Wet Hop WHARRGARBL at Bare Bones

Monday night a new beer went on tap at Bare Bones Brewery. The name of the beer wasn’t yet final. It didn’t matter. Nobody was there to order it. The Tap Room was closed. The Tap Room is always closed Monday. Still, the new beer was flowing.

Bare Bones owner, Dan Dringoli, and brewmaster, RJ Nordlund, were behind the bar. They poured a couple pints of the new beer. It’s part of the job. “Dan and I had to do a few quality control pints,” Nordlund says with a grin.

Those pints were the first wet-hop beers served in Oshkosh that were produced by an Oshkosh brewery. For a city with such a long brewing history, milestones like this one don’t happen often. This was something to celebrate.

Tuesday, the beer got its name: WHARRGARBL.

WHARRGARBL was brewed Monday, August 29, 2016. It wasn’t the first wet-hop beer produced by an Oshkosh brewery. The first had been brewed five days earlier on August 24 when Fox River Brewing made a wet hop beer at its Oshkosh brewery. That beer will see release within days.

For lovers of hop-forward beers these are welcome events. Wet-hop beers are typically aimed at aficionados; drinkers seeking beers with pronounced hop flavor. The people drawn to that flavor put a premium on freshness because hop flavor and aroma tend to be a beer’s least durable properties. That ephemeral character is what makes wet-hop beers alluring. This is beer at its freshest.

Wet hop beers are composed like other beers with one major deviation: the hops – instead of being dried and packaged – go directly from the bine to the brew kettle. The lack of processing preserves aromatics that would otherwise be lost to heat during drying. It all goes into the beer.

The difficult part is that wet hops are unstable. They quickly decompose.The freshly picked cones need to enter the brew kettle within a matter of hours. Most brewers consider 48 hours as the absolute limit of viability. For WHARRGARBL that meant a nearly 800 mile drive to Michigan and back.

The 15 barrel batch of beer was brewed with 60 pounds of Chinook hops grown at West Michigan Hopyards, a farm about 20 miles east of Grand Rapids. For Nordlund, a native Michigander, that’s familiar territory. The connection runs deep. Nordlund is a long-time friend of one of the growers there. “Yeah, actually I took his sister to prom,” he says.

The trip to Michigan began early on Saturday morning, August 27. By 7 a.m., Nordlund and Bare Bones assistant brewer, Jody Cleveland, were on the road. Along the way they stopped at two breweries – Founders Brewing and Harmony Brewing – where Nordlund had previously been a brewer. About 4:30 p.m. they reached the farm. Here are a couple of photos Cleveland took upon their arrival.

Harvested plants were being run through a mechanical hop picker when they arrrived.

Nordlund and Cleveland loaded up the car and began the drive home. “The smell in the car was incredible,” Cleveland says. “Tiny car, 4 tubs of fresh hops totalling 60 pounds. We really noticed it after getting out for pit stops and then getting back in. As much as I loved the smell, I was getting a headache by the time we got home.”

By the wee hours of Sunday morning the hops had been unloaded at Bare Bones. But it was too late to start the brew. The hops went into the beer cooler.

Monday morning Nordlund and Cleveland began to make the beer. The hops were divided into a chain of mesh bags called a hop spider. The spider would make it easier to separate the spent hops from the wort at the completion of the boil. Nordlund had brewed these beers before.

“I’ve done wet hop beers at Fetch Brewery and I helped brew at Founders for their Harvest Ale,” he says. “I got a lot more hops this time. I just sack ‘em all up and throw ‘em in the boil. We had some that wouldn’t fit in the bags. What we had left we put into the mash.”

Nordlund with his spider.

Nordlund wanted a simple base for WHARRGARBL.  “As far as the grain bill goes, it’s pretty much just a pale ale,” he says. “We’re trying to let the hops shine.”

All of the hops added to the brew were wet hops. “And it’s all just boil hops,” Nordlund says. “I couldn’t have done any dry hopping with these. The hops wouldn’t have been fresh enough by then.” The boil ended. The wort was cooled and given to the yeast.

Dringoli and Nordlund were in the near-empty Tap Room at Bare Bones 14 days later drinking the beer made with the fresh, Michigan hops. Nordlund was pleased. “I’m happy with it,” he says. “It’s really easy to drink.”

WHARRGARBL is a 5.4% ABV, wet hop pale and it’s pouring now at the Tap Room at Bare Bones Brewery. “Hopefully it won’t be on too long,” Nordlund says. “Hopefully everybody drinks it on up.”

Oshkosh Beer Show 59: ​The Beer Predominant

This week Adam and I drink Idiot Farm Imperial IPA from Karben4 Brewing as we discuss the good, bad and fugly aspects of the fact IPA has come to dominate the craft-beer scene...

