This Bradenton brewery helps pioneer the use of Florida-grown hops in its newest beer

Motorworks Brewing in Bradenton makes about 186,000 gallons of beer a year, but one of its most recent batches, about 100 gallons of brew, was made with Florida-grown hops.

Bob Haa, head brewer, and Desiree Chubb, director of quality and production at Motorworks Brewing, believe the Florida hops batch will go fast when its available at the tap.

What patrons will be drinking is a pale ale and it’s quite good, they said.

Motorworks newest batch of beer is made from freshly grown hops from the University of Florida’s Gulf Coast Research And Education Center in Balm, southern Hillsborough County.

Florida-grown hops has been a work in progress there since UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences announced in 2016 that researchers were working to develop a viable crop.

The first objective was to determine if it was feasible to grow hops in Florida. Early research showed that it was possible.

But as Bob Haa notes, Florida has fewer daylight hours than northwestern states, like Washington, Oregon and Idaho, which supplies Motorworks with most of its hops. And hops likes daylight.

If it sounds counter-intuitive that Washington state would have more daylight hours than the Sunshine State, consider that the further north you travel, there are places where the sun never seems to set. Norway and Alaska among them, depending on the season.

IFAS scientists solved the daylight problem by using LED lighting to extend the day and to grow hops twice a year.

“The artificial light tricks the crop into thinking daylight lasts longer than it really does. Florida growers may be able to produce a higher yield than the Pacific Northwest — if we can tailor the LED lighting and other horticultural practices according to plant-growth habits and requirements in each season,” IFAS said.

Haa and Chubb would like to brew more beer with Florida-grown hops, but the problem is one of supply.

“The availability is not great,” Haa said. “It’s still a novelty. It’s not even a fledgling industry yet.”

For hops to really take off as a Florida-grown ingredient, many more farmers would need to adopt it as a crop.

The hops grown in the Pacific Northwest arrive in Bradenton in pellet form.

Unless used within 48 hours, the fresh hops, like those from IFAS, quickly go bad, Haa said.

“Eventually, they have to get to the point of pelletizing the hops,” Haa said.

The Motorworks staff went to the IFAS research center in Balm, and harvested the hops themselves, Chubb said.

More than 50 brewers and growers, including Motorworks, out of more than 400 Florida craft brewers, attended IFAS’s hops field day at Balm in June.

Haa has some ideas about other crops that Florida farmers could contribute to the craft brewing industry. One is red habanero peppers.

“Spicy beers sell very well,” Haa said.

The supply of some other ingredients, like blueberries and black berries, seems to be improving, but passion fruit is still not available in great quantities, he said.

Unless you’re a regular at Motorworks, you might be surprised by their best seller is Pulp Friction. It’s a grapefruit IPA (India Pale Ale.), and accounts for 55% of sales at Motorworks, Haa said.

Motorworks Brewing is one of the first breweries in the Tampa Bay area to use Florida-grown hops.

Among the others are 3 Daughters, Grand Central, and Mastry’s in St. Petersburg and Leaven Brewing in Riverview, said Simon Bollin, agribusiness development manager for UF/IFAS Extension Hillsborough County.