Rogue Farms – I am Oregon Agriculture

Me (John Maier), harvesting honey at Rogue Farms in Independence, Oregon

I am Oregon agriculture.

My name is John Maier and I’m the Brewmaster at Rogue Ales & Spirits. If there’s one thing 25 years has taught us, it’s that there’s no better way to get farm fresh beer than to grow your own. The GYO Revolution starts at Rogue Farms, in Independence, OR, where we grow more than a dozen ingredients that reflect terroir andorigin in every bottle.

We grow seven varieties of hops, two varieties of malting barley, pumpkins, rye, jalapeños, marionberries, and honey. We grow a proprietary palate of flavors that go into Rogue ales, porters, stouts, lagers, mead, kolsch, braggotand spirits.

Our seven varieties of hops include Freedom, Revolution and Yaquina hops, the last of which we’ll be harvesting for the first time this year. We do more than grow and pick the hops, we also strip, sort, separate, kiln, cool and bale them on the farm just a few feet away from the hop rows. After processing, all of our hops end up in our Rogue Farms brews.

The Revolution hop harvest at Rogue Farms.

We grow 200 acres of Risk™ and Dare™ malting barley at Rogue Farms in Tygh Valley, OR. Here in the rain shadow of Mt. Hood we have some of the finest malting barley growing terroir in the world. Tygh Valley is also home to our Farmstead Malt House, where we floor malt and micro malt our grain by hand in small artisan batches. Then we send the bags of malt to the Rogue Brewery in Newport where we smoke and roast them into a variety of flavors.

Our field of Dream pumpkins produce a bountiful crop that’s wonderfully sweet. We cut them off the vines with machetes, truckthem to our brewery in Newport, cut them open to remove the seeds, and then roast them in our pizza oven to caramelize the sugars and bring out their flavor. Then they go into a kettle to be brewed into our Rogue Farms Pumpkin Patch Ale.

This year we’re also growing an acre of jalapeno peppers. We’ll pick each pepper by hand, then dry smoke them into chipotles and use them to brew Rogue Farms Chipotle Ale and Spirit.

The finished product. The farmers and fermenters of the Rogue Nation remain committed to saving the terroir of hops and barley one acre at a time by growing their own.

From spring until the end of summer our 7,140,289 honeybees forage on the wildflowers, hazelnuts, cherries and apples that surround Rogue Farms and help us out by pollinating our pumpkins, marionberries and jalapeños. The honey they produce is infused with all the flavors of the Wigrich Appellation, a true taste of terroir. We make all of Rogue Beers and Spirits in collaboration with Mother Nature. Please visit us at Rogue Farms and see how we grow beer and spirits!