Post on 07-Aug-2018
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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