The Oast House Hop Farm is a start-up ag operation in central New Jersey dedicated to providing quality organic hops to craft breweries, utilizing sustainable farming practices. It’s a homegrown friends and family operation that exudes all of craft’s credos of community and nature. Oast House is the culmination of three friends who are avid craft brewers themselves (we’ll call them Beau, Marylu and Art). The trio decided to breathe new life into New Jersey’s local craft industry by building a small scale production facility providing fresh, locally grown hops to consumers in the central Jersey area.
Although there are 12 acres waiting to be farmed, the trio has built a small ¼-acre hop yard using as much existing material on the property as possible — trellises using naturally rot-resistant locust trees from the farm and irrigation from a natural spring-fed pond on the property, as well as collections in rain barrels. Of course, Oast House just harvested its hops, and in the video above, Beau Byrtus talks about the 2014 crop of Chinook, Cascade, Nugget and Columbus and who’s using the Jersey-fresh hops from this third harvest year. These hops are actually handpicked, and who doesn’t want handpicked hops in their beer?
