The Hop Grower's Handbook: Introduction

8/20/2019 The Hop Grower's Handbook: Introduction

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northern horizon for a storm that never came. Prior

to the July heat wave we had endured a month of

heavy rain. The combination of the prolonged deluge

followed by the period of intense heat had resulted in

massive swarms of insects, and on the deck we were

soon enveloped in a cloud of mosquitoes that even-

tually drove us into the house. To beat the heat Dieterhad taken to getting up early to do farm chores,

patrol our newly established hop yards for the latest

outbreaks of insects and disease, and cut down the

rampant weeds flourishing in the heat and moisture.

It was : a.m. on a hot and muggy Saturday

morning in mid-July when I woke. Despite the

early hour my husband, nicknamed Dieter, was gone

from the bed and it was already pushing degrees.

Here in upstate New York we were about to suffer

through the sixth day of an unbearable heat wave

blanketing the Northeast. Last night we had sat onour deck overlooking the pond, mesmerized by heat

lightning flashing across the night sky. The peach-

tinted waves of light illuminated the scalloped edges

of a brigade of dark thunderheads massing on the

Introduction

Helderberg hops growing in front of our barn, with a view of our pilot hop yard the first year it was planted.


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bines’ thick green leaves to lace. A disaster. But yes,

he would come in and make the coffee.

As for me, still in my nightgown, I rushed down-

stairs and pulled out the Field Guide for Integrated

Pest Management in Hops, a cooperative publication

of Oregon State University, the University of Idaho,and Washington State University along with the

United States Department of Agriculture’s

Agricultural Research Service. Yes, I realize we are

talking about the integrated management of pests on

the other side of an enormous continent from our

little hop yard. But right now that’s all we’ve got.

Virtually all the country’s major commercial hop

production happens in the Northwest. The only

thing anyone has written lately about hop growing in

the East is a history book.In the s New York State was the biggest

producer of hops in the country, but the hop indus-

try has been dead here for about one hundred years,

victim to a combination of fungal disease, hop

aphids, and Prohibition at the turn of the century. I

quickly flipped to the well-worn section Arthropod

and Slug Pest Management and ran my finger

down the long list. Bertha armyworm, California

prionus beetle, hop looper, root weevil . . . wait a

minute, what about the letter J as in Japanese bee-

tle? Nothing. Do they not have Japanese beetles in

the Northwest? I consulted Google. No, they don’t.

Yet our hop yard here in upstate New York is crawl-

ing with Japanese beetles. What’s an Eastern hop

grower to do?

At this point it might make sense to ask why we

are growing hops here in the first place. Well, like

many things in life, it started over a few beers. My

husband and I went to high school together, and

that’s where we first became friends. We grew up in

the countryside near the city of Albany, me living on

my family’s apple orchard and him living just a mile

or so down the road. We are now in our early fifties,

but we became beer enthusiasts at a young age. Keep

in mind this was back when the drinking age in New

York was eighteen. There weren’t many local places

Whether you call it climate change, weather weird-

ing, “the new normal,” or just bad luck, we had

picked a heck of a year to start our hop farm.

I waited for a bit, then called Dieter on his cell

phone. I was a little concerned about where he was,

but mostly I wanted him to make coffee. Over

twenty-five years of marriage it has become a tradi-

tional job of his to, each morning, make espresso for

himself and caffe latte for me—and lately for our

teenage son, Wolfgang. I could tell as soon as Dieter

answered the phone there was something wrong. He

gave his field report in a dismal voice. The Japanese

beetles that we had noticed to be increasing in num-

ber in the hop yard over the past two days had

exploded overnight into a major infestation, deci-

mating our yard of heirloom hops and swarming

into the first- and second-year plantings, the beetles’

innumerable munching mouths reducing our hop

Japanese beetles do a lot of damage to hop yards in the

eastern United States but have not yet become a problem

for hop growers in the Northwest.


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tour—but first we shared a draft Duvel at the bar.

The dark beer the workers were drinking was

Maredsous Triple, percent alcohol by volume—

compare that to Budweiser, your average American

“working man’s” beer, weighing in at percent. Our

guide was the brewery’s public relations man. Heexplained that when we had first entered the bar the

workers had just been joking about how long it had

been since anyone had come looking for a brewery

tour—hence the surprised silence, then laughter. As

we talked we noticed the man’s face was crisscrossed

with healed scars. He explained that the brewery’s

products were very high in alcohol and he had been

in several car accidents driving home from work. He

cautioned us against drinking and driving. His tour

took us past giant open-air vats of beer brewed witha form of wild yeast that had become the brewery’s

signature and over a maze of elevated, narrow, and

slippery catwalks that took us through the brewing

apparatus. From the catwalk I looked down to see

the workers on the brewery floor peering up the skirt

that I had unfortunately chosen to wear that day.

