The Kickstarter Hop Farm

Cascade hops at Beaver Run Brewery.

Back in March I made a small contribution to a hop farm project on Kickstarter.  Having watched Dan's hopyard come of age over the last three or four years, observed the emergence of the craft brewery trend here in Virginia, and finally planting my own rhizomes, I just wanted to be a part of something bigger.  That's when I found the Condzella project up in Long Island and decided to support it.












If you follow that link, you'll arrive at an excellent video that was produced for the project.  It highlights the farm and all the effort that goes into farming this crop, not to mention touching on the cultural history that hops are part of.  The star of the show is the new hop harvesting machine, which according to the latest project update is up and running - and doing everything it promised to do, reducing hours of picking time to mere minutes!

For my support, I will receive a little premium that includes one pound of Cascade hops produced with the new equipment.  Considering most of my brews to date have required two oz. of hops, this will be plenty to get me through the winter.

I'll make a post when I get more information about how the harvest at Condzella went, or when my premium arrives - those will probably be combined into one post.  In the meantime, here's a link to my original post on the topic:

http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-kickstarter-hop-farm-project.html