet. It’ll rot. The crown will rot if it’s own was soggy. So if you’re in a lot of clay, build a mound, put that hop crown in that mountain so that the water will. Drain away from the roots, but they don’t like to dry out either, especially the first year, but the only way you kill them in the first year is, is let them dry out or snap off all of the growth that they’ve, that they’ve started.
And then the rhizome doesn’t have enough energy to, to create it again. Okay. That they’re really hard to kill after the first year.
Colter Wilson: Okay. And then after the crown, and it starts to actually start. Let’s say climbing or clinic going that vertical, what are a couple of ways? Let’s say I don’t have a two story house.
What are sort of some ideas of how I can get my hops to go vertical?
Andrew Voss: A utility pole, uh, go get the tallest, even if you get a 12 foot two by six, um, or four by six, sorry, four by six from home Depot or something, put it to the tallest pole. You can rig a pulley at the top. Um. Unless you’ve got it. It’s really sturdy Barrett, two or three feet in the ground next to the plant.
But you want a string that will come down from that, the top of the pole, the highest you can get. Um, and then when the plant starts making the, uh, the binds, they’re not vines. A vine would use a 10 year old to wrap itself onto something, whereas a bine with a B reps, the entire body of the plant around an object or a string in order to go up.
So when these binds come out of the crown or the new rhizome, you’ve gotten the new rise on when you’re only going to get two or three of these sprouts coming up. So be careful with them. If you snap the tip off, they will want to die in the or. They’ll go crazy. So you’ve got to maintain the integrity of that tip and they’re a little more fragile than you think.
But, uh, take two or three off of a matured crown or every single one you have on a first year plant and put it against a string that’s like a cotton clothesline that has the ability for that. How buying it has little hairs on the, on the bind called tricombs that will grip into the string and it’ll wrap itself.
You can help it, but it wants to go clockwise around that string and go up.
Colter Wilson: And then once it kind of goes up that string, it’s just going to Cline itself all the way up over the summer. Is there any kind of maintenance that you need to do throughout the year, other than water?
Andrew Voss: Mmm. Yeah. As it climbs, you may have to help keep that growing tip on the string.
Sometimes a window blow it off, or it’ll get so vigorous one day that it won’t find the string. What that, that, uh, that buying is, it’s growing up in the morning. It wakes up looking East and then it’ll hear in the Northern hemisphere, it’ll follow the sun as the sun tracks East to West, and that tip will grow anywhere from an inch to eight or 10 inches a day.
And it will follow the sun to the South and to the West. And at night it will clinch and tighten up. When there’s no sun, it will clench on that strength. So sometimes it, it won’t find that string at night to clench on your wake up in the morning. Just just carefully wrap that string around or that bind around the string.
And while you’re doing all this, make sure it stays moist but not soggy. Make sure it doesn’t dry out and add. I like liquid fish fertilizer. It’s seaweed and fish parts and whatever. You dilute it and you throw it on the plant that are cow poop. Either way, it wants nitrogen. So you’re adding these nutrients very early in the spring, and then you’re doing a little bit different kind of stuff in June when you want that plant to bloom or start forming the cones.
Colter Wilson: Okay. And so, yeah, let’s talk a bit about the life cycle throughout the year. So you start to get sprouts in April. Yeah, March and April, at least here in Colorado. And then throughout the spring, I guess your next step is June, where it starts to bloom. What, what’s kind of the next step
after
Andrew Voss: that? Okay, so yeah, sprouts in April and may you try a second year plants and later you trim everything down.
You’ll have like a Medusa’s head of sprouts. You want to trim down all of those sprouts except for two or three that you’re going to train up the string and then you walk around, you fertilize them. And in June. Around June 21st the solstice, that plant realizes that the, the days have gotten started getting shorter, and that will trigger that plant to put out little flowers.
It’ll put out lateral arms in June, and then on those lateral alarms, as those keep growing, they’ll start putting out these little flowers, which will turn into the cones. Uh, so that’s June. So in July, June, July, you, you add, if you do any kind of fertilizer, you do something that’s supportive of flowering.
In July, they’re gonna start, you’re gonna start seeing these beautiful cones and clusters and you’re going to squeeze them. And they’re really green and they don’t quite smell like hops yet, but they’re on their way. So when you, when these cones get really mature, which will be the end of July, the 1st of August, some varieties, the middle or end of August, kind of depends on when you had your last frost.
