Ramona’s Star B Ranch, a nationally-recognized buffalo ranch, has been harvesting hops — mostly Cascade and Nugget varieties — since 2008, with local brewery clients including Monkey Paw, Helms, ChuckAlek, San Diego Brewing Company, Julian Brewing Company, and Ballast Point.
This season, they have a (big) helping hand with managing their two acres of hops: the German-engineered WHE 170 Wolf Hop Harvester, a 9,000 lb. machine built in the 1970s that can handle as many as 340 ten-foot plants per hour, quickly stripping the bines and separating the cones from the leaves and stems. By comparison, hand-picking hops from each long, prickly bine can take nearly 45 minutes. (March still hopes to allow homebrewers to come out for “pick-your-own hops” sessions in early August, like they’ve done in years past.)
“Hand picking automatically limits the size of crop growers like ourselves can handle,” said Eric March, a member of the Star B Ranch management team that includes his wife Amie, and his in-laws Ken and Denice Childs. The family decided to invest in the Wolf because of their proven track record for small-scale hop farmers throughout Europe and the United States.
It was quite an operation to get the Wolf from Germany to San Diego County, starting with engineers cutting it in half for shipment. “We then had to rent a 10,000 lb. lift to move each half for reassembly,” March, who had to make extra trips to Los Angeles to pick up parts that didn’t originally arrive from overseas, told WC. “The unit cost around $32,000 plus $8,000 in shipping and handling, and probably another $5,000 or so in electrical work and miscellaneous parts,” March estimated, not including his crew’s labor.
Click here for a short video of Star B working on the hop machine.