Want To Help A Small Business Get Off The Ground?

Home brewing runs in the family. My cousins Joel and Matt have been home brewing beer for many years now. They planted hops over 6 years ago so they had their own fresh hops to brew with. You know, I never asked them, but I bet they planted hops in 2007 because of the hop shortage, maybe one of them will chime in on the topic in the comment section. If you are a home brewer you will remember 2007 as, "the year of the global hop shortage". Do to a flood of hops on the market in the years leading up to 2007, farmers got out of the hop business bringing the amount of hops on the market down. If that wasn't enough, a large warehouse in Washington full of hops burned to the ground in October of 2006. This made for a perfect storm, and sent hop prices through the roof if you could even get any. I remember my brew store had a 3 ounce limit on buying hops and you had to buy at least 10 pounds of grain to get them.

At any rate, 2007 saw the genesis of  "Ocean State Hops". The OSH crew consists of my cousins Joel, Matt and Kara with help from their friend Abe. Ocean State Hops is a small business in Exeter RI that is, in their words; "fueled by a passion to cram as many hops into each batch of beer as humanly possible". I, being a fan of this style of brewing, applaud their efforts at making beer that tastes like beer. I make a batch of beer that consists of me cleaning out the freezer at the end of the year and throwing every ounce of hops I have into one batch of IPA. I named this super-hopped beer "I Pee Hops."

Over the years the business picked up, they started selling to local breweries and kept adding more and more hops to the farm. This season they got really smart and went to a pick-your-own hops model. You come to the farm, pick a vine, cut it down and take it home. Fast, easy and smart. Well what could be next in the natural progressing of things? Starting a brewery of course. Matt and Kara recently purchased some brewing equipment from a brewery doing an upgrade and they already own the property where the brewery will be located. What they need help with is a 100 year old barn they want to retrofit with plumbing, a bar, a viewing area, refrigeration, everything you need to have a tour-able brewery.

So this is the barn in question. I grew up coming to this property almost every summer and have many memories playing in and around this barn. I am so happy Matt and Kara have decided to make this property their home and give this old barn a new life. I can't wait to see the operation in full working order. They have decided to name the brewery "Tilted Barn Brewery". I will cheers to that!

So please consider helping my family realize their dream of opening up a brewery on a piece of land that has been in our family for over 50 years. If you want to help out, here is a link to their Indiegogo campaign. Anything helps and they have a bunch of incentives at different backing levels. I can't wait to get my TBB shirt! All pictures in the post courtesy of Tilted Barn Brewery.

Odds and Ends

We have been extremely busy with EMT class.

 Dara and I are volunteers with our local 

Fire Dept and we are currently in school for EMT basic. 

It is hard to get anything done between working 40+ hours a week

 and class. We plan on being more active on the blog and 

on the homestead once class is over. 

Here are a few quick things I thought I would share.

Our hops are coming up like crazy!

 I need to get out there to string them up and cut them back soon.

Here is year two on the asparagus patch.

 I am so tempted to eat the few stalks coming up right

 now but I will control myself for the greater 

good of the patch. Next year its on! 

I was at the big box store the other day and found

 cedar fence posts on clearance for .34 each!

 I bought everything they had. This is the second truck load.

 I will post soon on what I plan to do with them, it's not a fence.

Sorry about the bad picture quality. 

These are from my phone and not edited.

 Again we will be more active soon once class is over. 

4x4 Arbor Post

Three feet doesn't sound like that far to dig. After a couple minutes with a manual post hole digger it seems almost impossible to dig that far. I put about three inches of pea gravel at the bottom of the hole for the 4x4 to sit on.

I used pressure treated 4x4's from the big box store. After many hours researching online the best way to install 4x4's, I realized where the saying "ask 9 people how to do something and you will get 10 answers", came from. In the end I decided if these only last me 10 years I will be happy.

I used whatever wood I had laying around to support the post while I poured the cement. I poured the cement right out of the bags into the holes. I soaked the cement with water afterward. I have heard you don't even need to do that. You can just let the ambient soil moisture harden the cement.

Here are the post for the hops. They are 12 feet long, standing 9 feet tall. The Grape posts are 8 feet long standing about 5 1/2 tall and the kiwi post are 6 feet long standing about 4 feet tall.

This set up worked quite well. You can do almost anything with ratchet straps.

You have to feed and listen to this level. Its worth it though.

So here we are. I will post later about what I use for wire and how I plan on training the grape (middle posts) and kiwi (front posts) vines.

The hops will wind there way up the hemp I am stringing here. Next year at this time there will be a wall of hops where I am standing.

New Plants!

Bare root plants from Burgess.

We had to soak these for a day before putting them in the ground.

We planted the lemon and orange trees in pots on the back deck.

In the back right corner of the yard is the asparagus bed.
You can see our sunflowers coming up in this photo.

Here's Patrick planting the asparagus crowns.
It will be about 3 years until we get a good harvest.

Dara planting a Catawba grape vine behind the hop bed.

One of the kiwi vines.

Patrick planting hazelnuts a.k.a filberts.