What’s up y’all. My name is Jeremy Marshall. I am the brew monster for the Lagunitas Brewing Company. Today we’re going to learn a little bit about how Hi-Fi Hops in made. In the meantime, I’m finishing up a truck delivery because the regular driver called in sick. But the show must go on. Nonetheless, let’s pop out here and have a look at how Hi-Fi Hops is made. So Hi-Fi Hops starts with rain. Everybody always wonders: How do you have water in California? Well it does rain here, especially in northern California. That’s why we live up here. It’s green and we have lots of water. You can look around right now. This is actual rain.
So, these are filled up about this full with granular activated carbon. We percolate the city water that started as rain – if you were paying attention there will be a test! It percolates through this and then it goes to our de-aeration factory that we’ll see next.
It then goes through about a three-stage filtration process, so through all of these guys, 10 micron, 1 micron – nobody cares, we’re getting too nerdy. We do a lot of quality assurance, quality control to make sure that it’s as close to 0 parts per billion as possible. And then we fill a giant tank. So, we fill one of these tanks all the way up to the top.
I’m going to take you to the dry-hopping. We’re just going to do one long cut here. They’re telling me to hurry it up right now. All right. So, we’re here at the hop cannon. The infamous Lagunitas hop cannon. This is a pressure tank that’s about a centimeter thick. It is filled with hops. We pressurize it with CO2 and use that CO2 as the force to blast the hops all the way up into the top of the tank and dry hop Hi-Fi Hops. We’re using three varieties: citra, centennial, and equinox. Citra gives, as the names suggests, flavors of your citrus fruits, also some passion fruit and things like that; centennial gives you bubble gum; and the equinox gives you fruity pebbles and all kinds of just interesting fruits. And it all mixes together and makes for this pop explosion.
So right here we’re next to something that everybody might recognize from their high school science class. We use a microscope to do a cell count because there’s yeast are used to make beer but for Hi-Fi Hops yeast are doing an incredibly different function. We add yeast to munch on those hops, to biotransform, the yeast actually contains special enzymes that work the terpenes and the hops from one class into another class that are a lot more bioactive. So that literally transform the terpenes. And that’s called biotransformation. We’re also going to check out the centrifuge, which is super loud, we might get to catch it discharge, and that’s when it opens up and spits out all the hops. So we add all those hops, to the Hi-Fi we have to get those hops out.
So today it looks like it’s going to be Stevie Ray Vaughn. Every day is a different theme. This is the centrifuge. This one’s not running. We’re running this one. It’s warm. So, meet me around here. So that’s after, and this is before. Going at 92 gallons a minute.
We get all that dialed in perfectly and we fill it into a tanker truck, then we send that 10 minutes up the road to Santa Rosa, where it is magically infused by shamanic alchemy with cannabinoids. It’s so not 420. What up? It’s starting to spit. How’s it going, bro. Good to see you. And then it goes into the bottle factory where it becomes delicious 5 and 10mg incarnations. Or as we like to say, the silver and the purple.
Cheers!
Not bad.