Coming Right Up...

A few ways to have fun with your mouth this week in the Oshkosh area...

A Taste of Things to Come from Rushford Meadery and Winery
Did you know a meadery/winery/cidery recently opened in Winnebago County? Now you do. Rushford Meadery and Winery is up and running in the the Town of Rushford just outside of Omro.

Owners Shane and Laurel Coombs have been keeping a somewhat low profile pending the opening of their tasting room, which ought to have its doors open before too much longer. Until then, here’s a chance to get a glance and a taste of what they’re up to.

Tomorrow evening, as in Wednesday, September 14, the Coombs will present five of their new meads at Bare Bones Brewery Taproom. The event runs from 5:30-7:30 pm. If mead is your thing, you really should check this one out. They’re making some great stuff in Rushford. For more info, go here.

Beer Flight School O’Marro’s Public House
At O’Marro’s they’ve launched a Thursday Night Beer Flight program that’ll serve as a weekly, guided tasting through the word of beer. It kicks off this Thursday, September 15 and runs through the evening, no sign up or advance tickets needed.

They’ll have $5 rotating beer flights, $5 Pizza and free pool. Lance Lehman, a beer industry insider who really knows his stuff, will be on hand to guide your flight. Or, if you’d rather, you can fly solo. More info here.

Wet Hops
Over the next few days, we’ll see the first wet hop beers produced commercially in Oshkosh go on tap. Both Fox River Brewing and Bare Bones Brewery produced wet hop beers ---. Each of these beers has an interesting backstory that I’m hoping to share in the coming days. Stay tuned, more to come on this one...

Lion’s Tail Celebrates Oktoberfest 
The Oktoberfest seasons is upon us. We’ll see a number of celebrations around here, with Lion’s Tail Brewery leading things off this weekend.

On Friday September 16 from 5-11 p.m. and Saturday September 17 from 1-11 p.m., Lion’s Tail will host its first Oktoberfest on the brewery grounds at 116 S. Commercial St. in Neenah. They’ll have live music, food trucks, contests and plenty of beer, including the brewery’s first Oktoberfest-style lager. For more info check out the Facebook event page.

We’re going to have a busy fall full of beer around here. This is just the beginning. Prost!

Hinman’s Hop House

A couple weeks ago I blogged about a 19th century hop farm owned by Lorenzo Hinman in the Town of Clayton. After the post went up, Oshkosh historian Dan Radig pointed me towards an illustration of the Hinman farm that appeared in a book published in 1880 named History of Winnebago County, Wisconsin, and early history of the Northwest. The Hinman farm drawing it contains is fantastic. Here it is. As always, click the image to enlarge it...

It would have been nice to see some hops growing there. It’s not surprising we don’t. Like most farmers in our area, Hinman had abandoned hop cultivation by the time this illustration appeared. But tucked in the midst of the image is an exceptionally rare glimpse into the Winnebago County hop culture of old.

Among the buildings shown on the Hinman farm is an oast house: a special type of barn designed for the drying and baling of hops. Here’s a detail of the image showing Hinman’s oast house.

During the 1860s and 1870s, such barns were found throughout much of Wisconsin. Winnebago County certainly had to have had her share of them. Yet the illustration of the Hinman farm contains the only representation of a Winnebago County oast house I’ve come across.

For added perspective, here are a couple of oast houses similar to Hinman’s. These were on hop farms in Washington State.

These buildings were designed to be simple and effective. The taller portion of the oast house with its steeply pitched roof was above a slatted floor where freshly picked hops were laid out. Below them was a heat source, either a coal or wood fire.

The cone-like roof helped draw the warm air through the hops, drying them in the process (and perhaps adding a smoky character to the finished product?). The black pipe that appears at the front of the Hinman oast house acted as a secondary vent to help control the heat generated within.

When the hops were sufficiently dry, they were raked into the adjoining portion of the barn. There they cooled before being dropped through a hole in the floor and compressed into burlap sacks known as pockets.

Here’s a diagram of an oast house very much like Hinman’s that illustrates the process.

And here are three pockets of finished product outside of an English oast house.

By the 1900s, this handcraft method of processing hops once used at the Hinman farm had given way to a more mechanical approach. And by that time, hop cultivation in Winnebago County had been over and done with for decades. Barely a trace of that culture survived the ensuing years. The drawing of the Hinman farm is a faint echo from that past.

Oshkosh Beer Versus Drugs

I’ll be tied up this week with a couple thing that are going to take me away from the blog. Life happens. I’ll be back on track next week. Until then, I’ll leave you to ponder this gem from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern of May 18, 1914...