If the plant started real early. You’ll be harvesting at the end of July. If they started late may 15, like maybe had to cut them down cause there was a hard for us, you’re allowed to harvest in August, most of my Chinooks middle of August every year, but the holler tall into July. So when you start seeing these hop cones on the, uh, the plant and clusters squeeze with your hand when they start feeling like parchment paper thereabout.
Ready, you might see him lighten up a little bit. You might see a little bit. Light Brown spots form on the outside, which totally good. Uh, you’re in your, you’re picking these early and often in your, you’re picking off a hop cone. You’re seeing how it compresses. If it, if it stays compressed, it’s too green.
If it starts to spring back and to its form after you squeeze it with your fingers and it feels like parchment paper, you’re getting real close. Rip it down the middle and look, and there’s little yellow dust in the middle, right in the core of that, it looks like a miniature pine cone. You’ll see a little yellow dust.
That’s the Lupron. And if that has started to form balls down at the base of those little hop cone leaves. Bingo. And it smells good. It’s oily, you rub it on your wrist like a little perfume and it kind of leaves a greasy oil to it and it smells strong and it’s parchment paper. Piguet
Colter Wilson: great. And then when you are doing a harvest, do you harvest just the cones as they come when, when do you actually like ripped down the plant and take them all.
Andrew Voss: Um, for me, I tried to get all my hop plants to have the variety to mature at the same time, which makes it really, you know, a busy six to seven days where I try to give them some, I pick a little early summit peak and some towards the end, and as you get towards the end, they might lose a little alpha acid, but they gain more in oil.
So there’s, it’s a trade off. I’m picking them. I cut the whole plant down. A lot of people like to leave ’em up. You’d have to use a ladder to go up there and pick them. It’s quite dangerous. And I cut the whole plant down, pull the string down, take them in the shade, drink some beer, listen to the radio and pick all the hops by hand.
You want to get behind the cone with your fingers. Don’t grab the cone and pull from the cone. You pull behind it like at the STEM, uh, and then throw them in a bin. But I tried to pick the whole plant at one time. I don’t pick the ones over here and wait for those to get better. I may. Isolate one plant that’s a little early or a little later than the other ones, and pick that before I pick the ones around it.
But, uh, when I start picking a plan, I pick the whole thing.
Colter Wilson: And then, and then what is the process for getting, let’s say, ho hops ready to brew after you’ve
Andrew Voss: picked them? Yeah. You can get them tested if you want. The, a Yakima chief hops in a Pacific Northwest used to have a place where you could send them into their lab for 30 bucks, which kind of blows your, your, uh, your.
Price point if you’re home brew and you just got a few. So usually what I do is look at the average, uh, alpha acids on a certain operator that you have. Make sure you pick them at peak harvest, call that the alpha acid and the beta acid, unless you want to send them into the lab, which I do. Um, I don’t do it for my fresh hops because I can’t get the alphas back fast enough anyway, but.
I digress. You keep me on point here, man. Um, so what do you do when you, when you pick the hops, uh, you can use them in a fresh hop using that day. Refrigerate them overnight, using the next day. That’s a fresh or a wet hop. As fast as you can pick them, you throw them into your brew and you’re going to have to compensate.
Certain brews are better for fresh hops. I get a good proven fresh hop or a wet hop. They’re kind of the same. Fresh would be within certain amount of days, never dried. Wet hop would be one that’s. Probably 24 hours or less from the time you picked it, it goes into the kettle. Um, so find a fresh shop. If you’re gonna do fresh shops, you don’t have to dry them, put them into the brew.
Um, yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s cautions, refresh, shop Roos. Don’t, you know, you don’t want to put them into early and let them just saturate the brew with a sense of fresh cut grass. Uh, so I’m not a fresh hop brewing expert. But I do like the fresh hops, and that’s a very unique thing. Uh, you get once a year when they’re fresh.
So if you’re gonna, if you’re going to just brew right away with a fresh shopper, SB, pick them, use them in 24 hours or use them on a day or two. If you’re not, you’ve got to take those hop cones and you got to start drying them pretty quickly.
Colter Wilson: And what are some of the methods you would use to dry them?
