Hoppin’ Hops: Idaho at the Center of Beer Culture

The hop fields of Wilder are being turned upside down. Two men stand in the bed of a truck and hang long 20-foot plants upside down on overhead hooks. Swags of leaves and lighter-green flower clusters fly above me. A wrist flick sends another up a metal track to join the parade to the top of a green metal-clad building that rumbles with inner machinery. There, a man armed with batons directs plants into the maw of the hop picker.

The excitement and smells of the harvest have changed little since southwest Idaho’s first commercial crop ripened in the 1930s, but the hop market has had a wild ride. Changes in the beer industry have rocked the hop world to its roots. The western Treasure Valley is one of four small regions where hops are grown commercially in the United States. The Wilder area and a large farm near Bonners Ferry together produce eight percent of the country’s hops; the rest are grown in Washington and Oregon.

Standing under the flying plants at Jackson Hop Farm, the air is infused in hop incense. The harvest fragrance permeates the workers’ clothing and will linger for months in growers’ trucks. Originally added to beer as a preservative, hops provide bitterness and a diverse palette of flavors and aromas. The flower clusters, called cones, roll along a belt from the picker to the drying kiln in the adjacent building. Belts spread the cones over fabric-draped grated floors; eight-foot tall fans push warm air up through the hops. Other belts move dried cones to be pressed into 200-pound bales. Most hops are later processed into pellets that look remarkably like rabbit pellets. Each hop farm has its ownpicker and kiln to dry the perishable crop during the month-long harvest. Jackson Hop Farms’ Nate Jackson utilizes a new kiln that handles the delicate cones more gently than older systems.

In Jackson’s fields, mechanical cutters gather lanky plants called bines. Hops climb using sticky hairs while vines use tendrils. The plants collapse as their supporting cords are cut from overhead wires. Trucks festooned with garlands of hops stir contrails of dust as they rush the plants to the picking machine.

In the hop world, females rule. Only female cones have enough flavor-and aroma-containing lupulin glands to be profitable. Serendipitously, male and female flowers live on separate hop plants. Males are banished to prevent unplanned reproduction, as seeds lower hop quality and cause off-flavor in beer. Ann George, executive director of Hop Growers of America said, “As much as we love our hop guys, we don’t want males in the field.”

Hops have been used in Idaho since brewers followed miners to the Gem State. In 1889, 33 breweries served the state’s fewer than 100,000 residents. Prohibition and the growth of large breweries in the East ended Idaho’s first crop of breweries by 1961. For hop growers, the large breweries simplified marketing. Diane Haas, a sixth generation grower explained, “There were two buyers; you sold to the one with the best price.” Haas got off her tractor to talk with me; her dad, Mike Gooding, joined us in the shop at their Parma farm. Selling their crop might have been easy, but hanging on through the whipsaw price swings was not. “There used to be steep peaks and long valleys. You hoped the  few good years were enough to get through the valleys,” Haas added.

Not all growers survived.