JACOBSTOWN — Oast House's annual harvest looks a bit like a backyard barbecue where the guests all showed up and plopped themselves down poolside, only to have a hop bine draped over their lap and be told to get to work.
It's the second-year harvest for one of only two hop farms in New Jersey — a small, upstart project looking to bring local ingredients to the Garden State's burgeoning beer industry. Hops, of course, are the bittering agent in beer, grown mostly on the West Coast for the past few decades.
Beau Byrtus and his friends are looking to change that.
Oast House was launched, like many half-cooked ideas, with a Kickstarter project. Byrtus, along with friends Marylu Hansen and Art Rhea, were homebrewers discussing a hop shortage back in 2007 when it occurred to them: Why can't we grow hops here?
The idea kicked around for a while before they took it to crowd funding website, asking for just $5,000 to cover start-up costs. The name comes from the buildings traditionally used to kiln hops. The land they already had: Hansen's family owned a dozen acres in Burlington County, a former horse farm, and they planted about 250 rhizomes there the first year.
The operation remains small but growing, with about 600 plants covering less than an acre. On harvest day, the bines are cut and collected by the three proprietors, Hansen driving a tractor, Byrtus snapping the bines hanging some 18 feet in the air, and Rhea collecting them down below.
Behind the scenes at Oast House Hop Farm, a small upstart farm growing hops in Wrightstown, New Jersey. | Photos by S.P. Sullivan/NJ.com
It's a family event, and the kids, running around on the periphery of the action, snap pictures. One of them yells out, "Do the Hop Monster!" As the bines start piling up on Rhea's shoulders, the request becomes clearer: He looks a little bit like Swamp Thing, and dutifully poses for a photo.
After they're cut, the hop bines are carted back up to the house, where an assembly line of friends and family perched on patio furniture set to work plucking off the cones.
"We really just try to bribe people with food and beer to sit there and pick our hops for us," Hansen said. "It is a true family process."
The cones are then weighed and sorted into mesh bags for distribution.
But in a state whose wine industry spurns the name "New Jersey" for "Outer Coastal Plane" in an effort to shed the negative associations outsiders have with the place, who would want New Jersey hops?
New Jersey brewers, for starters.
A big chunk of Oast House's hop yield goes to the Kane Brewing Company in Ocean Township, where Michael C. Kane and his team add them to their popular India pale ale for fresh take on the hop-heavy beer.
"We've been in contact with the guys over there all season to see how things were going and how the yield's going to be," Kane told NJ.com this week. The brewery got a batch of Cascade and Nugget hops on the day of the harvest, adding them to the beer just two days later.
Oast House's yield is still too small to fully hop a beer, so Kane offers a beer "wet-hopped" with Oast House hops, meaning they're thrown in fresh at the very end of the fermentation process, to add flavor and aroma.
It's called Oast House Head High, and it'll be sent out to craft beer bars around the state in the coming days (Kane says to stay tuned to their Facebook page for locations).
This is the second year the brewery, founded in 2011, has collaborated with the hop farm.
"Part of our philosophy is we incorporate as much local ingredients into our beers as possible," Kane said. "We do a beer with locally-pressed cider. We just got a bunch of New Jersey peaches that were added to a barrel. We do a coffee beer with a local roastery here that's down the road from us.
"I think it's interesting to incorporate products that are made nearby, to work with other people who are really dedicated to their craft."
The rest of the farm's yield is doled out to local homebrewers, who buy into a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, program. Oast House will give shareholders their hops anyway they want them — dried, fresh or frozen, though Byrtus says most brewers prefer them fresh, since it's hard to get fresh hops in these parts.
Behind the scenes at Oast House Hop Farm, a small upstart farm growing hops in Wrightstown, New Jersey.
Demand, at least for this little hop farm, currently outpaces supply. That's no surprise to Mike Kivowitz, proprietor of the website newjerseycraftbeer.com, who has watched the state's beer scene grow rapidly in the past few years.
"When I started New Jersey Craft Beer, I was just sort of grasping at straws to get content and get information from the local breweries," he said. Now, he says, his site is overflowing with updates on breweries starting up and expanding.
"We've added on a bunch of breweries," he said. "There's a whole lot more in the start-up phase. It's just a good time to be living in New Jersey for craft beer drinkers."
Couple that with an increased appetite among consumers for locally-sourced products, and hop farming in New Jersey seems like a pretty good idea.
"Hopefully more of these farms will pop up and we can one day do an all New Jersey-grown hop beer in the fall," Kane said. "But we're new, they're new, and hopefully we'll both keep growing so one day we can do that."