Andrew Voss: Um, in a, you don’t want to dry them out in the sunshine that will oxidize. A lot of the oils and things that are in it, you want to get it into a, a room that doesn’t have a lot of wind. You don’t want to, as the Hopkins dry out, they will blow away. So if you just, you put them in your driveway, in the shade, and you put a fan on it to drive moisture off as they lighten up, that fan that you have on it will blow them away.
So I’d suggest I’m in a hot room, you know, close your, close, your, um, your garage. If it gets really hot in there. And put a box fan underneath. Some saw horses, put a screen or a box you make out of screen, maybe six inches deep. Put that on the in between the saw horses, fill it with hops and blow that box man up underneath it.
Or alternatively, from the top down into that, uh, having another flat screen on tops of the hole. Put all the hops into a screen environment. A quarter inch wire works fine. Also. But you want the air here in Colorado. It’s, it’s, I mean, people in Wisconsin laughed at me when I was at, went to hop growing class up in a place called gorse Valley hops.
They said, you’re from Colorado, it’s so dry. You can go take a half an hour break. What we tell all these people in the Midwest, how to drive moisture off of the hops during the drying process using added heat. Uh, but if you’re picking an August, it’s hot. Find a hot, dry wooden barn or, uh, your garage and just put them on a screen so that make it so they don’t blow away.
Drive a drive air through those hops, and in a couple of days, those hops will be dry. You’ll notice they become incredibly light. 90% of the weight of the hop will be driven off as moisture, and you’ll have about 10% of that left. You can measure it. Um, there are calculations for measuring the, the amount of moisture you’re driving off.
It involves weighing it, you know, to a gram cooking the hops in the oven. Then weighing it again and see how much moisture was driven off as you cooked it in the oven. It’s kind of a test or the quick and easy is waiting until you pull that hop. Put it between your two hands, your fingers are two hands in and try to snap it like a, I’m just thinking, what’s the, like a carrot or something.
You try to try to snap that little, uh, how can like a carrot if it snaps. And you can feel that a center strip of the hop cone is totally dry. I like to put it up to my lip. I don’t put it back in the, in the South. I throw them away after I do that. But put it up to the lip cause your lips are very moisture sensitive.
And if there’s any moisture in the center strip of that hop cone, the center line of it, you’ll feel it on your lip. And if you feel any moisture on it, they’re not ready. If you have to twist it and it doesn’t just pop and crack as you, uh, break it. It’s not dry enough. You have to get it down to 9% moisture and it starts out at 85% moisture.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. And then once they’re dry, you can pretty much store them as you would any kind of whole cone hop at that point. Right?
Andrew Voss: Yeah. A vacuum sealer works great. Vacuum seal it, um, label it so you know where the heck it is when you picked it and then put it in the freezer and put it in a bag in a freezer.
But with the darkness and the cold of the freezer, it’s fine. Well you don’t want to do is package them before they’re totally dry. Cause if you do that. And you could freeze it, but as soon as you pull it out to thought it’s going to start getting all funky in there cause it has moisture in it
Colter Wilson: and, and pops when it, when you talk about moisture and hops, they, they go bad pretty quickly.
Right.
Andrew Voss: Um, they have, uh, they have a, a factor, a measurement that they call the hop storage index. It’s can be 0.1 or 0.2, two or 0.34, and that is a. When it, when it gets officially tested, it tells you, okay, this is how much oxygen, how much, how perfect the hops were and how well those store, and I don’t do it, but I just put a little extra and if they’re old hops, I put a lecturer in, I’ve had hops that have been a year, two years old, and I’ve used, and they’ve been just fine.
You open the package, it’s like, wow, I just packaged it yesterday. It’s kept in a dark, cool environment. You just put a little extra as they are older. Once you open that package and oxygen is getting in there, yeah, they’re going to go bad. Uh, very quickly. You wouldn’t want to leave them unsealed and removed all oxygen for very long.
Maybe, you know, a couple of weeks, three weeks. I think they’d be seriously affected at that point if you just left him in a paper bag.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. Which is the way that Homebrew shops sold them in like the 1980s. Right, right. He’s like, here’s the paper bag of hops. I wonder if they’d been sitting out on my shelf for six months.