Oshkosh Beer Show #58 – ​Seasonal Creep

This week, Adam and are talking fall seasonal beers and how they've become untethered from the season. While we yap, we slug down Oktillion, the new Oktoberfest-style beer from Ale Asylum of Madison, Wis.

Beer Production in Oshkosh – The First Half of 2016

Kevin Bowen, Brewmaster at Fox River Brewing Co., in the Oshkosh Brewery

The Wisconsin Department of Revenue reports on beer production in Wisconsin are now complete for the first six months of 2016. Hiding in the stream of numbers is an interesting story developing in Oshkosh. I’ll get to that, but first let’s get to the raw data.

This is the amount of beer produced in Oshkosh through June of this year. The figures are reported in barrels (a barrel of beer is 31 U.S. Gallons, or about 13.75  cases).

Bare Bones Brewery: 157.75 Barrels
Fox River Brewing Company – Oshkosh Brewery: 502.03 Barrels
Total amount of beer produced in Oshkosh: 659.78 Barrels

Let’s get behind those numbers. We'll start with Fox River Brewing.

The production records that were set last year at Fox River are in the process of being obliterated this year. Production at the Oshkosh brewery is up just over 26% in comparison to the same period last year. That’s just part of the Fox River story. At Fox River’s Appleton facility, where the brewery operates a bottling line, production has increased over 50% when compared to the first six months of 2015.

Fox River Brewing Company – Appleton Brewery: 687.78 Barrels

The trend appears even more extreme when you look at Fox River’s growth over the past four years. Production this year is up 133% in comparison to the first six month of 2013. At this point Fox River Brewing has to be among the fastest growing breweries in the state. That could become a problem.

At the end of last year, Fox River was nearing capacity at its two facilities. It’s difficult to see how they’ll be able to sustain this level of growth without expanding their production capabilities in some substantial way. It’s going to be an interesting second half of the year.

Now over to Bare Bones: The brewery didn’t begin producing beer until July 2016. That leaves us without a month-to-month comparison for the first half of the year. So, we’re left looking at average monthly output. And in this case that’s not a good comparison point. Most breweries, tend to produce less beer during the first half of the year than they do in the second half.

With that in mind, there’s good news coming out of Bare Bones. Average monthly production last year was just under 22 bbls. Through the first six months of this year it’s just over 26 bbls. That’s a trend that bodes well for the brewery.

OK, I like numbers, so let’s take a look at a few nearby breweries and see how they’re faring

Lion’s Tail Brewing, Neenah: 103.57 bbls.
Lion’s tail didn’t begin showing up in the state reports until this past April. Its first beers were produced at the Appleton Beer Factory. Now that production has been brought in-house, the second half of the year will tell us much more. From what I’ve seen, it looks as though things are going quite well there.

Knuth Brewing, Ripon: 40 bbls.
Knuth began reporting production in January 2016. The brewery just installed a new, larger brew system, so we’re bound to see increased production coming out of Ripon.

Appleton Beer Factory: 146.25 bbls.
That’s down about 10% over the same period last year.

Stone Arch/Stone Cellar, Appleton: 1379.57 bbls.
That up almost 9% over the first six months of last year.

Rowland’s Calumet Brewing, Chilton: 110 bbls.
An increase of 13% over last year’s first six months.

Overall, we’re seeing encouraging signs for brewing in this part of the state. Good news for all of us who like to drink locally made beer.

The Hinman Hop Yard in the Town of Clayton

Winnebago County once had a vibrant hop culture. Following the arrival of Yankee farmers in the late 1840s, hop farming spread across the county in the 1850s. In the 1860s, it turned into a craze. During the boom year of 1865, the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern commented, “Hereafter (hops) will constitute a very important item in the production of this county.”

It wasn’t to be. The hops market gradually collapsed in the 1870s. The county’s hop culture began winding down. By the end of the 1880s, all of it was gone.  With it went the memory of what had been so vital. Most of those who made it so were forgotten.

We have a few of their names. There was Silas Allen in Allenville. Luke LaBorde in deserted Delhi. And John Braley in Oshkosh. Another name to add to that list is Lorenzo Hinman. His hop farm in the Town of Clayton was said to be among the largest in the county.

Hinman was a Yankee, born on January 4, 1823 in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He was a direct descendent of Sgt. Edward Hinman, an English puritan who migrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1650.  For nearly 200 years, Massachusetts was where the Hinmans remained. But Lorenzo Hinman went wandering.

Hinman first went to New York. Then pulled by the lure of abundant and cheap land, he headed west. He may have been among the Hinman clan that in 1845 travelled from New York to Chicago by sailing ship then journeyed north by ox team to Wisconsin. 1846 saw Lorenzo Hinman settled in Walworth County. A couple years later, he was back on the move.