When we returned from our honeymoon, Dieter

began working as a salesman for Bill Newman at the

Wm. S. Newman Brewing Company, located in

Albany and one of the first craft brewers on the East

Coast. Needless to say our beer of choice during that

era became Newman’s Albany Amber Ale and,

to go for a beer back then, but there was a German

restaurant and bar in the next town called Scholz’s

Hofbrau Haus. Scholz’s served German beer. We

became particularly fond of Spaten Dopplebock,

which was served in a -liter glass boot. It was over

one of these boots that my husband and I becamemore than friends.

Good beer grew to be an even bigger part of our

lives when we moved to Boston to go to college and

both worked part time at Beacon Hill Wine & Spirits,

a small fine wine, cheese, and liquor store that fea-

tured a ridiculously broad selection of beer for such

a tiny place at the time. Leaving Boston, we moved

into a farmhouse on my family’s farm and married.

By this time our fascination with beer had reached

epic proportions. On our honeymoon we took ourfirst trip to Europe and brought only one guidebook,

Michael Jackson’s Pocket Guide to Beer , published in

, the year before we were married. The book is

now in its seventh edition. Whether we found our-

selves in Amsterdam, Brussels, or Cologne, Jackson’s

recommendations for the best brews and pubs led us

well off the beaten path, which was exactly where we

wanted to be.

Perhaps our most memorable visit was to the

Duvel Moortgat Brewery in Belgium, outside of

Brussels, where one of our favorite beers (Duvel, a

potent Belgian ale with . percent alcohol by vol-

ume) was made. Jackson reported in his pocket

guide that the Duvel Moortgat Brewery offered tours.

After hours of searching for the place, we pulled up

in front and entered a bar that was filled with rowdy

Flemish-speaking brewery workers drinking from

gigantic chalices of dark beer. When we asked in

English if the brewery provided tours, the room fell

utterly silent, much like that scene in the movie An

American Werewolf in London at the bar called The

Slaughtered Lamb. Then the workers all burst into

raucous laughter.

A small, bespectacled man with wispy hair

emerged from behind the bar and, speaking perfect

English, told us he would be happy to give us a Our interest in hops grew out of our interest in beer.


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recruiting friends to work the Newman’s beer truck

at festivals such as Albany’s Pinksterfest, we drank a

lot of it. Although the Wm. S. Newman Brewing

Company eventually went out of business, the craft

beer industry took off. Dieter got into home brewing,

led the formation of a local beer club that meets

monthly to try new beers, started a beer blog that

became very popular, and began growing hops in the

garden—and up the side of the house.

But before beer there was farming, and in hind-

sight it was inevitable that these two occupations and

preoccupations would merge in our lives. Both our

families have roots in dairy farming. Dieter’s family

had a dairy farm in New York’s Mohawk Valley, and

he spent many summers of his youth living and

working there. My family’s farm, on which we live

today, was originally also a dairy farm. It was started

by my great-grandfather, Peter Ten Eyck, a business-

man, politician, and farmer who in purchased a

tract of land made up of five individual farms in

western Albany County beneath the limestone cliffs

of the Helderberg Escarpment. There he created a

single farm and named it Indian Ladder Farms, after

a Native American trail that once scaled the cliff face.

The farm started out as an orchard and dairy, then

turned to raising beef cattle, and eventually converted

A panorama image of Indian Ladder Farms beneath the Helderberg Escarpment.

Dieter’s mother as a child, standing on her father’s

shoulders on Matis Farm in St. Johnsville, New York.

Photograph Courtesy of the Matis Family


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Bins of apples on Indian Ladder Farms, in the Ten Eyck family since .


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started a hops test plot, and eventually put in a small-

scale commercial hop yard. Today Dieter divides his

time between photography and farming, and he and

our business partner, Stuart Morris (a friend from

our days at Beacon Hill Wine & Spirits) have

launched the Indian Ladder Farmstead Brewery andCidery. Like all Eastern hop farms, ours is new by

agricultural standards. Nearly thirty years of growing

hops for pleasure has given us insight into the plant,

but having commercial aspirations and a full hop

yard has brought many new lessons our way.

Which brings me back to the day we had our first

Japanese beetle alarm. While we drank our coffee on

the porch, Dieter called my father, who went to

Cornell’s School of Agriculture in the s and

majored in insects and how to kill them. IndianLadder Farms is not an organic orchard, but my father

is committed to using as few pesticides as he can. The

farm operates under the terms of an environmental

label called Eco Apples, which ensures its growers

adhere to strict Integrated Pest Management princi-

ples and a low-spray program. Located in the middle

of a nonorganic apple orchard, our hop farm will

never be able to obtain organic certification—but our

goal is to farm in an environmentally sustainable way.

My father said he was also fighting Japanese beetles

in the apple orchard and told Dieter he was going to

have to spray the orchard with insecticide to kill them.