Andrew Voss: Yeah, that’s no bueno. I’ve, I’ve got a, I’ve got a vacuum sealer, a hot press, and I put them in Mylar bags. There’s no, you don’t want sunlight get into him. You don’t want oxygen getting into them. If you want to buy those little, uh, oxygen absorbers and, and put it into your bag when you do it, that’s cool too.
Uh, but if you dry them within a few days, and you know, if they’re, if they’re from the time you start drawing them to the end of their dried and you package them, vacuum seal them. You can keep them in the freezer and use them for a year, two years. I’ve been pretty happy with my hungers that way you lose a little bit of the potency, but not that much.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. And then do like for example, I know that most hops that if you’re a home brewer and you go down to your home brew shop or you order them online, you’re getting them in pellets. Right, right. Uh, w what kind of different factors do you need to think of when you’re doing cones versus pellets? Cause I know pellets tend to be stronger and you need to adjust for that.
Andrew Voss: Right. Yeah, they powder out. Uh, I mean, I, I don’t pelletize it. I could do an extra dollar a pound. I go get to pelletize, but I sell a lot of my hops is fresh hops and those that I don’t, I’ve already got a set up to package them as whole hops, but I think the reasons why they went to pellets or our consistency and, and to no small factor, the ability to ship a lot more hops in less space to store them in less space.
There’s less. Surface area to be oxidized. But then again, you have to beat up these beautiful little flowers in a hammer mill and, and squeeze them through a pelletizer extruder, which could be at such a hot temperature that it drives off some of the essential oils that are in hops. So there’s, there’s pros and cons for hops that are a pelletized versus whole Conant.
When you pelletize them, they do, you can pump them out their sludge, whereas the cones, you’re using a whole cone that’s dried, it will absorb quite a bit of your water and your brew. Andy, you really don’t want to squeeze out the bag of hops that you threw into your cattle cause you could be squeezing out tannins or some other unwanted stuff.
You want to let it drain light, little squeeze to get some of that, the yummy hopped juice out of it and into your boil, but you don’t want to ring it out and get all that water out. You just got to waste some water and pull the hops out. Yeah. Sorry. Is that a long window? Longer than an answer for hops?
Pellets are whole, but
Colter Wilson: yeah, that’s a, that’s a good answer actually. Uh, like me personally, I just throw my hops straight in my beer, so I, I’m not a, I’m not a hot bath kinda
Andrew Voss: guy. Yeah, you can keep me, you can do that whole French press thing. I was at hound and Fox and hound or somebody did it for awhile and some of the places you do the French press, you put your hops down in, you pour some beer on top, and then you, then you lower the plunger.
So it has like a fresh. A hot back like a Randall or something on your table. Wow.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. That’s good. Never thought of it that way.
Andrew Voss: If you just, if you’re that desperate for hot flavor, just chew on one.
Colter Wilson: Yeah, totally. What kind of clients do you have here in Colorado that you sell hops to?
Andrew Voss: Uh, right now my main client is black project.
They, um, they love the funky Neo Mexicanos hops that I have, and they put them in their barrel projects. Uh, every year they come out with one that uses fresh hops. And it’s like, gosh, what’s the name of it? Oh, I’ll think of it in a second. They gave me some bottles in their tastes are sours. They’re naturally fermented on the roof of the, uh, shop there in South Broadway in Denver.
But black project has been buying all of my hops that I’ve really sold for the last few years. Fourteeners bought some in the past to do some special batches. I used to sell the wind coop and. And barrels and bottles and golden. There’s been a variety that I’ve kind of come and go. The breweries start up, they’re very passionate for local ingredients, but as they get to the, the economies of scale and the, the fact that there are beers popular and they got make so much more in pellets are easier.
And, and having a consistent supply, it’s more difficult for someone like me who’s on two acres and now I’ve only got like half an acre, a quarter, an acre, and hops, uh, had been downsizing a little bit. It’s hard for a, a big run brewery to use somebody like me. So they will get the Western slope and they’ll get a high volume of hops that are consistent.
They can use maybe an, uh, a beer you see on the shelf more often.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. W when you, I remember we were having a conversation and you were telling me that you had some coffee houses buy and hops for me. What was kind of use case there?
Andrew Voss: Yeah. Um, you know, I tried, I didn’t get to it. Uh. Red silo here. They do teas and they, they wanted to, uh, get some Hopson.
