Just like ranchers talk about head of cattle, not pounds of beef, hop farmers refer to acreage. The B.T. Loftus Ranches hop farm, the Bale Breaker Brewing Co. family’s farm, was established in 1932. These days, it farms close to 1,000 acres of hops. For reference, U.S. farmers grew almost 40,000 acres of hops in 2014, about 29,000 of which were grown in Washington. Since an acre of hops in the Pacific Northwest yields about 2,000 pounds, it’s easy math. Brewers use an average of two pounds of hops per barrel in an IPA, which means a single acre could produce 1,000 barrels, or 2,000 kegs. Those numbers seemed highly abstract as I stood in front of two giant piles of hops on a warehouse floor. The mounds were shaped like perfect Dr. Seuss hills and almost glowing in an astonishing bright green. The hops were about to be baled in two-hundred-pound increments. After a loose pile of hops is smashed together inside burlap or plastic sheeting, someone hand sews the pieces of the bale together at the top. Someone else stencils numbers representing the hop variety, lot, and farm on the top of each bale. When she was little, Meghann said, she would run across the tops of the bales with bare feet and write the numbers on each one.
These days, a single baling crew works twelve-hour days, and each member of the crew is paid per hour. The following day the local newspaper, the Yakima Herald-Republic, would run a front-page story about the labor shortage that was affecting this year’s hop harvest. Because the valley’s hop farms had increased their acreage by 7 percent, the previous year’s workforce simply wasn’t sufficient, especially since the hop industry was competing with the local apple industry for workers.
By the time Meghann and I had returned to the picker building, where the hop bines are processed when they arrive fresh from the fields, the machines were working again. Two trucks had pulled into bays, and men wearing the reflective safety vests of road workers stood in the back of each one, feeding bines onto hooks that would whip the plants, which were clinging to each other for safety, across the two-story building in an unnatural, dangling dance. Not even the most agile Tarzan would have been able to swing through this fast-moving jungle. The hooks fed the hop bines into a vertical slot where a machine violently ripped off all the leaves and cones, a sound like five hundred bug zappers working in unison. The scene made me think of the kind of farm accidents you hear about only when someone heroically survives one, and has to learn to live without a limb. I had the urge to fold my arms, but I didn’t want to put away my notebook and pen.
Next, the bug zapper fed the plant material onto conveyor belts, which separated the hop cones from the leaves, stems, twine, dirt, and other things that shouldn’t go in a brew kettle. Eventually, one conveyor belt carried pure hop cones that were then whisked through a pipe to the kiln building. As Meghann and I walked along narrow wooden planks covered with lupulin and hovering between roaring machines and whizzing conveyor belts, I smelled engine grease underneath the overwhelming aroma of lemony, verdant hops. Lupulin seemed to cover every part of my body, including the insides of my nostrils, and when we walked outside into the glare of the August sun, I noticed a light layer of the powdery resin on Meghann’s face, a hop farmer’s face powder.
So I could see the origin of all the processing activity, Meghann drove me to a lot on her father’s farm where hops were being harvested. We zoomed along a straight two-lane road covered with chunks of hop bines—Yakima roadkill—until we turned onto a dirt road. It led to a spot where dusty rows of plant stubble and empty wires were bordered by rows of leafy green walls, twenty-foot-tall hop plants strung up to wires hung between poles. “Citra,” Meghann said again, which made sense. Theoretically, all the Citra hops would be ready for harvest on the same day, so the harvesting and processing crew would be moving Citra for hours. A truck, bouncing without the weight of a load of hop bines, appeared from a nearby row. Then the parade arrived.
First, a bottom-cutter truck moved down the row, cutting each bine at its base. Behind it, a truck with a large bed pulled a top cutter, a tall contraption with a spiraling bar that grazed the wires as it severed the attached bines and twine. Immediately, masses of green tumbled into the attached truck bed, which looked small among the acres of plants. The clanking, slow-moving machines seemed inefficient, like old-time farm relics.
