 My name is Stephanie Mock and I will be your guest host today. The Hawaii Food and Farmer series aims to meet people who are working to improve Hawaii's agriculture, learn about their food systems and local production, and hear how our guests stories on how they became involved in agriculture and learning about these varying perspectives on our local agricultural scene. Today we're going to hear about their personal experiences, background, and why they love what they do. We encourage those tuning in today to tweet us questions at thinktechhi on Twitter. Today's show is titled Brewing Local, Hawaii's Growing Brewing Culture. I'm joined today in the ThinkTech Hawaii Studio by two very special guests from our local agricultural and production community here on Oahu. I have with me Cindy Goldstein of Ag Matters and Alan Spitzer of Home Brewers on Pacific Shore's Home Brewing Club. We're going to be learning about the world of Hawaii's brewing culture from hops to home brews and how those who further our local agricultural also create local brews we enjoy here in Hawaii. So I'd like to take a moment and just thank you so much for coming today, Alan and Cindy. I appreciate it and I know the studio does too, so thank you for coming in. And thanks for having me on the show. Absolutely. You have such a calming voice so it's going to be a great interview today. So I thought we could just take a couple minutes and just talk about your backgrounds. You know who you are here in Hawaii, how you got involved with hops or home brewing and basically what home brewing means to you as master home brewers or working in the agricultural field. So Alan let's start with you. So you're with home brewers on Pacific shores, correct? That's correct. The hops. The hops. The hops. The hops. The hops. The hops. The hops. The hops. And why do you continue to do it today? Why do you have a love for home brewing? Well to start off with, my family originally came to the islands back in the late 1890s as brewers. The first brew master of Honolulu Brewing and Malting was my first relative here. And he wrote back to the family in Watertown, Wisconsin and said, you don't want to be there. Come to Hawaii, this is paradise. So more of the family came over and that's how we ended up being here in Hawaii. So brewing was something that I was always aware of. And I'd spend a year in Europe when I was in college. And after that, coming back to Hawaii, I noticed that there was very little good beer here. There is very little beer, period. So if you want it, you're going to have to make it yourself. So I was interested in home brewing. And there wasn't much out there. There wasn't any classes. There wasn't any home brew stores or anything at the time. You had to order everything from the mainland and get it shipped in. But there was a book that came up by Charlie Papasian, The Complete Joy of Home Brewing. And his motto is, relax, don't worry, have a home brew. Anybody can home brew, just follow the basic steps and you can do it too. So started out and the first couple of batches, quite frankly, weren't all that great. But because I made a few of the basic mistakes and things that he warned me about, sanitation and things that you think you're doing it right, but you aren't. But after a couple of batches, things started to turn out pretty good and people liked what you did. And you had control over what you wanted to brew. So I was able to have a bunch of different kinds of things and stuff that just wasn't available locally. And my friends really enjoyed having me as a home brewer. So that sort of got me started in it and I've been with it ever since. We're going to take a quick break. I think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. I'm your host Stephanie Mock and we just heard from Alan Spitzer of the Home Brewers on Pacific Shores for HUB Brewing Club. So now we're going to, we just learned about his family's history here in Hawaii about how they made the trek to Hawaii to be brewers. You said the master brewer of Honolulu, right? Very first one. Oh my goodness. And that was in the 1890s and you yourself have been home brewing for, oh, close to 50 years. Oh, yeah. 40, yeah. Almost 50 years. Well, we'll round up. It's almost half a century, right? Half a century of brewing. So I thought we could go to our next guest and talk about a friend of yours and master home brewer herself, Cindy Goldstein. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Cindy, you are with Ag Matters but you're also a member of the Home Brewers on Pacific Shores. I just want to call it the hops club. The hops club as well. So I thought we could just take a second and learn about how you came to Hawaii or your family came to Hawaii and how you yourself got involved in either farming or producing home brews yourself. Well, Aloha, Stephanie, thanks for asking us to join you here today to talk about a favorite topic, making beer, making home brews. So when I was in grad school, a friend of mine taught me how to brew and when I first learned how to make beer, he said, I'm not going to teach you how to make beer just pouring a can of liquid into the water and I didn't know any difference. And so I learned how to make beer from scratch where you do all grain brewing, where you start with the barley, with the cracked grain and you use that as your base rather than the liquid extract that brewers oftentimes start with. So I started right away with the more complicated version of it. And my background is in agriculture. I'm an ag research person and it was a great opportunity to combine doing lab work and science and the brewing science with something I love doing, which is cooking. And part of home brewing is creating recipes and doing tastes and aromas and making different styles of beer that you enjoy or your friends enjoy. So for me to combine doing work that to me seemed like kitchen science was what brewing was. And my master's degree was doing plant breeding with barley, so even more appropriate, I suppose. So I notice after your name you have a PhD. Can I ask you what your PhD is? It's in plant physiology and molecular biology, which has to do with plant growth, plant physiology and actually plant genetics at the cellular level. And how long have you been home brewing then? So you said you started in college. Are you close to the 40 years? Not quite. I've probably been brewing in earnest, I'd say closer to 25, 30 years. 