Lush-green hop vines are just beginning to crawl up the strings at Cedar Valley Hop Yards.
By late summer cones will be ripe for home brewers and brew masters across the Island.
“It’s like making a cake – it’s got to be just,” said Debbie Lamson, hop yard owner, with a chuckle, as she and her husband Kevin tried to explain just how fussy brewers are about their hops.
The couple planted their first hops five years ago. Kevin grew up on a dairy farm in Abbotsford and remembered hops farms as a kid, and with a worldwide hop shortage and a growing micro-brew industry, decided to give the crop a try.
Today, the three-hectare farm – and others springing up in Nanoose, Maple Bay and Duncan – are becoming a resource in the backyard of brewers who not only have the chance to tap into fresh ingredients, but build relationships with farmers and try new things, from all-local beer to wet hopping, where cones are put in the beer within 24 hours of vines being cut and taken to the picker. It’s all part of an eat-local movement that farmers and entrepreneurs are joining in on.
Longwood Brewery just launched Island Time, its first core-brand, 100-per cent locally-sourced lager.
“It’s pretty cool actually. Very satisfying,” said Harley Smith, brew master. “It’s never something I thought was available to us.”
Now Smith will make the effort to get local ingredients for all Longwood’s brews with access to locally grown and malted barley, and hops.
Smith, a seasoned brewer with three decades in the business, said breweries have always sourced outside – from the Prairies, Czech Republic, Australia and China. Local ingredients weren’t on his radar until a farmer walked through the brewery door with a sack of malted barley
“You only have four ingredients to make beer: barley, hops, water, yeast,” said Smith. “There’s not a lot of things you have to source, but that malted step is big and as it turned out [the farmer] was onto something.”
He describes being able to get fresh malted barley like the difference between bread just out of the toaster and toast that’s rested on the counter for a day.
It’s all toast, but the flavour profile of the fresh one is “fantastic,” said Smith, who began to slowly integrate the locally malted barley into his brew. Two and a half years ago he created a seasonal India pale ale that was 90 per cent local – now it’s been bumped up to 100 per cent.
Smith likes the relationship he can have with the farmer. He can stand in the field and discuss with a farmer the kind of barley he’d like to see grown, or ask the maltster to malt his barley a certain way. It’s all delivered batch size, and the money stays in the community, he said. It’s almost like going back to the old days in Nanaimo, Smith said, pointing out this city had breweries from the late 1800s to the turn of the century, including one beside the Millstone River where old hop vines still grow wild.
“We were able to this year, for the first year, sign on for 100 per cent of our hops from Cedar Valley,” said Smith, who said it takes about three years for a hop field to get into production. “Which kind of goes against a lot of the way beer styles are.”
For Czech-style pilsner or British ale, the ingredients are normally from the region and that’s how the flavour of that region is acquired. Hops are very much like grapes, said Smith.
“In the wine world they call it terroir and that’s how a wine from Bordeaux tastes like a wine from Bordeaux,” he said. “Our sort of ideology has morphed into, we’ve got all this available to us right in our backyard where we’d like to introduce the terroir of beer.”
Island Time is now on tap at restaurants like La Stella Trattoria, a restaurant on Wesley Street with pasta and wood-fired pizza. Owner and executive chef Ryan Zuvich, who also owns Hilltop Bistro, sourced locally for years, with ingredients now coming from places like Nanoose Edibles Farm and Early Girl Urban Farm. The whole premise for Zuvich is about good food but it’s also about supporting neighbours and making sure money earned in town is then spent in the town to build it up.
The new brew supports local, but pizza and beer are also just go together.
“It’s a no brainer for us for sure,” he said.