Before the 1950s, when machines volunteered to do the hop picking, people did the job by hand. In 1931 George Orwell worked on a hop farm in Kent, England, and he kept a journal about the experience. He wrote:
[Hop picking] entails long hours, but it is healthy, outdoor work, and any able-bodied person can do it. The process is extremely simple. The vines, long climbing plants with the hops clustering on them in bunches like grapes, are trained up poles or over wires; all the picker has to do is to tear them down and strip the hops into a bin, keeping them as clean as possible from leaves. The spiny stems cut the palms of one’s hands to pieces, and in the early morning, before the cuts have reopened, it is painful work; one has trouble too with the plant-lice which infest the hops and crawl down one’s neck, but beyond that there are no annoyances. One can talk and smoke as one works, and on hot days there is no pleasanter place than the shady lanes of hops, with their bitter scent – an unutterably refreshing scent, like a wind blowing from oceans of cool beer.
These days, workers wearing helmets and orange safety vests do different work by hand. A few men moved among the rows of plants with machetes, chopping missed bines at the base, as though they were on an expedition through the deep Amazon jungle.
I felt exhausted on behalf of all the workers involved in harvest. Here, every part of the harvest process, with the exception of the bailing room, would operate 24/7 until every hop from the field had been processed. If the entire length of this year’s harvest were a Monday-through-Friday workweek, I was there on a Wednesday morning. One harvest manager told me these middle days were a difficult time; the crew couldn’t yet celebrate the nearness of the end. As harvest unfolds, managers rejigger the end date. Every day that gets added weighs on everyone involved.
Years ago, after I’d visited my first Oregon hop farm, I’d come up with a vision of an end-of-hop-harvest dinner, which I thought would make a great magazine feature. In Kinfolk style, the dinner would happen on a hop farm at a long table flanked with the beautiful people who’d made the harvest happen. Bathed in flattering light of a sunset, they’d eat a roasted pig that had somehow been seasoned with hops. I’d gone so far as to ask an Oregon hop farmer about the idea. He sounded skeptical. “Everyone usually just wants to get out of here by the time we’re done,” he’d said. Later, at a different farm, I noticed a charred spot at the end of a row of hops, an informal fire pit littered with blackened corncobs and husks. I guessed that was how workers were sustaining themselves during nighttime shifts, when the plants were illuminated by headlights, flashlights, and moonlight. I silently wished them a roasted pig.
All the lupulin and dust had made me thirsty. At the Bale Breaker taproom, a bastion of craft beer in an otherwise parched valley, I ordered a sampler paddle of the brewery’s current lineup of beers. The lighter end of the beer spectrum was perfectly refreshing, and I was surprised to taste a restrained use of hops in many of the styles. Meghann’s parents sat with us on a covered outdoor patio. Her dad, Mike Smith, told me how the snowmelt from the Cascades made for good irrigation. Combined with the long days and cool nights of the forty-seventh parallel, Yakima had the perfect conditions for hop growing. Compared to Oregon, the Yakima valley had fewer fungal diseases and downy mildew, factors that could severely diminish yield. While this kind of information was studied and recorded by science, in Mike’s case, it was also passed down. His grandparents planted nine acres of hops on this land in 1932, the year before Prohibition ended. Mike told me when he got into the business in the early 1970s, a few hundred Washington families grew hops. These days, only forty or forty-five families were hop growers.
The Smith family had been preparing for a visit from “beer royalty,” some famous craft brewers who were in town for
the harvest. The family marked the occasion with a big dinner at home, which of course included plenty of beer. Sure enough, as I lingered at the tap room, Vinnie and Natalie Cilurzo arrived. They were the owners of Russian River Brewing Co. in Santa Rosa, California, and I’d interviewed them both by phone years ago, so I said hello. Natalie and I talked about the Great American Beer Festival, which was coming up in a few weeks. I would be there for the first time. A brewer from Tröegs Independent Brewing in Hershey, Pennsylvania, came through the door toting a cooler filled with his beers. As I finished my beer, I listened to the brewers and hop farmer talk about the weather and other Yakima farms they’d visited. They discussed certain hop varieties, gossiped about industry folk, and reminisced about last year. In that moment, I sensed that next year’s beers were being created at that very moment, thanks to a magical mingling of dusty heat, verdant bines, and creative juices.
