Hop Picking in Higashiomi, Shiga.

On 7/16, our brew team went to Shiga to visit Flora Fermentation to pick some hops for an upcoming beer. Flora’s co-founder and brewer, Kai, is a former KBC brew team member, and when we collaborated with them ahead of our 10 year anniversary, they were keen to show us and have us try the hops they are now growing out by their brewery.

While Japan isn’t known for being one of the bigger commercial hop growing regions, Hops do grow natively. The challenge is that hops are very much an agricultural product and are only as good as the care put into growing them, and they take on character from the terroir they are grown in. This gives hops growers a great challenge when it comes to selecting the right piece of land, and picking what varieties of hops to grow based on the conditions of their region.Typically, when these hops are ready for harvest they are pulled down from the bine, processed with giant specialized pieces of equipment, allowed to dry, and then processed into pellets for long term storage. Also, it is during this harvest season that brewers get a rare treat, and we get to use fresh hops in our beer. Without drying and processing, the hops begin to oxidise very quickly, and then become unusable due to an unpleasant “cheesy” character. This means that a “fresh hop” beer is only possible during harvest season, and you really need to pick and then brew with the fresh hops almost immediately.

Flora’s hop farm in Shiga is much too small for all the large processing equipment, which makes it quite labor intensive, as everything is done by hand. With the gracious invitation to use some of their fresh hops, we jumped in our van and the KBC brew team pitched in to help! We picked each hop cone off the bine by hand, sorting through all the bines and leaves trying to find all the hops hidden away, while avoiding the ones that were underdeveloped or have gone past their prime in a long, labour-intensive, but very rewarding process.

This time around, we were harvesting Chinook and, to our surprise, for such a young hop farm, the quality of the chinook was quite impressive. Hop Rhizomes take a few years to reach full maturity, and this is just the second year they have grown hops. Sun damage, wind damage, mildew, and insects, are all things that can very easily render a hop crop unusable by brewers, and this is before you even start to evaluate flavour quality and oil content. These chinook hops we were picking had many of the familiar aromas of American grown chinook, with a bit of piney, citrus character, with some flowery and grassy undertones. Once picked these hops need to be used or dried within 48 hours due to their high-water content. It is not often brewers get this opportunity to brew with fresh hops (yet alone help pick these hops by hand as well!) and so we made sure that they were being used in the brew the following morning. This is an exciting beer to make for a number of reasons, and we look forward to discovering how the terroir of Shiga comes through in it.We’ll share more information on the beer in due course, but this will represent the first of 3 beers made with other breweries focused on introducing and showcasing some unique or special ingredients that are less available or common here in Japan. Keep your eyes peeled for the next one!