Dieter decided to try another route—spraying the hop

bines with neem oil, made from the crushed fruit and

seeds of the neem tree, which grows in India. Neem

oil contains azadirachtin, a natural pesticide approved

for organic use. He also set up some Japanese beetle

traps near the hop yards. By the next morning the

traps were filled with thousands of Japanese beetles,

and during his morning patrol Dieter noticed many

of the beetles still clinging to the hop leaves were in

fact dead. One problem down.

A couple of weeks later we went on our annual

one-week pilgrimage to the beach. We expected the

hops to come to maturity a week or ten days after our

return. Dieter planned to spend the time in between

entirely to orchard. Today the farm, operated by my

father, who is also named Peter Ten Eyck, remains

primarily an apple orchard, with a sizable retail farm

market and pick-your-own business. As I write, he is

in the process of retiring and turning over manage-

ment of the business to my brother, another PeterTen Eyck, and me.

After we moved back to the farm, Dieter and I

experimented with various types of agriculture. We

grew specialty vegetables for restaurants, kept a flock

of sheep for meat and wool, raised chickens for eggs

and meat, and created a small herd of dairy goats.

Today we continue to produce much of our own

food, gardening extensively and raising small live-

stock. I have worked on my family’s farm ever since

I was a child. As an adult, giving up on my not-necessarily-lucrative career as a freelance journalist

and newspaper reporter, I served a long stint helping

my father run the farm’s retail operation before

launching a new career in farmland conservation.

Today I work for the New York State office of the

national farmland conservation organization Ameri-

can Farmland Trust. Dieter, a photographer and

photo editor by trade, also helped out on Indian

Ladder Farms over the years. A while ago my father,

in his seventies, gave us the house we live in along

with acres (. hectares) of land. Twenty acres of

the land we now own are still cultivated by Indian

Ladder Farms through an informal lease arrange-

ment; however, the remainder of it is not. After

taking ownership of the land we began to cogitate

about what we should do with it. Right around that

time New York State adopted new legislation called

the New York State Farm Brewery Act, intended to

stimulate economic development in the state by ele-

vating beer making to the same level as the state’s

extremely successful vineyards and wineries. Brew-

ing beer was now not only allowed but encouraged

on farms as long as it was made with ingredients

grown in New York State.

Needless to say, a lightbulb went on in Dieter’s

head. We began planting more hops and barley,


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our return and the harvest setting up the drying area

in the barn. When we returned we found that a sec-

tion of the hop trellis had collapsed beneath the

weight of the bines. After using the tractor to try to

pull the collapsed section back up and nearly taking

down the entire hop yard and trellis in the process,

we decided to cut the bines down even though all the

hop cones weren’t quite ready.

We spent the entire day on our deck with friends

pulling the cones off the bines. We were amazed by

how many flowers there were. It was just our second

year, so we had not expected the bines to produce so

many so soon—and we didn’t have a mechanical

harvester yet. I began to feel extremely stressed, but

Dieter seemed to be perfectly content drinking beer

and picking hops. How in the world were we going

to harvest all of this by hand? But the more immedi-

ate question was the following: without the drying

area set up in the barn, where were we going to dry

several bushels of hop flowers? Picked hops must be

spread out to dry immediately after harvest so they

don’t mold.

Hops are a soporific, and hop picking made me

very sleepy. I went upstairs to lie down for a bit. I

Our pilot hop yard before the trellis collapse. Note the trellis is beginning to sag under the weight of the hops.

The section of collapsed trellis we encountered upon

returning from vacation.


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heard a lot of commotion in the living room but tried

to ignore it. When I came back down I found all the

furniture had been pushed to the edges of the room

and a giant blue tarp had been spread across the

entire floor. The tarp was covered with a layer of

hops and surrounded by four box fans turned onhigh. Dieter and a couple of our male friends sat

around drinking beer and waiting to see how mad I

would be. Absurdly, a small child-size rake lay in the

middle of the sea of hops. I had to laugh—because if

I didn’t I would have cried.

These were just some of the new challenges that

reared up when we began to scale up our garden-

variety hop hobby to a commercial venture. As a

gardener, whether you are graduating from cultivat-

ing tomato plants in raised beds to field production,expanding a handful of backyard fruit trees to an

orchard, or transitioning from a single hop bine

growing in a corner of the garden to a hop yard, you

will face new issues. Sure, you know how to take care

of a tomato plant—but when you apply that knowl-

edge to taking care of one hundred or one thousand

plants, you find yourself on a different playing field

entirely. Insects and disease can quickly run wild in

even a small-scale monoculture planting. Meanwhile

weeds will happily take advantage of the water and

nutrients you are providing for your crop. And if you

are successful your harvest will no longer be picked

in a couple of hours on a pleasant afternoon. Because

of the increased scale of a crop produced for market,

controlling pests on a plant-by-plant basis, and weed-

ing, you’ll find cultivating and harvesting by hand

may no longer be practical—especially if you are

working on your own.