On September 1, 1848 at the federal land office in Green Bay, Hinman purchased 360 acres in Winnebago County. The deeds Hinman received were signed by the 11th President of the United States, James Polk.

The largest contiguous piece spanned the townships of Clayton and Vinland. The 320 acre parcel is bisected by the current Breezewood Lane. It’s bordered on the east by Center Road. Here’s an 1855 map of Winnebago County with the Hinman property blocked in red (click the image to enlarge it).

Hinman sold the Vinland portion to his father. He kept the SE ¼ of Section 33 in the Town of Clayton for himself. This is where he would stay. He cleared the land, built a home and established a farm. Here’s a recent satellite view of the area with Hinman’s property framed in yellow. We're looking at the northwest corner of Breezewood Lane and Center Roads .

Hinman was among the first settlers to what officially became the Town of Clayton in 1849. It’s unlikely he arrived there with thoughts of hop growing in mind. There is some indication of hop culture in the northern part of Winnebago County in the late 1840s, but it appears the plant's spread into the Town of Clayton came later.

The 1850 Wisconsin Federal Census doesn’t enumerate hop production among the township’s agricultural output. A less formal survey of agriculture in Clayton made by the Oshkosh Democrat in 1851 also makes no mention of hops. But by the mid-1850s, hops had arrived.

Perhaps inspired by the success of hop culture in bordering Vinland, Hinman and other farmers in Clayton began putting down rootstock. The 1999 book The History of the Town of Clayton suggests that hops had taken hold in the township by 1856. That date corresponds with the initial spread of hops in Winnebago County.

It’s not known when Hinman’s yard began bearing hop cones, but the crop obviously served him well. At least in the beginning. By 1860, Hinman had begun his rise. The 37-year-old listed his net worth as $4,430.00 or about $130,000.00 in today’s money. It was just the start.

An 1862 map with the Lorenzo Hinman farm framed in yellow

Hinman, like other farmers in the area, was swept upward by the momentum of rising hop prices. How much of his land he devoted to the lucrative crop is another unknown. The History of the Town of Clayton states that Hinman had in excess of 300 acres devoted to hop production. That would have been impossible.

During Hinman’s time, hops were picked by hand. It would have taken more than 2,000 people a month to harvest a crop of that size. There’s just no way. More likely, Hinman’s yard comprised 10-20 acres. Even a yard of that acreage would have required nearly 100 pickers or more for the August/September harvest.

The Roblee farm, just north of Hinman’s property provided temporary residence for at least some of the itinerant pickers who found their way to the Town of Clayton. According to Century Farms of Wisconsin, Volume 1, the Roblees built a frame house that became a dormitory for hop pickers during harvest season. “Girls and young men from nearby were hired to harvest the crop. The girls slept in the north part of the house, and the men slept in the south part.”

Meanwhile, Hinman amassed wealth. Over the course of the 1860s – boom years for hop growers – Hinman did well. He bought more land. In 1870 he posted a net worth of $21,550, or about $404,000.00 in today’s money. He was at his financial peak.

Grand Entrance to the former Hinman Farm, circa 1950

The Grand Entrance Today

But the good times were just about over. As the price of hops plummeted in the 1870s, hop farming in Winnebago County dried up. Many of those who had vested heavily in the crop lost their farms. Hinman didn’t. But he doesn't appear to have come out unscathed.

When Lorenzo Hinman died on September 16, 1896, he still had his farm. But much of his wealth had been erased. While he owned more than 320 acres of land, he had less than $700 to his name. Hinman died land rich and cash poor.

Hinman's modest headstone in Allenville Cemetery

The Hinman land in the Town of Clayton remained with the Hinman family until the end of the 1940s; a century after Lorenzo Hinman arrived here. One of the few remnants of his hop yard were the old hop poles stacked by an outbuilding near the house. Hinman had saved them. They were still there in 1933.

I’ve been out to see what used to be Hinman’s farm. I was hoping to find wild hops growing. Some feral legacy of Hinman from the land he poured his life into. A progeny of one that endured the uprooting after everything went to hell. So far, there's been none of that to be found.

There's more on the Hinman hop farm here.

Oshkosh Beer Show #57 – ​Fresh IPA!

This time Adam and I are drinking an IPA that’s 60-days old while discussing the ins and outs of fresh beer. The evolution of the American IPA has resulted in an obsession with freshness. We explore how this aspect of beer culture has developed.

Beer Stories From Oshkosh: Cordobabock

A short video with Richard Cardenas and RJ Nordlund. They talk about Cordobabock, the beer they collaborated on at Bare Bones Brewery. Cordobabock is on tap now at the Bare Bones Taproom.