Craft Brewers Conference

As we were going through photos today we stumbled across some of our booth that we use when attending the Craft Brewer's Conference each year. The conference occurs in April each year. The 2008 conference was held in San Diego and next two will be in Boston '09 and Chicago '10. Our family attends the conference because we like to show everyone what we are all about, which is being a family farm... We would encourage anyone who is living in the Boston or Chicago areas to come visit our booth at the conferences if you have a chance. The main attraction is that we almost always bring a full bale of hops (200lbs.) with us, and most people cannot believe how large, heavy, and fresh the hops are in the bale. Of course we also have prizes for the people who are able to correctly identify the variety of the bale by smelling the hops.

As you can see we built a mini version of a hop trellis complete with the actual wire we use in the fields, most are blown away by the gauge of the wire and the fact that a real trellis setup is about 2.5 times higher that the mini version we set up. (in the front right are our pickled hop shoots that we traditionally serve with cheddar cheese cubes to guests, you either love or hate them)

Beside the door on the left side is bale of hops, this year we brought a Willamette bale of hops with us. The nice part is that we normally never have to take the bale home with us, because normally someone really wants to take it.

The hops covering the wire in near the back of our booth are actually silk hops. They actually look pretty good, even up close. Another thing to note is that we used a single disc (from the disc's we run through our hops) as the base for our poles. (please disregard the picture of pumpkins on the computer screen in the background that's just a part time hobby of ours, the younger cousins love selling them in the fall)