Season 2, Episode 5: America’s Favorite Food Group: Beer
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
Hops held a special place in my heart and a month into our move we were ready to pick the ones that had been growing on our property. It would end up being the most memorable day of my life so far.
In this episode of Was Is Could Be: America’s favorite pastime - drinking beer.
With Special Guests:
Chad Meigs is Founder and Chief Hoperations Officer at The Bineyard, a full scale hop farm and processing facility located in Cazenovia, NY. The company is one of a few full service hop enterprises in the State of NY. The Bineyard includes end-to-end processing equipment and support facilities to produce high grade hop products utilized by craft breweries throughout the state. Mr. Meigs currently serves on the Board of Hop Growers of New York an organization that has been in the forefront of resurrecting the hop industry in NYS and the Northeast. Mr. Meigs through his hop industry visibility and stewardship has developed a far reaching network in the craft beer industry. Check out The Bineyard to learn more about Chad's "hop"eration.
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Chad Meigs (Hops):
This is exactly four acres here. Right now we're about eight acres under management. So this is exactly half here. There are seven different varieties here and we have about 15 different varieties total.
Liz Russell Narration:
Hops held a special place in my heart. 18 feet. They were one of the plants growing on the property when we moved. There were apple trees and grapevines as well, but the high hops were the most novel to us and we were eager to harvest them. So a month into our move in September, we were ready to pick. It would end up being the most memorable day of my life so far, but I'll get back to that in a second.
[🎶Theme music🎶]
Liz Russell Narration:
Chad Meigs was introduced to me by the Madison county historian, Matt, who I met when I decided to research my property more. I didn't get very far with the property history. COVID made it hard to go into the offices that held the records. And frankly, I started to get a little bored. There just didn't seem to be much of a story there. Chad is a hops farmer, but he also processes hops for other farmers and takes them to market, which I thought was pretty interesting. So I talked to Chad on the phone first to see about his story. And he invited me to do a tour. Mask on, I met Chad in his driveway. He was tall and fit with dark hair and bright blue eyes. And he wore clothes that looked like they came from Patagonia or LL bean. I'm sure it was because it was the off season. But needless to say, Chad did not scream farmer to me, nonetheless, a farmer he was. Chad took me around and told me all about his model and showed me all of the steps in his process.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
So this is the bull harvester. This is really the cornerstone of the whole operation.
Liz Russell Narration:
We were looking at this huge machine, the size of maybe a mobile home. It looked like two layers of conveyor belts and wheels boxed in by a forest green steel with fans and pipes and knobs all over it.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
It came over here from Germany. It weighs about five and a half tons. And it's awesome. And all it does is pick. All this thing does is just pick hops.
Liz Russell Narration:
This machine was designed to move the bines of hops, separating the cones of hops that you want to keep from the rest of the plant. It was the first part of Chad's operation. For some context, if you're not aware, hops grow on bines, which is spelled B-I-N-E. They're similar to vines, except that they spiral up a post or a pole in a circular fashion. Hops at Chad's operation grow up to be about 18 feet tall and are bushy. Ours at home are probably more like 12 foot tall. And so far are not very bushy at all.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
It was built in 1974, I believe. So this thing's pretty old. Yeah. And it runs great. There's probably about 30 of these in the state. I would say now this was probably like the fourth or the fifth one that actually came over here. So we were one of the first ones to get 'em over here. Wolf, the manufacturer, doesn't even make these anymore. The company's still in business, but they make picking machines the size of five of these barns.
Liz Russell:
Wow.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
It's just like massive warehouses with conveyors running around everywhere, and you know, tens of millions of dollars. If I were to call ‘em up and say, Hey, I need a spark for this. Or how does this piece fit on here? They'll just laugh at me. Like what? Like, yeah, we've moved on.
