First day…
Awesome. Enjoy !
Nice…do you get to take some hops home?
We’ll see! I saw literally tons of Simcoe this AM and considered trying to stuff my bag with them! The photo os one of four selection rooms here where the brewers can evaluate hops before they order. The blue background is traditional for assessing hop color.
I know why my cones are not being analyzed! ;D
I’d love to just float one of those bricks in a 5-gallon bucket of IPA. It must smell AWESOME over there.
Denny- How did you do at matching up the aromas? I didn’t do very well last year…
Bruce
- 10
I think Rodney K is there, say hi for me.
OK, but not great. We just did it. I got anout 50% of the ones I could actually smell. It’s amazing how your sense of smell diminishes as you get older.
He gets in later today for the homebrewer session. I’m at the commercial session, but there’s a party tonight for all of us.
This is the experimental hop plot at Perrault Farms outside Yakima. Home of the original Simcoe! 50K varieties, one hill of each. About 10% will go on to testing with 7 hills each, and about 1% of those will make it to market. Average cost of bringing a new variety to market is 5 million.
Living the dream Denny! 8)
Have fun!
I am indeed, Ron! Gary Glass and John Palmer came in this evening to speak at the homebrewers sessions the next couple days…
Geez, half of the home brewing rock stars are within an hour of my house and I’m not there. Life is just not fair
Yeah, and I’m planning on driving right by there next week. Timing is everything.
I went to it last year and it was absolutely worth it!
As Denny and others said, the hop aroma recognition thing is quite hard as your senses get overwhelmed and you are under time pressure. I was in the last group to do it and many of the vials were empty by then.
The other thing that was a wake up call was seeing and smelling all the candidate plants. They were all genetically distinct yet there were fields of them. I don’t remember the numbers but it was along the lines of for every 1 varietal that makes it into production there are a thousand or two that never do.
If you ever get a chance, just go. You’ll be really glad you did.
Dying to, man. Had to be a great experience !