A hop yard grows despite the land’s naturally parched state during the summer. The towers of plants rise as victorious symbols of how humans successfully wrangle water. But the sun is relentless. The next day, as I walked through rows of experimental hops in a hop yard designed to foster genetic experiments, not even the pillars of leaves blocked the unapologetic sun, which seared my neck at every turn. Every plant around me was an original genetic creation bred to serve a specific need; this was a place I felt I needed to see if I was going to understand how popular hop varieties had come into existence.
Because of the scientific nature of this space, I’d imagined rows of plants identified by metal plaques, the kind you’d find in a well-curated arboretum. Instead, the rows of hops looked like any other hop yard, until I slowed down and really started to look at the plants. Unlike a regular hop farm, where a single variety is grown together in rows that make up uniform-looking lots, these plants varied wildly. Some were bushy and hedge-like near the ground. Others were stringy and leggy-tall. I couldn’t tell from looking at them what I longed to know: which hop would become the next big thing. Maybe, just maybe, one of these hop plants would drive brewers and beer drinkers wild a few years from now. They’d crave this single variety’s flavors and aromas, which would forever change the craft beer landscape. It has happened before.
The only way I’d understand this place was to stay close to Gene Probasco, one of the most accomplished hop breeders in the world. I tried to match his stride. He wore a baseball cap and a crisp button-up shirt; the collar was proof he was accustomed to a hop yard’s harsh sun. Gene works for John I. Haas, a hop company founded in 1914 in Germany. Through mergers and buyouts, its parent company, the Barth-Haas Group, is able to call itself “the world’s largest supplier of hops and hop services.” Earlier that morning, Gene had picked me up from my hotel in Yakima. As we left the lobby, where men wearing caps and shirts emblazoned with beer logos carried briefcases and clipboards, I heard trucks roaring along the nearby highway. The air smelled resinous and green.
“Does it smell like hops?” I asked him. Gene paused and squinted, his face upturned to the stark blue sky.
“I don’t think so. But maybe I’m just used to it,” he conceded, generously.
My logical self knew that, if a man who’d spent thirty-plus years in the hop industry wasn’t smelling hops, I wasn’t smelling hops. But I didn’t want to believe it, because I was in Yakima. Later I’d look back on the moment as proof of the power of place to alter one’s perception, a common aspect of how humans evaluate aromas and tastes. Right then, I wanted to romanticize the air in a parking lot next to Interstate 82.
As we drove to the experimental hop farm, Gene pointed out fields of other crops along the way, from apples to asparagus. I kept steering the conversation back to hops. Gene explained that, unlike plants that have male and female parts on the same plant, entire hop plants are either male or female. While both “genders” of plants produce hop flowers, the male plants will pollinate the females to produce seeds, which makes them undesirable for brewing. That’s why every plant on a hop farm is female. When hop plants do reproduce, the male and female plants cross-pollinate to make unique genetic offspring, like humans.
During his decades of working for John I. Haas, Gene researched and invented nonbrewing uses for hops. Because the alpha acids in hops are antimicrobial—one of the properties that makes them a preservative in beer—they’re also useful in substances like ethanol. In addition, the beta acids in hops can be used to sterilize surfaces. In sugar processing, hops can be used instead of formaldehyde to clean equipment. Beta acids can also help control parasitic mites that attack honeybees.
But those hop uses are still secondary for Gene. The main focus of his work is to breed new hop varieties that will wow brewers. To accomplish that task, he plants about 15,000–20,000 seedlings each year, of about 2,500 distinct varieties. He and his team expose all the seedlings to powdery mildew, one of the greatest threats to hop plants, which will kill about half of the seedlings. For the next three years, Gene monitors the survivors. By the third year, he selects twenty to forty of the most promising varieties, multiplies the plants for each one, and transfers the plants to a test plot, where they’ll spend at least five years in the ground. In total, it takes about ten years to develop a new hop variety, which means Gene becomes intimately familiar with each plant that has promise.