I just never followed up with them. Part of the problem is having three jobs is, uh, I don’t always follow up with people that show interest in the hops to sell. And then, uh, what was it? Corvis I was gonna sell to them, uh, back in the day, but I had a hop, uh, had a hailstorm that, that blew me out of that year and I had nothing, and it was 2014, maybe something like that.
And then they got another supplier in there. They’re out. But. Yeah. Coffee shops can use them, uh, with their tea or their coffee. Cold brew
Colter Wilson: stuff. Yeah. Anybody who’s not from Colorado, uh, hail is a big deal here. Yeah. It is the one thing that if there’s something in Colorado is going to destroy your garden or whatever crops you have going on, it’s hail.
Andrew Voss: Yeah. And it’s hit or miss. I’ve been lucky less than them. Knock on wood, I’ve been lucky not to get hailed out, but I’ve gotten hailed out three times. And I’ve always said the next time it happens, I’m done growing hops cause it’s so depressing. The Western slope of Colorado, they don’t have the Hale. Uh, and that’s, and they’re better out there for orchards and, and, uh, hops, uh, for lot of them.
But I mean, I put up with it. You can’t really put screens over there 20 foot tall. You break your neck trying to put like a, a vineyard would have hail guards over the top of it, but you just take your lumps here. Exactly.
Colter Wilson: And uh, what, what, what kind of, uh, you said you’re scaling back a bit. What are you going to grow in stead?
Andrew Voss: Um, I finally put some more, uh, Apple trees in and, uh, for cider, mostly at a dozen of those. I’ve got lots of hops. Uh, still 250 plants, 150 foot long rows, 20 foot tall rosary, about 12 feet apart. So I’ve still got a lot. I’ve got holler, tall shin Oak. Neo Mexican-ness on the variety of that is Neo one. It’s kind of a lemon drop.
And then I’ve got a, so I said, holler tall, and I’ve got mystery X, which is an Amarillo type cascade type. Don’t know what it is, but it’s neither one of those that came as a, as a rogue rhizome in a batch of a batch of bad rhizomes I got many years ago and I, I, when it started growing, I realized how unique it was.
I set it aside and I’ve cloned it to about 150 plants now. It’s a really good aroma hop, uh, about seven, eight, a beta and eight, five to nine alpha, but a real nice nose to it, a little tropical. And, uh, I put it with my shin as a, as a bittering and it, but that on top anyways. What was the question?
Colter Wilson: You know, you’re talking
Andrew Voss: about my mystery X offs.
Um, well, what am I, what am I growing on the property? Okay. Um, I’ve got a big vegetable gardens cause that, I mean, that was always been a passion. Uh, grew up in a, in a vegetable garden. Um, I’ve got a, a hydroponic aquaponic system now called farm pod, www.farm and a pod. These guys created a shipping container with a greenhouse on top fish in the bottom using the fish waste as nutrients for the vertical towers that grow vegetables in the greenhouse on top.
And I got the. The, um, the original model that they built in Santa Fe, it had been sitting at Santa Fe community college and, uh, I, I’d met the guys when I went down to st Croix in the Virgin islands where I used to live. They went down there to manufacture them because their shipping containers, Oh, you need to be as near a shipping container port.
And they said, well, I could live in Houston or the Virgin islands, or Miami or LA or the Virgin islands. So they’re down there. Brazil is where they, they wanted to get their, uh, original one out of. Santa Fe community college. You hold it up last September. So I’ll be, I got perch in the tanks now. Just got them a few days ago and I’m sprouting the, um, the, uh, vegetable leafy greens in basil and stuff like that to put into the greenhouse up top.
So I’ll have that very soon. I’ve got about 30 chickens too. Wow. That’s
Colter Wilson: a quite the project on top of
Andrew Voss: all your jobs. And with with the stay at home orders, a lot of people I’ve, I’m kind of in a fishbowl. I probably got a dozen houses that back up to me. And, uh, I’m their entertainment a lot of the time.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. And I’ve actually been to your farm and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of cool cause, uh, and for those that don’t know, we’re here in Arvada, Colorado. We’re 15 minutes from downtown Denver. We’re very, very close to a, a very. Bustling metropolitan area and, uh, you’re, you’re like little farm is, like you said, it’s like total suburbia and then back in a little alley, down a dirt road.
