US: Florida brewers set up hydroponic hop farm

What makes craft beer “local” is typically the people behind the pint — what they put in it, how close they open a microbrewery to your house. But that’s about the extent of it, says master brewer Aaron Barth, who’s part of a new St. Petersburg brewery called Twin Bays alongside founder Brenden Markopoulos. Soon, the Pinellas-born owners intend to take local a step further with a one-of-a-kind project set to accompany their brewhouse and taproom: a hydroponic hop farm.

Located on Twin Bays Brewing’s large piece of property at 3201 39th Ave. N., the 11,000-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse will produce 4,462 plants or so for about 10,000 pounds of fresh state-grown hops every three months, upping Florida beer’s hometown appeal.

“If you think about your beer, it’s like what’s local about your beer? Your hops are usually grown somewhere else. Your malt is from somewhere else. Usually it’s been the people who make the beer and work in the brewery — that’s local,” said Barth, previously the head brewer for Florida Avenue Brewing Co. “So by giving breweries these hops and letting them use ’em, it makes it a much more local product.”

Twin Bays — whose name has nothing to do with Tampa Bay, Boca Ciega Bay or anyone’s bae and everything to do with the twin-bay hopper cars originally developed during the Great Depression to transport grain — aims to use a small amount of its hops in-house, and then sell the rest commercially. More than a year in the making, the 30-barrel brewery has reached out to folks like Colin Clark of Colorado’s Hydro Hop Farms, whom they plan to consult during their first plant, and the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The institute’s Wimauma and Apopka facilities are testing how well multiple species of hops grow here, and they’re helping Twin Bays with questions that come up along the way.

Read more at Creative Loafing