Today we are growing hops on a small-scale com-

mercial basis. At our Indian Ladder Farmstead

Brewery and Cidery, we are making hard cider, fla-

vored with our own hops, from apples grown on

Indian Ladder Farms—as well as beer made with

the hops and barley that we grow along with some

that we purchase from other farmers in New York

State. The brewery has a tasting room where peopleOur son, Wolfgang, carrying hop bines to the deck where

we handpicked the cones. Photograph by Laura Ten Eyck

Collecting an early harvest in the bucket loader. Photograph

by Laura Ten Eyck

We tried to pull the trellis back up but it didn’t work.

Photograph by Laura Ten Eyck


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The Hop Yard in Gorham, Maine, got its start on a

potato farm and is now supplying the craft beer scene

in Portland, Maine. Addison Hop Farm supplies its

organic hops to breweries and home brewers in its

home state of Vermont, which has the largest num-

ber of breweries per capita of any state in the nation.

The Hop Farm Brewing Company, in Pittsburgh, has

its own hop yard outside the city and is working with

regional farmers to increase hop acreage in western

Pennsylvania. Old Dominion Hops Cooperative is a

group of ninety-plus farmers producing local, sus-

tainably grown hops to supply the craft beer industry

in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.

When we first started planting hops beyond the

garden gate there were few resources to guide

can buy beer and hard cider by the glass to drink

on-site; they can also fill growlers. Plans are under-

way to build a post-and-beam barn to house the

brewery and cidery, expand the tasting room, and

add a shop. To think it all began with a single hop

growing in the garden!

And we are not alone. Outside the hop-growing

stronghold of the Northwest, productive hop yards

have taken root in other states, including Colorado,

Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio. In the

eastern United States, hops are being grown from

Maine to North Carolina. Whether they are home-

steaders, home brewers, or in it to make money,

people are growing hops and using those hops to

brew local beer.

Laurie handpicking hops on the deck. Bucket starting to fill with hops from collapsed trellis.


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in the Northeast Hop Alliance and Cornell put

out the Cornell Integrated Hops Production Guide.

We devoured all the material we could get our

hands on. It was clear that lots and lots of great sci-

ence had been done on hop nutritional needs,

varieties, insects, and disease—but nowhere could

we find self-contained, simple, step-by-step instruc-

tions for growing hops commercially (hop-yard

construction, planting, tending, and harvesting and

processing). To complicate matters further, whether

it was about soils, bugs, disease, or the hops them-

selves, most of the language used was highly

technical and difficult to understand. We’ve worked

hard to learn what we have learned, and we are still

learning. So we decided to create the book we wish

we had when we started out, in the hopes that it will

help others who want to grow hops, either for their

Easterners interested in growing hops in the garden,

on a small scale, or commercially. The number of

East Coast craft brewers was rapidly expanding, and

many were starting to clamor for locally grown hops.

But all the books, research papers, and online

resources available were primarily about hop produc-

tion in the Northwest, which takes place at a vast

scale under completely different climatic conditions.

By , under the direction of agronomist Heather

Darby, the Hops Project at the University of Vermont

had put in their experimental organic hop yard—and

results from their variety trials and research into dis-

eases and insect pests began appearing online. The

Northeast Hop Alliance formed, and a couple of

conferences were held in New York and Vermont.

The year after we put in our pilot hop yard, Cornell

University put in their own experimental hop yard;

Our first hop harvest on the living room floor.


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Dieter holding hop bine in the one-acre hop yard.

Photograph courtesy of John Carl D’Annibale/Times Union

Laurie checking out a sample from a brewer’s cut in the

Yakima Valley, Washington.

Wolfgang paying homage to hops at Crosby Hop Farm in the Willamette Valley, Oregon.


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also explain how to process the cones to ensure the

highest quality for beer making, explain the basics of

how beer is made, and talk about the role of hops in

brewing beer. As a grower, the more you know about

how hops are used by brewers, the better. At the end

of the book, friends who are commercial brewers andhome brewers share their recipes for beer they have

made with our hops. One thing we have found is that,

like drinking beer, growing hops is a social activity

that brings together friends and community.

own use or for market and help fuel the renaissance

of small-scale, sustainable hop growing in the East.

In the pages ahead, you’ll gain a general under-

standing of the hop plant itself, its botany, its history,

and its role in the brewing of beer. You’ll also learn

about hop varieties, how and where to grow and carefor them, and what kind of infrastructure and equip-

ment you will need at various scales—whether you

are growing hops on a city balcony, in a backyard gar-

den, in a miniature hop yard, or as the real thing. We

Documents

The Hop Grower's Handbook: Introduction