25 or 30 years, my goodness. So combined you have about 70 to 80 depending on what we went around to of experience home brewing. And you mentioned you started learning in college from scratch. When did you realize that you actually learned the more complicated process before realizing that there's other ways? Maybe simpler ways to home brew. Probably after I had been doing this for about three years and talking to other home brewers and comparing notes, because that's something brewers like to do. Talk about the equipment you're using and the recipes and what type of hops did you add or what were your ingredients. So just in talking to other brewers and like any other group of enthusiasts, people love to compare what sorts of things they're doing and share ideas with each other over a good home brew. A good home brew. I know you guys have the perfect like Calhanna, like let's drink a home brew and learn about home brews too. Exactly. And I thought we could take a step back, but I know we just jumped right in about your passion for home brewing and how long and how much experience you have. But for those tuning in today who maybe don't understand the whole process of how hops or other agricultural crops can be turned into home brews, I thought we could maybe start with hops and since you claimed to be the agricultural specialist as you are, I thought you could talk a little bit about hops, it being grown here in Hawaii and how then it will be transferred into the process of home brewing, which Alan and I know you are definitely an expert at. So Cindy, let's start with you and learn a little bit more about hops here in Hawaii. Well, to take a step back, there are four ingredients, four beer, water, the yeast, the barley or whatever grains and hops. So hops give beer their bitter taste. They give an aroma, they give a taste characteristic and oftentimes the bitterness that you taste in a home brew or a craft beer and the interest in hops comes from the desire of our local home brewers and the craft breweries to have local ingredients and to have hops that we grow here in Hawaii in our local brews. And so the Hawaii Department of Agriculture has a specialty crop grant program and they provide funds for different types of studies and I'm now involved with Ag Matters doing a grant study to look at the ability to grow hops in the state of Hawaii. So are hops being grown now or is the study looking at is this a possible crop in the future? So it's looking at really expanding the growth of hops to other farms and farmers. So initially there's a study underway to look at who has grown hops in the past and who is currently growing hops and if anybody is a farmer or somebody who's a home brewer who's tried growing hops in the past even if it wasn't successful. We're very interested in knowing more about that and we have an email address hops at hawaii.rr.com where people can send an email and there's a short survey just to see what's worked in the past and currently anybody who's growing hops what they're finding what their experiences are. So I know that we'll be putting that email address up at the end of the show with all a bunch of information about the hops brewing club and where people can find more information about what we're talking about today. So don't worry we're definitely going to include that email address for your survey because I know right now you're just trying to gather what the baseline is for hops growing here in Hawaii. So yeah so again we'll kind of now move from hops which you mentioned you're just trying to find the baseline right now who's growing hops but let's go on to the process now and how do you take hops and then make it into a home brew? Alan would you like to talk about that? Hops is one of those ingredients that is often difficult to get because you want it as fresh as possible. And here in Hawaii most of the time we have to get pelletized hops so they take the hops off the plant and they basically crush it down until it looks like rabbit food. But it's more stable that way and it's easier to ship and they vacuum seal it and you get your hops that way. But if you can get the fresh hops or whole cone hops you get a much more unique flavor and aroma to them especially on the aroma side. So if you can get fresh hops you're going to have a fresher beer and you're going to have a more unique aroma and taste to it as well. Getting fresh hops if you can grow it here that's going to give you the opportunity to get the fresh hops. Now hops can be entered into the brewing process early, middle, late or even after you're done with the brewing process. So if you start at the very beginning of your boil so you've got your carbohydrates in there that are already broken down and they're ready to be put together. So you've got them and you start your boil. In the boil process if you add the hops really early on the aromas and the taste are going to be virtually gone. What you're going to get is the bitterness out of the hops. So the alpha acids. So if you add it towards later into the boiling process you get more flavor. If you add the hops at the very end you get the flavor and the aroma. And then there's something called dry hopping. So after you're all done with the boil you've got it in your carboy, you've put in your yeast, you're fermenting and you put in the hops at that point then you're going to get really just aroma out of it and it adds that really fresh nice aroma of the hops and it could be spicy or resiny or floral, citrusy. There's all different kinds that you get from the different hops that are out there. So fresh hops is a very good thing. If we can grow locally, home brewers can get more fresh hops and that makes better beer. So you're talking about the different variety of hops giving