Is farms just kind of in the middle of the city? Uh, kind of a unique place, but a kind of an amazing, cool little farm. Right?
Andrew Voss: It’s hard to find. I mean, I knew what I was looking for. I grew up in the sticks. I know. I didn’t want to live in the sticks. I mean, so no. No offense to Lyman, but that’s not where I want to live.
I’d rather be near, near in the city, uh, but I look for agricultural property. It’s ag zoned. It’s got its own well water. It was formerly a larger farm that they sold off and they develop the houses, build the houses around the farm, but it’s ag zoning. It’s a pocket of Jefferson County surrounded by the city of Arvada that is kind of standalone.
Yeah,
Colter Wilson: it’s pretty, it’s pretty cool. And then, uh, I guess the last question I have are, you know, what kind of brewing projects you have going on? You said you do a lot of barrel projects. I know you and Ryan, who’s been on the stand for do a lot of barrels together. So what
Andrew Voss: kinds of things? Ryan’s good. He has all the passion.
He shows up and he sees, uh, that I’ve got an excellent place to put the barrel into my, my catacombs in the crawl space and the space, and usually the time to also brew. So we, he and I approved. Four or five barrel projects, strong Ailes in rum barrels and Belgian quad, she may blue clones and in rum barrels and Baltic porters and rye wine and rye bourbon barrels.
Um, I like having those on hand. Those are like, you know, an investment in my future though, 10% ABVs um, I bottle those, but I’m like drinking pale ales, uh, IPS ESPs and English ESB that I’ve Americanized with the American hops. It has a more flowery nose. That’s, that’s usually my summer drink.
Colter Wilson: That’s awesome.
Uh, one last question, just to go back to hops a bit is, you know, we, we talked about your first year . What would you expect from your second year of hops?
Andrew Voss: Second year of hops? Um, that’s a good question. Thank you. Uh, first year you may want to plant this little bitty rhizome. You may want to implant it two feet away from the other one.
Don’t plant them five feet apart from another hop. Or feet minimum. If you’ve got to make, you know, five fit into the space instead of four but a, your hot plants, when you plant them four to five feet apart, first year, they’re going to seem real scrawny. You might, you might get some cones. I’ve had Chinooks give me cones as big as my thumb the first year cause they, they get up there and they, and they, they want to do all that.
The second year, that hot plant is going to be three to four times as wide. It could have. Four foot lateral arms on each side of it that, that, that go out and then they drooped down. It’s going to be a really bigger than your, you can put your arms around this hot plant the second and third year, if it’s got the right sun, the right water, and the right nutrients.
It will be a real horse. The second year in the first year, it’s, it’s like a Billy goat.
Colter Wilson: Okay. And what kind of. Like, for example, year one, you said you’re lucky if you get some cones, right? So maybe if you’re going to get a few ounces a hops, right, what would you expect per plant on a year to, let’s say your other, the right growing conditions?
Andrew Voss: Yep. You’re two and I’ve really gotten kind of a full hot plant worth of Hopkins on year two, year three. It, you know, no later than that you’ll get the maximum a pound dried, uh, four or five pounds wet. A fresh hops you’ll get from a big producer, like Chinook. Chinook gives me four to some of them, six pounds of fresh hops off of one big monster plant, a holler town or Willamette.
It’s going to be a lot less. You’re going to get maybe a half a pound of dried and a couple of pounds of fresh if you do it right. Nugget, very dense cone, you’re going to get Chinook level, you know, a pound dried off each plant. So it’s kind of. It depends on the variety. Chanel grows very well out here.
The Neo Mexicanos does well. You don’t have to water them a lot. In fact, they may not like, as much as I’m wondering. I’m sorry, I got to watch it this year. A nugget does well, a lot of people have success with cascade. It was just so common. I got rid of it. Um, my holler tall, middle, middle fruit, middle fro.
How do you say that? Anyway? Uh, that variety. It’s such a proper will behave top. I love it. I got it from, uh, Gordon. Who was in our brew club. Uh, he had one that he’d had for years and years and I cleaned it up for him. I’ve got a bunch of rhizomes, uh, five years ago, and it’s, it’s a real favorite of mine now.
It just, it just is well behaved plant. It grows, it doesn’t go crazy on the rhizomes making me trim it so much and when it climbs a claim straight and true.
