Beer And Spirits Begin In The Dirt

From tiny pumpkin shoots to foot high wheat, see how beer and spirits begins in the dirt.

The First Signs Of Beer

We took a stroll through our hopyard this morning and look at what we found!

The first bines of the season are emerging from the soil. They’re so tiny, about the size of a bottle cap, we almost didn’t see them.

A new bine pokes through the dirt in the 42-acre hopyard at Rogue Farms.

Picking Our Plums

We’re blessed this year with one of our best crops ever on our 19-acre orchard at Rogue Farms in Tygh Valley, Oregon.

It’s quite the comeback story. We lost nearly all of our fruit for three years in a row due to severe frosts that hit during the flowering season. But this spring was warm and dry, almost perfect in fact. Now we’ve got so much fruit it’s as if the trees were making up for lost time.

So what are we picking this week?

The Harvest Season Begins!

The calendar says summer is just getting started. Not the time of year you normally think about bringing in a crop.

But Mother Nature doesn’t always stick to a schedule. Thanks to a spring growing season that was unusually warm and sunny the Rogue Farms cherries are ripe now. So what if they’re a couple of weeks early? It’s time to get the ladders and baskets out of the barn and head into the orchard to start picking.

Tree To Table At Rogue Farms

We are officially exhaling at Rogue Farms in Tygh Valley.

There's only about a week left in the month of May and our orchard crops are in excellent shape. Lots of good-looking apples, cherries, plums, pears and apricots.

Blossoms In Your Beer

We can’t think of a prettier place to be than spring time in a cherry orchard.

Stroll among the trees and feel the orchards glow in soft hues of white and pink. A gentle breeze sends petals drifting lazily through the air.

Stand still for a moment and take in the quiet. Because, if you listen very carefully, you’ll hear a slight buzz.

That’s the sound of our Rogue Farms honeybees.

April in the cherry orchards next door to Rogue Farms.

The blossoming of the cherry orchards marks the beginning of the spring nectar flow, a time of year when the Wigrich Appellation offers an amazing buffet of flowers for our honeybees. As the cherries fade away, the pears will come into bloom, to be followed by the apple trees. Thousands of wildflowers dot the landscape.

All a bee has to do is fly off in any direction and it will soon find a nice source of nectar and pollen. But they seem to take a shine to cherry blossoms.

A closer look at the cherry blossoms.

We started keeping honeybees because we wanted to create another ingredient to our proprietary palate of flavors of known origin. Because nothing says terroir quite like honey.

From spring until the end of summer our 7,140,289 honeybees will sample all the flavors of the Wigrich Appellation including; hazelnuts, our Dream Pumpkins, our jalapeños, our marionberries, cherries, apples, wild blackberries, clover, and a gazillion other wild flowers.

Rogue Farms Wildflower honey is truly a taste of place.

Rogue Farms honeybees returning from a trip to the cherry orchards.

You can try putting cherry blossoms in your beer, or you could let our honeybees do it for you. This year’s crop of Rogue Farms honey will be put to good use by John Maier as he crafts future batches of 19 Original Colonies Mead, Honey Kolsch and Marionberry Braggot.

Spring has arrived at Rogue Farms! Come join us for another season of growing beer, spirits and honey.

 

 

Hard Freeze Hits Rogue Farms Cherries And Apples

This year’s crop of apples and cherries at Rogue Farms in Tygh Valley, Oregon may be a total loss.

Our orchards were hit hard by several nights of below freezing temperatures, severely damaging the new blooms and buds of the cherry and apple trees.

And considering what happened to the rye at our farm in Independence – it’s a week of tough news – and it’s only Tuesday.