Material Culture of Breweries (Guides to Historical Artifacts) by Herman Wiley Ronnenberg

Author:Herman Wiley Ronnenberg [Ronnenberg, Herman Wiley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315424781
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-06-15T21:00:00+00:00

Figure 2.17. A New York hop kiln. (Meeker, 1883, 94–95.)

A good description exists of a hop house from Otsego County, New York: “An iron stove in the drying house heated hops on the upper, slatted floor. Airtight walls, a roof vent, and the wind-directed cowl above created the necessary updraft. Dried hops cooled in the top floor of the shed, … and were dropped to the press room for baling. The structure was painted ‘barn red’ with iron oxide and oil.”160 Another description of a typical hop house read: “A kiln floor 16 feet square, and laid four feet deep, will have about nine hundred bushels or 4,500 pounds of hops, which contain 3,400 pounds of water to be evaporated in twelve hours”161 (fig. 2.17).

Ezra Leland described the hop kilns in his area of Morrisville in Madison County, New York, in 1845.162 They had developed since the concepts published in 1834. They were about 30 feet long, 18 feet wide, and the first story of stone or brick was 9 feet high with 18-inch holes to let air in for the eight charcoal fires. The kiln had thinner walls than those of a decade earlier, and no funnel-shaped interior.

The next development in the eastern United States was the round stone oast house based on the British model. It was near the storage barn and would have a hallway to connect them. In 1832, balloon construction, using framing with two-by-fours, was introduced, and by 1860 was applied to hop kiln construction in Otsego County, New York.163

As hop growing moved to the Midwest, hop house construction developed there, starting with the concepts of the 1860s. H. H. Potter of Sauk County, Wisconsin, described the hop house he erected in 1865: “It was 40 by 20 with studding sixteen feet high under a single roof at quarter pitch which cost $400 to construct.”164 The hop kiln built by the Canfield family of Sauk County, Wisconsin, was an eightsided log structure with a shake roof and a large ventilator on top. Others in the area were stone-and-rubble wall oast style. Tomlan concluded that “the most important contributions of Wisconsin’s comparatively brief hop-growing effort lie in the introduction of the balloon frame and in the preoccupation with mechanical drying. A little over a decade later both of these improvements were adopted by the large growers on the Pacific Coast.”165

Rectangular hop kilns were the only ones to become popular in the Pacific Northwest. In the northwest there were very large triple kiln hop houses with ramps on the side permitting horse-drawn wagons to unload.166 The Woolrey-Koehler hop kiln of the Puyallup Valley of Washington state was built in 1869 of charred cedar logs. Wood stoves heated the entire building, including the upper level drying room and the central baling room (fig. 2.18). In 1890, the building was expanded and a second, shorter chimney added.167

After cooling, the hops were baled in America, while in Europe they were put in bags before being cooled. Hop baling presses were

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