Colter Wilson: That’s awesome. let’s talk about maybe. Areas of the United States and, and kind of, if you were, you know, like for example, let’s say I’m on the East coast, what kind of hops grow well there versus the middle of the country versus the West coast?
Andrew Voss: Yeah. Now you’re going to get me, well, out of my, I’m the, I’m the. I’m the Pope of Northwest Arvada hops, but I’m by no means an expert for national ops. I’m in the East of New York state and Michigan and Wisconsin. They’ve really got a big hop growing revolution going with them. Uh, in fact, New York state, they require a lot of the breweries to buy local ingredients first or certain percentage, uh, in the East.
You know, they probably grow all the same kinds. They just have different issues. In the East, it’s, it’s higher humidity rates. You can get powdery mildew. Uh, reticulum will, I think is something there’s, there’s quite a few of these moist, humid air conditions that you can get in the East that you’re not going to run into very often in Colorado.
In fact, once your hop plants grow up, you strip off all the lower leaves and branches off that hot plant so that the air can rotate and breeze through the bottom, as well as around through the top. You want air to pass through your Hopyard, filling away excess moisture as it. transfer rates. There’s my biology word for the day.
As a, the plant pulls the moisture and the nutrients of it has to get rid of the water. It goes out in the leaves and uh, or rain or Mister or anything like that that might collect. It’s a place where fungus can grow and you don’t want that on a hot plan. So in those other areas of the East and Midwest, they have to worry about that.
Most of the hops are grown in Idaho, Washington state, the dry side, Oregon, the dry side, because of the similar conditions, what we have in Colorado. Yeah,
Colter Wilson: like a Idaho. I know. I grew up in Utah was this next state up, and it was a huge hop growing area. And when people think Oregon and Washington, they always think, you know, Pacific Northwest and green forest.
Right. And you go to the East side of those States and they’re pretty arid.
Andrew Voss: Oh yeah. The rain shadow. That’s kind of what we have here in Colorado.
Colter Wilson: Exactly. Yeah. It’s a giant rain shadow. The whole state, except for the mountains.
Andrew Voss: Yeah. So the hops, I mean, they grow all kinds of hops. I have, you know, every hop you can imagine, I’d love to get my hands in some New Zealand hops to grow, but they don’t want to seem to part with those rhizomes yet.
Um, I would say, you know, find some other local that’s growing it. Um, if you’re, if you’re in those locations, go with the tried and true, uh, you know, Chinooks cascades. A lot of the, the big producers don’t get too specialized at the start. Uh, if you find the wild hop, sure. Grow it. Um, you know, it was fun to, uh, to sample those hops that you might collect someplace else.
You don’t know what the alpha acids are, how much bitterness it’s going to give you, what it’s going to turn out like. But it’s fun to practice with that. And there’s nothing really full disclosure. I’ve never brewed beer with any person’s hops except my own, uh, which is weird, but I’ve had a lot of different writers, like I kept a few centennials, which I don’t like to grow cause they don’t like to produce.
For me, I like to sprawl. I kept some more laminates. I kept, you know, I’ve got these little one or two plants. So when I brew, I’ve got a selection. Um, it’s really fun to be putting in your beer, the main, you know, outside of malt, but you know, the main flavor component, uh, and know that you grew that in your backyard or, or down the road.
Yeah.
Colter Wilson: That’s kind of the, I think when you talk to a home brewer. It’s kind of that next step, right, is like, Hey, I’ve, I’ve got everything going. I might as well grow some hops in the backyard. And, and you know, specifically when we talk about a lot of the IPAs out there, the hot bill can get pretty high when you’re talking about one ounce, buying them a few ounces at a time.
Yeah.
Andrew Voss: You can get a pound by pound is split with your friends,
Colter Wilson: which is what I do. But yeah, but the idea is that, uh, if you’re not buying pounds of hops, let’s say you don’t have the air, the room to store them, uh, you know, a great project would be to grow hops in your home. It’s, it’s, it is
Andrew Voss: very easy. Yeah.
And if you don’t want to mess with worrying about drying them, just have a good, fresh off, wet hot recipe. And, uh, have a brew day the same, you know, you pick them in the morning and in your broom in the mid day and that night you’re drinking. You know, something else you bruised IX before. Um, it is, it is a great hobby.