“Are they like your children?” I asked, immediately regretting that I’d anthropomorphized the focus of his scientific career. But he played along.
“Yes, I suppose they’re kind of like my children,” he replied. “You start to learn their behaviors and characteristics.” He does have favorites, he said, but among the thousands of new hop varieties he’s created, “very few of them are actually special.”
At this point in his career, Gene is most famous for breeding the Citra variety, the highly sought-after aroma hop with a distinct citrus aromas I knew intimately after my time at Bale Breaker. Gene told me he first bred the plant in 1990, but brewers weren’t interested in its grapefruit characteristics back then. In 2007 he sent samples of Citra to Widmer, Deschutes, and Sierra Nevada. At the time, the hop was known as EXP 114. Eventually, Citra was renamed, and other brewers fell in love with the hop. Back then, Gene was surprised it took so long for brewers to latch on to the variety. “I’m not surprised by anything anymore,” he said.
Like a fashion designer who debuts shocking silhouettes on the runway years before they become popular with a mainstream audience, Gene seemed like a purveyor of tastes, like somehow he knew what flavors and aromas brewers would want ten years from now. But he told me my assumption was wrong.
“We don’t tell the brewers what they’re going to want or need,” he said. “They tell us.”
As we walked through the experimental field, Gene would stop and pull a stack of stapled papers from his back pocket. He called it a map, but once I saw it, I called it a spreadsheet.
“We’re here,” he said, pointing at one of the sheet’s horizontal rows. The line read: 60, 18-24, S169-78. Once in a while, he’d stop to pluck a hop cone from a plant and break it open to examine the juicy inside. Then he’d rub the cone between his hands and inhale the air inside his cupped hands. I followed suit, trying to notice the differences between aromas, but more obvious was the scale of intensity of what I smelled. Some didn’t smell like anything but a raw hop plant, while others seemed more complex and nuanced. At one point, I said I smelled mint, and Gene confirmed that a nearby farm grew mint, which was most likely being harvested that morning.
Gene said he wanted to check on a few varieties with banana aromas. He checked the map. When he found his destination plant, he pulled a cone, smelled it, and said, “Yep, that’s banana, but onion and garlic are coming through. It’s overripe.”
We heard laughter and tromped through the rows to find its source. A few rows to the east, Joe Casey, the brewmaster at Widmer Brothers, and Doug Rehberg, who’d sat next to me at the taste panel, were holding the same spreadsheet. When brewers visit hop farms during harv
est, most of them also visit nearby experimental hop yards, because what grows here could greatly alter their future. Joe and Doug said they’d visited this plot a few weeks ago, but they’d returned to check on a few varieties, because they wanted to examine how those hops were maturing on the bine. Joe said that, when they identified an experimental hop as interesting, Widmer would order about ten pounds of the hop for an experimental brew. If the hop performed well in the kettle, the brewery would “sponsor an acre” of that variety, a minor financial gamble for a large, well-funded brewery like Widmer.
“We’re not looking for a specific aroma,” Doug said, “but something new or different.”
“We also look at yield,” added Joe. I’d already learned how greater yielding plants were the future of hop growing, considering the rising cost of land and the growing demand for hops worldwide.
As they talked, Joe and Doug pulled hop cones from different plants, rubbed them in their hands, and inhaled.
“I’m getting lime and cedar here,” Joe said.
A few plants down the row, Doug yelled out that he found one that had notes of menthol and something fruity, something like Fruit Stripe gum. Joe sprinted to him and smelled the hop for himself.
“Yeah, totally!” he said shaking his head in disbelief. “Fruit Stripe gum.” I wanted to think they’d just discovered the hop that would launch a thousand brews.
My Beer Year Page 6