There are 50, maybe 70 hop farms, by Perrault’s estimate, left in America, with a few new ones boasting small acreages in less obvious places like New York and New Mexico, and even the White House garden. That number is down from around 200 back in the 1970s, but the acreage each farm accounts for, logically, has increased. According to the Hop Growers of America, U.S. farmers grew over 65 million pounds of hops last year (only Germany grows more), just under 80 percent of which was grown in Yakima where Perrault himself is a fourth generation hop farmer. Perrault Farms is one of the Hop Breeding Co.’s licensed growers. Oregon’s Willamette Valley produced roughly 16 percent of total U.S. volume thanks to growers like Blake Crosby, a fifth generation hop farmer, who plants exclusively USDA hop varieties. One solitary acre of his B. Crosby Hop Farm is set aside for experimental rather than commercial hops, specifically because he aims to be a resource for craft brewers whose hop utilization rely 80 percent on domestic hops.
It’s American craft brewers who are clamoring for new cultivars and with the growth in the craft segment compared to the industrial brewing companies, breeders are finally starting to work closer with them. How exactly does a new cultivar go from germplasm to a brewkettle? Slowly, carefully, deliberately and luckily.
The process begins with making a cross, which is to say selecting which female and male plants might create the perfect progeny, then in a year it’s ready to plant in a greenhouse. A selected seedling is then tested in a field to see if it’s strong and immune enough to survive while being hearty enough to be easily picked and stored for the sake of hop growers. Three or four years’ worth of evaluating its benefits may see fit to include the hop in a select panel for cloning and expanded trial farming before it makes its way to a brewery to evaluate its utility and desirability. More on how a brewer is given the opportunity to evaluate new cultivars in a minute.
As an overview, Henning says if he comes up with 15,000 seeds today, perhaps 1,500 will make their way to a field and of those, only five to 10 will become available to the commercial brewing industry by the year 2020 at the earliest.
In Yakima, Perrault’s journey of a thousand varieties begins not with a single whiff, but tons of them. “I’m smelling maybe 10,000 of these plants in the field, grinding samples, getting ideas,” said Perrault. This is what’s called “rub and sniff.” If the initial aroma is interesting, he may decide to expand the new line. But never is he able to tell while standing in the soil if he’s holding the next highly sought-after hop in his fingers. “Very rarely do you think you have a superstar. You have potential.”
Engineering new hops, like designing new beers, is part science and part art. And just because something smells amazing right now, there’s no way of knowing how it would translate in an actual beer a decade down the road.
“One of the beauties of the brewers in the craft industry is they’re willing to try something new and share info,” continues Perrault. After brewing with an experimental hop, the brewer “will come back and give us some feedback, as well as give us some of the beer to try. There’s a good exchange of information that goes on that allows us to move through the system confidently.”
