This past weekend I attended our NW chapter MBAA meeting in Yakima (aka hop country) with again over 200 people. The meeting, obviously, was heavily focused on a “hop” theme with presentations on hopping from Mitch Steele of Stone Brewing as well as a practical session on hop grading, selection and hop breeding. Maybe the highlight was the social event held at the new Barth-Haas Innovation Center. The multi-million dollar, 23,500 square foot LEED-certified center opened in June for research of new hop products for beer and non-beer applications (hop products to control bacterial growth in other products like sugar and fuel ethanol). The HIC has a fully automated tricked out 3BBL German brewhouse with a very large cellar for trialing new products.
After the great evening at Haas on Friday night we kicked off Saturday with a canning line demo from Owen Lingley of Craft Canning & Bottling. CC&B are a mobile canning and bottling line service and Owen had his unit running cans of Bloody Mary’s for everyone first thing Saturday morning, very needed by a lot of attendees!
