The smell of yeast hits you on the street more than a block away. Inside the lobby of the brewery, it is even stronger. I wondered how long that secretary had been putting up with the smell. "You get used to it." she said "The tour begins in ten minutes." Two other families had come to take this tour as well. A tasteful way to spend the afternoon with grandparents or in-laws, I thought. A short old man comes out after a while. He is wearing an amplifier around his neck and carrying a microphone. The speaker is bigger his head. The other members of the group stand up and we are all lead back out onto the street. The traffic rushes by us as he explains the square brass plate bolted into the pavement at our feet. "This is a time capsule" squawks the amplifier. The time capsule was buried in 1956 and will be opened again in the year 2006. It contains one bottle of Henry-Weinhard's beer, and one local newspaper.
I picture a crowd gathered here in nine years and I picture them some fifty years ago. Maybe they shiver against the rain or maybe they brace themselves against a fierce wind rushing up Burnside St. like it is today. In any case I picture them waiting there as the sacred bottle is unearthed, having traversed time to bring us the old newspaper. I wonder if it will have frozen and cracked down there. I wonder if anyone will drink that bottle if it is intact when it is brought to surface. I picture the small man with the amplifier tipping back his head and downing the contents of the artifact. We are truly a people brought together most readily by such a symbol. Nothing warms Americans up to each other like alcohol. Blitz beer is one of the cheapest brands one can buy in the grocery store these days. It runs about four or five dollars for a twelve pack. Needless to say it is the choice of the thriftier lush. The can is of a simple design. White with red letters reading "Oregon's Premium quality beer for over fifty years....Founded 1856." One is lead to wonder whether those fifty premium years are taking place now, or if they have already passed us by. Blitz is really not that bad. It does the job, as they say, but the beer connoisseur would not be impressed by the flavor or body. Blitz-Weinhard makes a series of other, more tasteful and expensive beers, and those are the focus of the brewery tour. I have chosen to focus on Blitz beer however. The nature of Blitz and it's entourage strikes me as a bit more interesting for some reason.
Henry Weinhard was a German immigrant from Wurttemburg who traveled up the Columbia river by cargo ship in the year of 1856 and set up his first brewery in a US trading post very close to Fort Vancouver. The original handmade copper brewpot still stands today beside the gigantic automated brewpot. Weinhard died as he was drawing up the plans for the present brewery, but he would surely be proud of the extent to which his company has grown. The tour group is led into an old wrought iron cage elevator. It is a tight fit and the man beside me wriggles his arms free in order to take out his mini video camera. He begins a monologue as we watch each floor move past us through the bars of the elevator cage door. "Right now we are in the elevator," he begins. His wife abruptly scolds him and makes him put the camera away. He doesn't take it out again for the rest of the tour. Finally we reach the top floor and are lead into a big room with a very high ceiling. Here we see two large containers resembling short grain silos. Beside them sits the abandoned hand wrought copper brewpot. To our left is a beautifully carved dark wooden door. On it in gold letters is painted the word "brewmaster."
Inside the room the walls and ceiling beams are ornately carved as well. I am reminded of the priest's quarters in a church I visited when I was very little. Oh the irony. There are paintings of leaves and draperies on the ceiling. We are told these are original oil paintings. "It still looks pretty good" says the little man glancing nervously into the corner where the paint is chipping and falling to the polished floor. The brewmaster's quarters, which were once upon a time the real quarters of the brewmaster, now house rows of seats all facing a movie screen. We all sit down and the lights are dimmed while we watch a short film outlining the history of the blitz-Weinhard brewery.
Arnold Blitz was bought out by Henry Weinhard in the 1940's. Blitz had been Weinhard's biggest competitor. We are shown slides of old cowboys kicking the dirt around in front of picturesque saloons. The narrator takes us back through history, through the gold rush and the time of prohibition. A bottle of Blitz mutates its shape, label and logo as the years cruise by. I am starting to wonder why the little man has brought that amplifier. It seems we are getting the whole story right here on the screen. Soon the narrator brings us from the days of wooden barrel and horse drawn carriage up to the present day and we are tantalized as we watch the bottles zip past on conveyor belts. The machines they have now can fill 800 bottles of beer per minute and fill from 1200-1500 cans per minute. "We sure have come a long way" chortles the anonymous voice.
When the movie has ended and the lights come on, our tour guide takes over the narration. We are led back out into the big room with the brewpot silos and our guide begins to take us through the process. In the first pot the barley mash is boiled and soaked in water. The boiled hops are added in another pot and then it is all cooled. This combination is sent through the floor to another brew pot. We file down to the floor below us. This room is as large as the last and it holds the master computer. I am assuming this master computer has taken the place of the brewmaster. It couldn't be that very bored looking man trying to ignore us as he sits in front of a much smaller terminal. He is also pretending to ignore the large pool of beer gushing out of an open pipe in the floor. The master computer covers the entire wall. It is alive with blinking colored lights, dials, meters and switches. Our guide looks pretty uncomfortable about the gushing beer as well as it inches closer and closer to the massive blinking computer. He doesn't mention it although it almost touches his shoe. He continues with the story. The pool is almost four inches deep by the time our guide finishes telling us about the brewpot on this floor. This is where the yeast is added and boiled and then cooled again before it is sent through a pipe across the street to even larger silos where it is aged for about seven days. We are told the left over pulp is dumped into a big truck and brought out to local farms for fertilizer. The tour has now moved to the bottom floor where the tasting room is. There are free glasses of the more tasty beers. I notice they don't offer Blitz for sample and I make my polite exit.
