Growing Local - Neighborhood Hop Farms Provide Brewers with Terroir

You would not know that all the hops used to make Brewery Ommegang’s Hopstate NY were grown in New York if the brewery didn’t announce it prominently on the label. Justin Forsythe, Ommegang’s innovations manager, thinks that’s not altogether bad.

- Stan Hieronymus

Hundreds of farmers outside of the Pacific Northwest have made a bet that brewers and drinkers want locally grown hops. At the beginning of the 21st century there were almost no commercial hop operations beyond Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. It wasn’t until 2014 that Hop Growers of America began tabulating hop acreage planted in other states. It grew from 899 in 2014 to 1,277, then 2,098 in the following two years. In total, American farmers strung 53,213 acres for production in 2016.

Seasonal local-hop releases like Hopstate NY or Palm Reader from Founders Brewing in Grand Rapids, Mich., generate street cred, although not always in the same way. The 2016 edition of Hopstate features Cascade, Chinook, and Nugget hops that taste and smell like they could have been grown in the Northwest, where farmers have established what those varieties should taste like. In contrast, there is no standard to compare to Zuper-Saazer, which adds a fruity, and perhaps distinctively Michigan, character to Palm Reader.

“The Ommegangs of the world, the Adirondacks of the world, they’ve been great,” says Corey Mosher at Mosher Farms, one of the growers Ommegang buys hops from. “They’ve been right out front helping New York hops farmers.” Even though New York created a Farm Brewery license in 2012 that provides financial incentives for breweries to use hops grown within the state, Mosher says few farm breweries have contracted to buy New York hops.