different flavors. What you happen is it different species? Is it different varieties or they're hybrids? What, is there a main hop variety that's known throughout the world for doing a good home brew or is it just kind of all these unique products just depending on where they grow? You wanna take that one? Sure. There's different cultivars or different varieties. There are some hops that are used more in your lager beers. These are hops that originate in Northern Europe, grown in Germany, grown in other countries in Northern Europe. There are English varieties of hops that have been grown in England for any number of centuries now. And in the US we've had hop growing areas in the past like upstate New York or Michigan that are seeing a revival. And then probably the largest hop growing area in the US is in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon and Washington. And especially in the US, there's a desire to have these hops that are very floral, very citrusy, very high in their bitterness. And so one of the things we wanna see here is to, as part of the study, is to have farmers in three locations across the state, one on Kauai, one on Hawaii Island, and one here on Oahu, to grow some different cultivars. They'll grow the same five cultivars. And these are ones that are popular with home brewers. And we're gonna see which ones perform well, which ones don't give maybe as high a yield or quality. And then of course from an agricultural perspective, we're always interested in their disease resistance, their insect tolerance, because for a farmer to be successful, we wanna know what cultivars will perform the best here in Hawaii in our local field. So you were mentioning these cultivars in England and Germany and Pacific Northwest. And one thing I've noticed is it's really cold or it can get really cold. So is this study then or what you're talking about these trial sites? Are they cold enough for these cultivars? We don't even know, it's just an experiment. So people have managed to produce some hop cones here, but not a very good yield, not a large number. And so we know that the usual chilling period, the dormancy in the winter, we don't have a chilling dormancy phase. And so on the mainland and in other growing areas, the hops go dormant in the winter. And then as the temperature warms, it triggers a cycle of growth. And they're also sensitive to day length, which many crops are. We don't have the right day length necessarily. So I think the thing that's very interesting and of interest to me for our local agriculture is whether we can develop a very different type of growing scheme with multiple harvest cycles in Hawaii. So perhaps rather than getting one harvest in the fall, we may be able to get more than one round of production. And Big Island Brewhouse on Hawaii Island has been very kind in sharing information and a visit to their farm. And they get multiple cycles of hop cone production during the year. And I think that's a really exciting possibility here. Yeah. So we have some photos up on our screen. I thought Cindy, some of these photos were provided by you and Alan as well. I thought you could just take a quick moment and explain what are we seeing here? I mean, it's beautiful, but I'm not quite sure what it is. So this is on Hawaii Island over in Waimea. And what you see here is hops that were planted last year that are now regrowing again this year. And you see how they're growing straight up. And there's a line that they're on a string. And you always need a trellis structure for hops. It's quite common for them to grow 15 feet, 20 feet tall to grow straight up. And what we're seeing here is being creative using different sorts of trellis structures. This was actually an existing greenhouse where they removed the fiberglass roof and are allowing the hops to grow up to up the lines of string, which are then attached to the structure of that existing greenhouse. Nice. And perhaps our producers can kind of go through our slideshow of photos and then Alan and Cindy, you guys can jump in and just kind of explain what we're seeing. And I know we've talked a lot about this brewing process and the cultivars of hops. And I thought it'd be a nice chance just if no one's ever seen hops. For me personally, I've never seen hops. So I was very excited to see these photos. So Cindy, can you explain what this is? So those are young hop cones that are just beginning to develop and grow on the plant. Hops interestingly, similar to cannabis and they're actually in the same family. You grow female plants, you don't want male plants because you don't want seeds in your hop cones. So growers plant female hop plants. So those are beginning hop cones and I'll let you talk about. Okay, when those beginning ones, you notice they're open like that. They're gonna close up as they get older and more mature. And then once they close up, they're ready for picking. And this is a view of the actual hop cones that are now ready to pick and ready to be used. So those are fresh hop cones, ready to go. That would be perfect put into your home brew. And so you just literally take that and put it into your brew and you were talking about the different stages beginning to the end just to get the different flavors and stuff. And so how old would this be roughly? Is this a couple years old? How long does the process of blooming to get the hop cone? A weeks. Weeks? Yeah, yeah. So the plant grows in weeks then, which years in weeks rather. In other climates, they tend to begin growing, they're not called vines, they're called vines would it be? So the vines begin to grow in the spring and into the early summer, you'll start getting some hop cones appearing late summer and they're ready to harvest usually October in most climatic zones. Yeah, that's pretty quick. I didn't realize how fast it was. And they do regrow, they'll grow again in successive years. They usually will trim the plants back. And then again in the spring, you'll get another flush of growth of the vines. You train two or three of those and trim the rest back, prune the rest back. So you just