It’s like a, I actually tried growing malt, the guys at the Cody brothers at Colorado malting in Alamosa, they sent some red, I forget what it is, red, a red barley, red Scarlet barley, I think is what it was. And they sent it up with a guy that works at DALSA. Lally. I’ve worked with them before, up in central city.
If you’ve never been to that tiny, awesome little brewery in central city, go up and do that. And also Lally, uh, they brought me some malt seed, so I, I grew the barley. And it was beautiful and I harvested it. And then when it came to threshing it and the daunting task of trying to germinate and, and malted and Rose as like gave up that it’s the chickens, I just couldn’t do it.
Colter Wilson: It’s a lot of
Andrew Voss: work. If you want to do your own malt. Oh, jobs. Hops are much more simple.
Colter Wilson: Yeah. We did a show on DIY malting and I was blown away at how many steps are in it and it’s actually way, it’s more involved in brewing beer itself on a level that you can. Yeah. But the idea is that people that are really into it are into that whole experience.
And most of them already grow their own hops too. So, uh, it’s kind of the, the way it is.
Andrew Voss: And what’s cool is there’s a lot of craft malters in the state now in Colorado, and maybe there isn’t in whoever’s listening to this around the country, but, uh, seek them out. They need your support just like a hop road as, and that’s my blatant plug.
When you go to a brewery, ask. The S the the beer tender, you know, what do you guys brew that has local ingredients, whether it’s malt or hops? I mean, I’m personally asking about the hops, but just ask them, because if you don’t ask, they may not think that you would like to try that and they won’t spend the extra money or take the extra time to make a small seasonal with it, with local
Colter Wilson: Yeah, and I, I’ve actually tried some of the local malt that is made here and it’s delicious. I, yeah, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a good time to try a beer as an experiment and see, Hey, is this very different than the large molesters that you get? And it is. It’s got a, it’s got a different character. It’s, it’s, it’s a fun project to do.
And if you’re a homebrewer, go ask your Homebrew shop, Hey, do you have any local mall? And chances
Andrew Voss: are they do. And local hops. I mean, I, I mean, I’ve tried selling my hops through quirky and, and, uh, um, the, what’s the place downtown, uh, Cobra. Yep. And, uh, so quirky and Tom’s, Tom’s per shop. They’ve got someone, but people just go in, they, they have a recipe and they go straight for that.
So it’s, it’s difficult to sell my hops, even though I put them in like two ounce bags that already had like a mesh bag in it and sealed. It’s not something I S you know, I mean for me it’s when I grew in my selling to the breweries, cause they’ll use it in a seasonal or a special, yeah. Like Nighthawk brewing in Broomfield, Colorado.
They’re not around anymore. But the sales, the brewer there, uh, for quite a few years bought fresh hops. And we go there and we have pick days with all their customers that come and pick the hops, throw them in the cattle. He’d brew the beer and the sales guy that went out around and sold to the on premise.
He said that’s the first thing he he’d run out of. It was all the fresh up cause people wanted to pull that tap handle first because it was local and limited time
Colter Wilson: and a fresh hop. Yours is like no other beer out there. It just tastes amazing.
Andrew Voss: It’s unique. It’s soup. And so, I mean there are, there are ways that if anybody out there is thinking, which there’s probably thousands still want to open a brewery.
Just try to keep that in mind. You don’t have to do your whole whole line of beers with it. I know that’d be very hard to manage that supply line. But. Just have a lot of local stuff and especially the fresh shops. Yeah, exactly.
Colter Wilson: Well, Andrew, I’d like to thank you for coming on the show. I had a great conversation and I, I learned a ton that I didn’t know about growing hops, and I’ve even grown hops a couple of times, so I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
Andrew Voss: Yeah. And once his social distancing is over, then maybe we’ll see you at the next beer club meeting.
Colter Wilson: I want to thank Andrew for taking the time to be on this week’s show. It’s a great conversation to do a deep dive in growing your own hops and a really great side hobby as part of the homebrewing hobby in general. If you look in the show notes on your favorite podcast player, you’re going to see a link to the Voss farms Facebook page.
Click on it, check it out. It’s a pretty cool experience to see all the pictures of what Andrew’s doing over there. Well, that’s it for this week. And we’ll see you next week on homebrewing DIY .