Liz Russell:
So they don't even make these anymore. So how did this get into your hands? You started way after the seventies.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
Yeah. So this was in Germany, as I mentioned. For whatever reason that farmer decided to get out of hops. And a lot of these are just sitting around, especially in Poland and in Germany. There's a lot of these machines on a smaller scale, which is what we're on, they obviously were just sitting around farms. This one was actually taken care of. There was a little rust on it, but you know, I've seen others in worse shape. So this was clearly undercover somewhere. I never saw it before I bought it. So I was like sight unseen <laugh>, which was really scary.
Liz Russell:
Yeah. I bet.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
It just showed up on a flatbed, January 2013. It was in a driving snowstorm and it was quite the day too. And then I remember afterwards, I remember just sitting on top of it, just like, What the hell did I just do? It's mine?
Liz Russell:
Yeah.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
What did I just do? I have no idea, but we got it. It was the first thought, how to get it in here. You know, it was five and a half tons and they dropped it in the front yard. So of course, we had to get it in here. We lifted it up a little bit, put it all back together. A lot of these things were hanging off of it, obviously. So we had to figure out how it all went back together and we had to figure out how to turn it on and how it worked. And there was no manual. There was absolutely nothing.
Liz Russell:
So no IKEA book, with all the numbers and letters?
Chad Meigs (Hops):
No, everything's in German. So I think a few years ago, someone came up with some sort of diagram on it, but it was all written in German.
Liz Russell:
Wow.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
There's that plate right there. But it's all written in German. I don't even know what it says. So it was a task to get this all back together, but we did it and the thing runs awesome. And we wouldn't be where we are without this thing. I mean, it's amazing. It enables us. These things will harvest probably 20 to 25 acres a season, I'd say.
Liz Russell:
Wow.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
So our goal is to get up to that.
Liz Russell:
Nice.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
At least that size, just us. One of the great things about it is when we first moved to this property, the business plan wasn't necessarily to process on this scale. I just wanted to have a couple acres and it turned into a lot more than it was because we were able to get this.
The first thing we did was actually buy this before we even planted out there. And people like, well, why are you doing that? And I'm just like, well, cause you know, first of all, no one has any of these around here. And second of all, we were able to rent it out to people. So we were making money from day one. Whereas if you're planting hops on a ground, it takes three years to get yield off of it. So, while those were coming into maturity, we were able to actually make a little money on the farm due to all this processing equipment that we invested in. So in businesses timing's everything. And I think we timed the market pretty right with the purchase of this.
Liz Russell:
Just out of curiosity. Is that something like you rent by the hour or…?
Chad Meigs (Hops):
Yes.
Liz Russell:
And the reason I ask is it reminds me kind of the old school threshing model, where a thresher came to each property and you paid him for the day. And I don't know if you see that a lot anymore. So that's really interesting.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
Yeah. It's very, very similar. We charge $145 an hour to run this thing. And in my opinion, it's totally worth it. Considering one person can only pick one bine, you know, so someone could bring me 150 bines, pay me $145 and have them all picked. Other than that, they're not gonna get their hops picked unless they have a lot of help. It's been awesome.
Liz Russell Narration:
Next, we went to the drying room. It was essentially a square room built inside of the barn. Once we got inside, there was a false bottom and a square area of fence built around it, keeping hops in and allowing for airflow.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
And I can really geek out on this if you want me to. But the basic concept of this is it has a false bottom here, and it's basically pulling air down and through the hops. You actually have some hops up in here. If you wanna see it still. So we're aging. Some brewers have actually been asking me to age hops for them. So we've never done it before, but you want maximum exposure to oxygen. So they're getting massive exposure to oxygen. Just sitting here though. Normally this is against everything I've ever been taught <laugh> but brewers want this flavor mostly for wild lambs and things that, wild fermentation type styles and beers. When you do this, it degrades the alpha acids in there and it imparts like little wild critters to, for lack of a better term, wild yeast and things like that, which won't impart different flavors in your beer, so something that's aged.