maintain two or three of these vines that you allow to grow. And then I've heard that they can stay in production three to five years before you might consider needing to replant them. Oh, that's fantastic. You definitely get a good yield from it. Once you plant it, you can hopefully expect without pest pressure and disease that you can at least have a crop for the next three or five years and have a market for it as well. So you guys have been sharing your knowledge about home brewing, right? And I thought we could just talk about kind of the education and outreach that you guys do but also that others do to include all these individual home brewers and the home brewing clubs and talk about are there events for home brewing? Do you guys all get together and just drink or do you talk about drinking? Rather, home brewing, excuse me. And just enjoy and relax a nice home brew while you're doing it. So I know we have some photos of these events, I believe. So if we could pull those up, that would be great. So Cindy or Alan, what is this photo of? This is basically a learn to home brew session. So we get a bunch of home brewers together. They bring equipment out and show you how to home brew. And it's a way for people to learn from others as what they're doing. I think this one was an event where there were several people brewing at the same time. So you've got to see several different people's equipment going on, different people brewing in their own particular way. But I think this was also one where they were all brewing the same thing. Yes, the same recipe. So same recipe, but you could add your own additional ingredients like, well, I wanna put hibiscus in mine or I wanna, but you have the same basic starting recipe. So it's a great one for people to get out there and socializing is part of it, talking about the home brewing, having and tasting home brews that other people bring to it, but also learning how to home brew from others. So you see what other people are doing, how they're doing it, and that helps you to grow in your own home brewing skills. So you really, both of you and other clubs, just took the joy of home brewing and just made it a reality in an in-person event. Kind of learning those lessons maybe learning the wrong way the first couple of times, making mistakes, but learning from other people's mistakes and how people can start home brewing successfully and trying these unique combinations. You're mentioning hibiscus. Can you name some other local produce or agricultural crops that people like to use? Lemongrass has been used, Atlantic hibrewing is using lemongrass, as well as hibiscus in their beers. Maui brewing has an award-winning year after year coconut border, which actually uses coconut in it, which is difficult to do, that's tricky because of the oils in the coconut can kill the head in the beer itself. Passion fruit has been a big one that's been used by a number of people here locally and even on the mainland, they've got brewers there that are bringing passion fruit in to use in the beers over there as well. Coffee? Coffee, yes, coffee is a big one. Oh, a cow? Yeah, coffee. We don't have any coffee in Hawaii. We don't have any coffee in Kakao are both real popular to use in porters and stouts. Chili peppers. People like, some people like spicy beer and chili peppers are another great one that you can use in beer to enhance the flavor. There's others in it. Guava has been used too. Boy, there's a bunch and I just not popping around. It seems like you can almost use pretty much anything that's edible. If you're creative, you can. There's a category in the beer judging guidelines which is vegetable beer, which just gives you a clue. You can use darn beer. It's maybe a bit too much for myself. You may not want to be the judge for that, but I know you have. Well, I mean, I wish we could talk all day. We were already near the end of our show, but thank you guys so much for coming on and just sharing your passion and also the science. I didn't realize how much chemistry and science ultimately creativity you were talking about and how local home brewers and craft breweries also help support our local agricultural scene, not through just hops growing, but through producing other products as well. Not only value added products and the loggers and stouts you're talking about, but also incorporating these different crafts that Hawaii's known for to make these unique home brews that local people can enjoy, relax and have a home brew, right? So I want everyone to be able to support your projects and continue the good work that you guys are doing, the socializing, the outreach, the education, helping our farmers grow as well. So our producer will put up the information. Cindy, you mentioned your survey. So the DOA survey, people can email, which email again? The hops at hawaii.rr.com. Okay. And if they wanna learn more about the home brewers on Pacific Shores, the Hops Home Brewing Club, where can they find more information? The Hops Facebook page is a great place to look for that. And I can attest to that. Over 5,000 members in growing with people putting recipes and ideas and selling equipment each and every day, right? Well, again, Cindy Goldstein, thank you so much for joining us. And Alan Spitzer, I really appreciate you taking the time to join. Thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk with you. Yes, thank you very much. So it's been. Match Day is no ordinary day. The Pitch, hallowed ground for players and supporters alike. Excitement builds. Game plans are made with responsibility. Okay. It's been interesting to learn about what's been bubbling and brewing and the home brewing here in Hawaii and how home brewing here, not only melds our local agricultural scene and value-added production and home brewing, but it also creates unique products that you can find in these Hawaiian home brews. You'd like to learn more? We mentioned that email that Cindy can be emailed to learn more about a hop survey. And we also have the home brewers on Pacific Shore's Facebook page. Thank you. Thank you for joining us, Aloha.