 BEER COLUMN Hop Harvest BY JEFF ALWORTH About a year ago, Bert Grant invited a horde of industry insiders and media representatives to Yakima to celebrate the hop harvest. In what would become a famous party, visitors were treated to tours of his brewery and of the town before being delivered to the fields where, as legend has it, the hopheads entered a lupulin-induced frenzy. The event concluded when brewers raced fresh-from-the-vine Cascade hops back to the brewery and dumped them into a boiling batch of beer. Thus was born Grant's Fresh Hop Ale and his new line of single-hop seasonals. For people who have sunk their noses into a pint of beer and inhaled the magical spicy, floral or citrus scent of fresh hops, seeing the source--acres of the little jewels hanging by the thousands from the vine--is enough to induce giddy lightheadedness. Sadly, I missed the show last year (having not yet begun to write the Mash) and have lamented it bitterly ever since. However, after several months of pretty broad hints, I finally secured an invitation to see the harvest this year (no party, no media, just hops). Beer drinkers from Oregon are justifiably proud of the wealth of local hops grown in the Willamette Valley, which has given its name to one of the most common domestic varieties, but measured by sheer quantity, the Yakima Valley is the cradle of hop production in America. Situated east of Mount Rainier, the valley is actually in the middle of the arid and hilly high desert just beyond the central Washington forests. The area's agriculture, which includes miles of orchards and vineyards, is fed by the Yakima River and six area reservoirs. The lush plants and trees climbing up the hills to the irrigation perimeter make for a striking sight; beyond that sharp line, the hills are brown with rock, scruffy sagebrush and parched grass. When I arrived in Yakima on the second day of the harvest, the mid-morning sun was already beginning to bake the dry valley. For my tour, the folks from the brewery connected me with Larry Sidor of S.S. Steiner, the international hop dealer and grower who, in 1967, brought Bert Grant to Yakima, where he continued to work until long after opening his own brewpub in 1982. At our initial meeting, I was struck by one of the contrasts which characterize the Yakima hop industry. Although most of the valley is a sleepy, rural community of farmers and migrant labor--the visitor's guide introduces itself as the "land of cowboys and Cabernet"--it exists within the larger context of international agri-business. Sidor himself, previously a master brewer at Pabst, was, like many in Yakima, one of the best in his profession. This was not, however, the most startling paradox I found there. As we drove out to the hop fields, Sidor explained hop growing and production. This year had been a particularly bad year for hops; due to two extremely hot weeks in July, many of the delicate hop flowers had stopped growing and were now far smaller than usual for this time of year. Driving along the highway, Sidor pointed to where the plants were stunted, having failed to climb all the way up their wire leads. "They should climb up to the top and form a big clump," he explained. Despite low yields, harvest was in full swing when we arrived at the plant, where 10-foot long vines of hops were being hoisted up from trucks toward the grinding metal fingers of the combine. Once separated from leaves, twigs and vines, the hops are taken to a football-field-sized kiln, where they are dumped, three feet deep, to dry in 140-degree heat. Finally, after two days of drying, the hops are compressed into 200-pound bales and prepared for shipping. As we walked through the plant, and later in an adjacent field of Galena hops, the second paradox of hop cultivation occurred to me: Unlike the growers of most other crops, hop farmers aren't able to consume what they grow, save through beer made far from their fields. All brewers know the intense delight of stuffing their noses deep into fresh hops, and part of the thrill comes from knowing how it will complement or accentuate the beer. But leaning over the palpably rich, steaming aroma coming of the drying hops, it seemed a cruel injustice for the growers to have to send them off to places such as St. Louis and Milwaukee, where their flavor and smell would get lost in elephantine vats of beer. It was clear to me how Bert Grant got the idea to introduce his line of seasonal ales, particularly autumn's Fresh Hop. Although growers won't ever be able to taste their crops directly, this is the next-best thing.
originally published September 9, 1998
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