The way this brewery was constructed in order to receive tour groups was really interesting. Considering the distribution of Weinhard (at least 30,000 barrels a year in order to fulfill their contract with Boston Beer) it makes sense for them to cater to the interests of the public. The people in my group seemed delighted at getting a look at the production of their local beverage. The only reference to the origin of the ingredients though, was some quick dreamlike shots of a smiling farmer on a nameless farm in the video we had been shown. We also didn't see anything about the carbonation of the beer. The process we saw seemed far more simple than I can believe it really is. For all we could tell from our walk through the place, the barley malt, hops and corn grits were funneled straight through the ceiling from the heavens above, mixed, boiled and ready for hearty consumption. From the ceiling through three floors to the street level where it came out of the tap.
The production of the hops themselves is a rather tricky process as I understand it. Hops uses up an incredible amount of nutrients from the soil, (about 460 pounds per acre.) This causes a great waste of land if the foliage is not returned to the soil after the cones have been taken to be processed. If the foliage is returned though, only 100 pounds of nutrients per acre will be lost. Blitz beer is made from the Cascade variety of hops and processed by the John I Haas Inc. in Yakima Washington where Mr. Haas first began his business in 1931. Today the company has sites in Idaho, Oregon, British Columbia and Tasmania, Australia. John I Haas Inc. is the largest hops grower in the world and provides for over half of the world's breweries. Cascade hops is not exactly an unrefined variety. Despite the naturalistic, hearty image of the smiling farmer with dirty hands that we saw breifly in the video, Cascade Hops was developed in 1972 through a U.S.D.A breeding program to be a stronger strain, producing a larger cone (the part used to make beer) and standing up to more varied climates. Cascade hops yield up to about 1800 lbs. per acre.
There are several farms throughout the United States that provide the John I Haas' hops but Blitz brewery is proud to advertise that their hops are grown right here in the Willamette Valley. Each farm is under the direction of a farm manager. Each manager attends the annual meeting in which budget and industry development are discussed. The farm manager must be well educated about pesticide, fertilizer, soil irrigation, machinery and supplies. They must also know a thing or two about building, designing, repairing equipment, record keeping, accounting and labor relations. During the spring, an average hops farm (250 acres) will have from 12-16 workers. During the summer, from June until harvest, only a few workers are kept on to take care of irrigation and pesticide. During spring harvest from 24-32 workers are hired until September, and then only a few are needed again until spring. Most of the labor force of Haas Inc. is composed of migrant Mexican-American workers. Needless to say, they put up with seasonal employment.
In the spring the first job on the hops farm is pruning. This removes old growth, as well as restricts the spreading of the plant and gets it ready for "training." This used to be done by hand of course, but today it is done by tractor drawn, mechanical pruners. The next spring task is called twining. This involves the stretching of twine from a trellis overhead to the ground. The hop bines are able to use these to crawl upward. They grow to be about 25 feet tall. The twine is made either of paper or biodegradable cord, made in India from coconut fiber. Currently the twining is done by field workers, but a mechanical twiner does exist, is now being tested, and is likely to replace the seven man twining crew within a matter of years. "Training" is the next spring task. This involves the wrapping of the plant in a clockwise direction around the twine. Throughout the month of May, the plants will be wrapped upward around the twine until they learn to follow it upward by themselves. Once the plants have been trained, arching and stripping must be done. Arching is the tightening of the twine strings so that they don't sag and so that the farm equipment can move between the plants. Stripping is the process of removing the leaves and shoots which do not follow the twine. In Australia the stripping is the responsibility of sheep, who have a great old time eating the shoots off the bottom of the plants.
There are at least five viruses which threaten the hops production in the U.S., the most recently and locally threatening of which is called Powdery Mildew. This is the oldest of fungal diseases but it was eliminated until an outbreak in the 1997 crop. Washington got crisis exemption for the fungicide Rubigan, but it was too late. The Powdery mildew had gone through several generation cycles and the spores were airborne. Right now John I Haas Inc. is doing tests with 10 other fungicides. They feel they have it under control now and are armed with a plethora of poisonous agents to fight the mildew, but they are beginning to consider more genetic engineering to produce a stain that will resist the threat of the dreaded powdery mildew.
The cultivation of the hops is done by tractor as well. Each row is gone over 4-6 times both ways with the cultivator. The final cultivation takes place in early July. The cultivated hops are sent out to the breweries in three possible forms. They can be ground and formed into pellets, they can be baled, or they can be distilled and sent out in the form of hops extract. Blitz is made with either baled hops or hops pellets.
Here then is the mysterious element poured
in through the ceiling of the Blitz-Weinhard brewery to be mass
produced, boiled and cooled, added and aged, bottled and packaged and
trucked on out to your local grocery store. It's a long and arduous
trip for those little buds, much longer than it was in Arnold Blitz's
day. The average thrifty Blitz-lush is not likely to appreciate the
distance or the effort of the sweet little hops plant either, save
for a loud, heartfelt and socially offensive belch.