Rogue Farms – We Grow Bees & Honey & Rogue Reaps What It Sows

This year, our 7,156,283 honeybees made 89,453,537,512 stops to collect nectar from flowering hazelnuts, maples, roses, apples, walnuts, cherries, pumpkins, raspberries, marionberries, blackberries and clover. The honey they produced is a sampling of all the flavors of the Wigrich Appellation – a unique taste of place.

John removes a beeswax seal from a honeycomb which allows the honey to be extracted during harvest.

You’ll be able to taste the terroir of Rogue Farms for yourself when the honey we harvested is used to brew 19 Original Colonies Mead, Honey Kolsch and Braggot.

Honey is just one of the farm fresh ingredients we grow here at Rogue Farms to create a proprietary palate of flavors for Brewmaster John Maier. Growing our own is the best way to make sure we use the freshest honey possible from the same farm where we also grow our hops, rye, pumpkins and jalapenos.

Smoke calms the bees when we open the hives for inspection. 

We open all the hives and check the honeycombs to see which ones have enough surplus honey for us to harvest. We want to leave enough honey behind for the honeybees to feed themselves during the upcoming winter. So we take only the fullest honeycombs.

This is what a full honeycomb looks like – heavy and bulging with honey hidden by a thick seal of beeswax.

After the beeswax is removed, we put the honeycombs into a hand cranked extractor and give them a spin.

The extractor spins the honeycombs using centrifugal force to remove the honey. The honey drips to the bottom and passes through a light filter before we gather it in buckets.

When we’re done, we drive the just harvested honey 77 miles over the Oregon Coast Range to the Rogue Brewery in Newport to be brewed as Mead, Kolsch and Braggot. This is as farm fresh as it gets.