Liz Russell:
I'm not a brewer, but it kind of seems like when you do something like this, it's kind of a shot in the dark, whether or not it's gonna work or not.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
Yeah. It would be very hard to replicate a beer over time, right? Unless you're doing the same farm with the same methods, the same everything, and then blending at the end of the season, right at the end of the fermentation. But you know, New York brewers are pretty awesome and they are very experimental by nature. Brewers are, and you know… lambics and wild fermentations are gaining in popularity. So this is our aging program, but to get back to the dryer. So basically we fill this whole thing up and it pulls air down underneath. There's two big fans on that side and it's just moving air.
When we originally built this, farms around here were less than an acre and while we have five different bays, so to speak… So these things come up and they'll be those five. So we could, you know, drive five different Fridays or we could have five different farms in the same day. When I built this dryer, I thought it was massive overkill. I'm like, his will never be your bottleneck. Well, now it is. And we're actually building another one that's new and improved over there. I was hoping to have it on for the season, but we didn't quite get there. So this is why it's a construction zone. We just stopped construction one day and I realized it wasn't gonna be done. So maybe I'll get back to it. One of these things.
Liz Russell:
Yeah. Hey, you gotta make those decisions. I mean, it sounds like a good problem to have, I guess, right?
Chad Meigs (Hops):
Yeah. It's a good problem. We weren't able to dry or pick as fast as I would've liked. We were only running the wall for maybe three, four hours a day, you know. Once you get to commercial yield, this builds up very fast. So we're finally getting commercial yield and we would fill this in three or four hours. Where before, the same amount I was maybe filling three days in here. So, yes, it's a good problem. <laugh> You know, there's always something to do, something to affect, something to grow, something to improve, always. And you can tell too, on our last day we just said, I’m done. So I haven't really picked up in here yet.
Liz Russell:
On our little four acres, which is not commercial anything, I was like, okay, we need snow because I'm done. I'm done with the landscaping, I'm done with the picking of everything. Yeah. We have mostly apples, but yeah, I was at about that point. So yeah, the first frost was pretty welcome to be frank.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
Yes. Yes. It wasn't too long.
Liz Russell:
Yeah. So we dry?
Chad Meigs (Hops):
Yep. So now the hops are dry. This takes about a day I would say, or, I'm sorry, the whole process takes about a day. So we try to pick every single day. We pick in the morning, fill this up. This thing runs overnight. And then hopefully by the next morning, everything here is dry. We remove the hops out of here and put 'em into the baler, which is right here. So basically all that thing is doing is just making big bales, big square bales. Yeah, just compresses 'em. The bales are about this size here. It fits down into this thing here. So it's a nice square or rectangle, I guess I should say. And those bales weigh between 80 to 120 pounds or, something like that. The amazing thing is that after the palletization process, that whole bale fits into those boxes out there.
Liz Russell Narration:
I know this is hard to picture since you can't see what I got to see in the barn, but imagine something like a large Rubbermaid tub getting compressed down into one of those medium sized priority mailboxes you get at the post office, something like eight by 11 inches. That's what Chad was talking about.
Liz Russell:
Now as we're walking, I'm just impressed by how fast, like a day? How long of a harvest period is that? How many days do you have of processing?
Chad Meigs (Hops):
So harvest usually runs from mid-August to mid-September. You have 30 days to actually get through everything. And when the hops are ready, you probably have a week, I'd say, to get them picked, drug in, and be okay. If you don't do that, if you pick 'em too early, their lab numbers will come back really low and they'll be poor brewing hops. If you wait too late, they give off aromas. You get aromas of hunting environment. So as harvest timing is everything, which is why it's difficult. We had a machine like that to actually do everything because you have such a small window. So having all his equipment here is huge.
Liz Russell Narration:
After seeing the operation from start to finish, we went inside to escape the guinea fowl on the property, which kept screeching at us. I wanted to ask more about Chad's operation and how he got into farming in the first place.
