There isn't much difference between picking hops in Washington's Yakima Valley, to be used within hours for Bert Grant's Fresh Hop Ale, and picking hops at Anheuser-Busch's Idaho hops farm, to be used after a year of aging for Budweiser.

"These machines haven't changed much in 25 years," said Kevin Laurent, who manages two hop ranches for S.S. Steiner in Yakima Valley. That the process remains much the same doesn't mean the hop business has stood still, however. "You can really mess up a hop if you make the wrong decision," Laurent said. "It's changed a lot in the last 10 years, with all the varieties. ... When I was a kid there were two hops - an early and a late Cluster."

Clusters were the dominant hops in the Yakima Valley 20 years ago, for at the time they were both high in alpha acid and hardy. Hops with much higher alpha acid levels (meaning they are more bitter and therefore more economical) have since been developed, but Clusters remain a popular Yakima crop.

At Elk Mountain Hop Farm, which is run by the A-B subsidiary known as Busch Agricultural Resources Inc., only traditional German hops - Saaz, Hallertau/Mittelfrau and Tettnang - are grown, from root stock that originated in Europe. At 1,800 acres, Elk Mountain is the world's largest aroma hop farm, but its output represents less than 8 percent of the hops used by A-B.

The farm, which was first planted in 1987, sits just 10 miles from the Canadian border, north of Bonners Ferry, Idaho. The U.S.-Canadian border is on the same latitude as the prime hop-growing regions of Europe, and gets 16 hours of sunlight in the summer. That, combined with swampy, low bottom land, made the setting ideal. "Hops like the river bottom, the silty, loamy type of soil," said Elk Mountain manager Brad Studer. The climate is wetter than in the Yakima region; the Elk Mountain farms only have to be irrigated two or three times a year.

Yakima is the second-largest (behind Germany) hop producing region in the world, as well as the leading apple producer and an area rich with vineyards. Fields producing each of the three crops touch at places, but crop rotation isn't an alternative. Trees take time to grow, and a single hop plant will send up vines for 20 years.

Anheuser-Busch paid the way for beer writers to see hops harvested in Idaho, while Yakima Brewing & Malting Co. (Bert Grant's Real Ales) footed the bill for writers to witness the harvest in Washington. What they saw was the flurry of activity that comes after six months of growing season. In Yakima, the harvest begins in mid-August and needs to be completed by the third week of September, when snow becomes a threat.

Hops grown on the Elk Mountain Hop Farm climb clockwise up 20-foot poles, joined together by wires in a grid system. They travel up biodegradable twine made from coconut husks, in a clockwise rotation following the sun. The first hops to mature, the Saaz, are ready to pick in mid-August, and the whole crop is picked in three weeks.

The hops are harvested by hand, combines and mechanical pickers. They are transported to the on-grounds cleaning shed, where machinery separates the leaves and stems from the cones. "We can get 0 percent leaves and stems with these machines," Studer said. Next, they are dried at 150 degrees F in a kiln, then sent to a heated room for further drying, to reach a moisture content of about 10 percent. From there, the hops are packed in 200-pound bales, then shipped cold to be stored at 26 degrees F. This year's yield was expected to be more than 1.5 million pounds.

The process in Yakima Valley is much the same, but happens over and over on a smaller scale, since the area is dotted with company and family ranches much smaller than Elk Mountain. Hops arrived in the Yakima Valley in 1868, so many farms are staffed by workers four or five generations into hops.

Only 20 percent of S.S. Steiner's shipments out of Yakima are whole hops - the rest are pellets or extracts, mostly pellets. Bert Grant developed the process for pelletizing hops for Steiner, and Fresh Hop Ale (the first of four single-hop seasonals the brewery plans to release) aside, the practicalities of using hop pellets far outweigh the romance of seeing whole hops floating in a brewing kettle. Nevertheless, A-B uses the whole cones, which are aged for a year.

The potency of hops degenerates rapidly, so that beer made with six-month-old hops will taste different than beer brewed with three-month-old hops unless the recipe is altered. In fact, since the Cascades in the Fresh Hop Ale weren't even dried, those hops decompose even quicker. Head brewer Darren Waytuck made daily forays into the hop fields to pick up Cascades. The hops were usually in the brewing kettle - 70 pounds per 40-barrel batch - within two hours after they were picked. They were added late in the boil for aroma, long after pellets used for bittering.

Otherwise, it's rare to find whole hops inside Bert Grant's Brewery. Since Fresh Hop Ale was being brewed when writers visited, Grant scooped up a handful as a prop in a photo opportunity. After the camera flashes had gone off, he took a single cone and broke it. He pulled it to his nose, his eyes closed, and a large smile crossed his face.

Some things never change.