Brewing Success: Inside WSDA’s role in your St. Patrick's Day beer
As St. Patrick's Day approaches and the world eagerly anticipates raising a glass of green beer in celebration, have you ever paused to think about how that beloved brew makes its way to your tastebuds?
It’s a lot of work growing, harvesting, and exporting before the brewing even starts. The Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) plays a crucial role in the early process: helping eradicate invasive pests, ensuring the safe and legal use of pesticides, and providing hops growers with grades for their products. These grades allow them to export their products across the globe.
Protecting hops while they grow
In Central Washington, which is where a large portion of the world's hops are grown, WSDA is taking measures to protect hops from an invasive pest called the Japanese beetle. Unfortunately, this pest has been on the rise in Yakima, Benton, and Franklin counties, and poses a threat to many plants, including hops. Over the last few years, WSDA has been working hard to eliminate this pest and has made some progress in eradicating it.
Apart from that, WSDA's pesticide management team is responsible for ensuring that farmers can safely and legally use pesticides to combat other pests. To accomplish this, WSDA performs several activities, such as registering pesticides, licensing pesticide applicators, dealers, and consultants, investigating complaints of potential misuse, maintaining a registry of individuals who may be sensitive to pesticides, and running a waste pesticide collection program.
Sampling and grading
Hops are typically harvested once a year, usually in late summer or early fall, depending on the variety and growing region. Harvesting is usually done by hand or using specialized machinery.
Harvesting, sorting, and grading hops involves several steps to ensure quality and consistency. Every year WSDA provides a service to the hops industry in Washington state.
After harvesting, hops are typically collected and transported to processing facilities. This may involve loading them into crates, bins, or trailers for transportation. WSDA has “samplers” that travel to farms and warehouses to collect and label plant materials. They bring hops samples back to the Yakima lab, where the “graders” get to work.
Once at the lab, the graders then break apart the samples to create loose material for further dividing. Once the material is broken down into workable pieces, it is run through a specialized machine that further separates the material based on particle size. This process separates the plant into leaf and stem samples, seed samples, and a file sample.
After this process, the leaf and stem samples are run through a sieve (screen) until the desired particle size is reached. These leaf and stem samples are then sent for analysis. An inspector sorts any leaf material, stems, vines, and cones larger than 1 inch from the hop material. This material is then weighed and recorded.
Then, the seed samples are analyzed by heating them in an oven for 2 hours at 118° F. The dried seed is then broken apart from the cones (flowers) in a process called threshing. Hidden inside each cone are tiny little yellow pods called lupulin — this is the source of bitterness, aroma, and flavor in beer. The threshed seed is further separated from the hops material by screening. Separated seed is then weighed and a percentage determined.
The hops can be certified once the extracted leaf/stem and seed by-product material is weighed and recorded. The less leaf, stem, and seed in the final hops, the higher the quality and grade. Once this process is complete, farmers are given a “Seed, Leaf, and Stem Certificate” that allows them to export their product worldwide. The better the grade, the better the price for the crop!
While our work supports agriculture in all of Washington, consider this just a tiny sip of the colossal role WSDA plays in getting beer to your glass.