Liz Russell:
Okay. So one of the things you told me about on the phone that I thought was really interesting is just how you got into farming, like your previous life to your current life. And I wanted to share that and sort of almost do a comparison.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
OK. Yeah. So my previous life was of a computer geek. I got my degree in computer science. I graduated from the University of Rhode Island in ‘98. I then went on to a career of computers, sitting in front of a keyboard and hammering out code the whole time. That was great. It was super lucrative. I was living in Boston, great town for, you know, young 20 somethings making too much money. It was awesome. I never really enjoyed it. I was good and it paid very well, but I never really loved it. I didn't really like sitting in front of computers. I like being outside. I like working with my hands. It was very good at the time. Fast forward a couple years, I met my wife in Boston, and we decided to relocate to central New York, which is where she's from.
I grew up in Vermont. So it's a pretty similar geography, but it was never really… never knew I'd be here, but I didn't really know what people did when they moved here. <laugh> So it's like, well, people do agriculture. There's a lot of dairy farms and all things. Well, I was definitely not starting the dairy farm. So, I looked into other aspects. I'd always been attracted to beer. I, like beer. In our first house we planted a couple of hop bines ‘cause I started home brewing because of my enjoyment of beer. I was like, oh, well, you know, we'll plant a couple hop bines and I'll throw 'em in my home brew. Loved it. It was fun. They're huge plants and they're beautiful. So we did those, we started with four plants.
We then decided to take it to a quarter acre, which was about 150 plants. And that was at our old house. It was about a four acre lot. So the hop yard took up a good chunk of that entire property, but it was a true trellis. It was the nice poles, 18 feet high with the wires and everything. So I really learned what not to do there, and made most of my mistakes on a really small scale. From there, we decided to write a business plan and take it large scale, you know, and kind of go commercial with it, which is when we found this property that we're on now. And we ended up moving here. So the business plan changed. As I mentioned earlier, I just wanted to grow and just sell it to someone else and have them deal with it.
But because of the property that we're on and the barn that was on the property, we decided to do the full processing facility too. And I'm really glad that we did that. So that was a pivot in the whole business plan, but it was completely different from what I was doing prior, sitting in front of computers, hammering out code. Paid well, but I wasn't super fulfilled. You know, now I get to be outside. I get to work with my hands. I work twice as hard for half the money <laugh>, but it's, you know, quality of life is definitely there. And, you know, I have little kids and they are able… We have the last house on the dead end road and 140 acres and they can just go outside and roam and I don't have to worry about them or anything.
So, the quality of life is through the roof, you know, and one of the things that I did like about computer science and computers was just problem solving. You know, you get a really big problem and you write a piece of software to solve that problem. Farming is pretty similar where it's a different problem every single day, and there's always problems. <laugh> You're always coming up with something that you need to fix or to be done. And in that sense, it's very fulfilling, ‘cause it's very challenging, not only emotionally, but physically and just getting real involved in problem solving and you know, making it happen and overcoming them really is fulfilling, I guess. Yeah.
Liz Russell:
Do you think problem solving is kind of the main skill you bought from your previous life or is there others that you say translate well to farming?
Chad Meigs (Hops):
Not much translates at all. <laugh> But yeah, I would say yeah, maybe yeah. Problem solving, I think. It’s the ability to think, you know, logically about something. Okay, here's the problem. Break it down into its components and what can we fix? What do we have control over, what we do not have control over? What can we do to fix it? So yeah, I guess that's pretty similar in a sense. I think my engineering black and white brain is, you know, conducive for hop farming.
Liz Russell:
Very interesting. So you had mentioned on our call as well, you know, really that debt is a big part of farming for others. Something that you've tried to avoid, definitely part of your business model. Can you tell me to the extent that you're comfortable a bit about that and just where you think the traps maybe are for others. You know, to the extent that you feel comfortable.
Chad Meigs (Hops):
When we first moved here to New York and I started looking at agriculture as a possible career path, the first thing you looked to is dairy. Right? Cause there was dairy farms everywhere around in New York. And the one thing I noticed is that they, you know, without looking at other farmer's business plans, it seems that their growth projection is always just growing and growing, growing to the point where the farms are so massive now that you really can't grow anymore. And a lot of these farmers rely on debt and rely on always being in debt too. You know, maybe it's a tax write off. I don't really know why that is, but that seems to be what you do as a large scale, massive farm. That's nothing really that I was attracted to <laugh>.
