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Farmers Pick Up The Pace On Local Hops Production

While you may not think you can grow your own beer, Nashville resident Mike Brooks is doing just that. He lives on a farm just south of State Road 46, where he developed two sizable patches of Hops over the course of three years.

"With the explosion of craft beer, we thought that hops might be a good crop that would be a nice fit for our place here," Brooks says.

Indiana is home to an impressive market for beer lovers across the state. Some breweries are even selling on a national scale.

They use massive amounts of hops in their brewing process – but how much of that comes from Indiana soil? Some of Indiana's top brewers say it's not much – and it's for a good reason.

"We have a lot of people who contact us yearly, ‘Hey, we've got some extra acreage, we wanna grow some hops.'" says Dave Colt, Co-founder of Sun King Brewing. "That's fantastic, but we need to make sure that we know some basic information, alpha acids, all those kinds of things that we get from our national providers, so that we can accurately and intelligently make beer and know what it's gonna be like towards the finished product."

Sun King Brewing in Indianapolis gets most of its hops from the pacific northwest, an area that flourishes with hops harvesting on an industrial level.

"While we have the ability to grow hops, the infrastructure isn't here to actually package and process hops so that they have storage, shelf life, and stability," says Clay Robinson, who founded Sun King Brewing with Colt.

Most hops farms in Indiana, like Brooks' farm in Nashville, harvest their hops whole-coned; that means they can only use it during the short window when the season is in.

The missing link in producing hops on a larger, long-term scale is a process called pelletizing. It turns the whole-bloom plant into tiny pellets, perfect for packaging and a sustainable shelf life.

But Sen. Jon Ford, R-Terre Haute, is trying to make it more enticing for Indiana breweries to use Hoosier hops. He's proposed a bill that would provide tax incentives for breweries that use over 20 percent of their resources from a local source.

"We're trying to help breweries stay local, to help them innovate, and there is this little subculture of people out there that are growing hops, growing specialty barleys, to help the brewers out," Ford says.

The tax incentive promotes collaborations with both brewers and farmers, who support the legislation.

"I think it's always a good idea to incentivize using local whenever possible, so we would take advantage of it," Colt says.

still9Since hops farming is in its infancy stages in Indiana, Colt says it will take collaboration for it to become as popular as the beer it helps produce.

But for now, Brooks and his farm find value in the smaller, overnight batches. He says he made the conscious decision to sell whole-cone hops to give local breweries the opportunities to make fresh-hopped harvest ales, which wouldn't otherwise be possible.

"The logistics of overnighting fresh hops from the pacific-northwest to Indiana to get them in the beer is very difficult," Brooks says.

Brooks will host a big harvesting event later this month, where community members will pick hops and send them to Brown County's Quaff On! Brewing to brew overnight.

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