So we tried to do the exact opposite. We grew organically and slowly, and I think that's been advantageous to where we're at now because we have no debt. We own all that equipment out there. I mean, my computer job helped to pay for a lot of it, so it was, you know, a step above someone who started with nothing. But I think being able to pay for all that, having the farm, buy it, putting money back into the farm and actually buying those pieces of equipment is huge. And we were able to do that because we started so small and we grew very slowly, as slowly as we could. We've been at this for 10 years now and we're still pretty small scale. So it also makes me learn if I had a ton of money and I could just throw money at a problem. It's not necessarily solving it.
So being nontraditional, thinking outside of the box, well, how do we fix this problem without finding a specialized piece of equipment, not only helped me learn what we can do better, but there's just different ways of going about problems. And it's not always buying a piece of equipment. There's other ways about it. I will give an example of stringing again, the hops are 18 feet high and need to put a string from the top down to the bottom to two for every single plant. So that's a lot of strings you have to do every single year. The people out in the Pacific Northwest where the really large hop farms are, have picking wagons and really large lifts and pieces of equipment where they drive down their rows.
And there's five people on this big thing. And they're hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the tractor to pull the wagon. You know? So in our first yard where we had 150 plants, I had an A-frame rider where I just moved from plant to plant. Is that scalable? Absolutely not. But I learned that, okay, there's a painful point. These strings, and this is something we have to do every single year, you know, I now need a better way of doing this. So I know people that got right into hops that had a lot of money. They went out and they bought $15,000, $20,000 lifts, you know, those big boom lifts. Yep. Great. You know, that's awesome, if you can afford something like that. But come to find out, you try to drive that in your field in the spring and it's gonna bury itself in the mud.
And then you have to wait until the weather's nice to go strong. So knowing what I knew and knowing with my resources, we built a really lightweight wagon. It has a little tower, it looks like a crow’s nest. So it's almost like a sailing mast and one person can be up in it at a time. And our yard was built such that one person can reach either side of the row and tie a string. You gotta teach yourself to be ambidextrous, but you can tie two strings at once. One person can go down a row and tie the entire row. And it can be wet out there ‘cause our lightweight vehicles, we can use an ATV to pull this wagon. We're able to get out in our field a lot sooner than, you know, some of these traditional type farms can.
Liz Russell Narration:
Our little hops operation could hardly be called a farm, certainly not on Chad's level, but we were proud of our first harvest. We picked our hops on a Tuesday evening. So I did not put on full work outside farm gear, but I didn't wanna ruin anything good either. So I ended up putting on sweatpants and polka dotted rain boots. We had to walk back into the property where there's this clearing in the woods. The hops are there on their own poles, which the previous owner had actually put in. What I remember most was that the mosquitoes were eating us alive and the dog was barking back at the house. This made me want to hurry, I was kind of having anxiety or something. So as soon as we were done, I started back to the house, basket of hops in my hand. And Brad was a little bit behind me.
As I got to the edge of the woods, Brad asked me to wait. And when I turned around, he dropped on one knee and asked me to marry him. I was surprised. I was actually shocked and I dropped the entire basket of hops. So when our little hoopla was over, you know, kissing and hugging and whatnot, we picked the hops up and we probably lost several in that process. We went to make beer with them later. We discovered we didn't have quite enough. And our first batch, which I called the engagement batch came out, tasting quite a bit like Keystone light.
[🎶Theme music🎶]
Liz Russell Narration:
Next time on Was Is Could Be, dairy and some real talk about the cost of farming. If you wanna learn more about my food journey, follow me @itslizrussell on Instagram or check out https://www.itslizrussell.com/podcast-blog-transcripts/. If you wanna learn more about Chad Meigs and his operation, check out thebineyard.com, especially if you're a brewer or a grower.