The Pandemic Slowed Hop Orders and Wildfires Threatened the Harvest. But Crosby Hop Farm and Its New Beer Garden are on the Rebound in 2021.

Zak Schroerlucke has two words to describe last year’s hop season: “It sucked.”

Granted, Schroerlucke, marketing manager at Crosby Hop Farm in Woodburn, acknowledges it could have been a lot worse. The pandemic had already paralyzed the beer industry it serves, then the entire state caught on fire just as the small harvest window was opening. That yields turned out on par with previous years, and were unaffected by smoke damage, is some kind of small miracle.

Still: It sucked. Even before Oregon went up in flames, business at the 120-year-old farm—which supplies Centennial, Strata and Comet hops, among other varietals, to 3,000 breweries in the U.S. alone—declined at the onset of COVID-19, as taprooms shuttered nationwide, halting direct-to-consumer sales. And as wildfires encroached on the Willamette Valley last September, turning the skies red and the air unbreathable, it made the already time-sensitive hop-picking process touch and go.

“It was scary, for sure,” Schroerlucke says. “We just made an effort to constantly be looking at the fire maps. Employee safety is everything, and we were definitely ready to pull the plug at any moment.”

Only now are things beginning to suck a bit less. In just the past few weeks, Schroerlucke says orders have gone from a trickle to a deluge. And in April, the farm reopened TopWire, the onsite beer garden it launched last summer, which sits amid 600 acres of soon to be towering hop bines.

It also kicked off a collaborative brewing project with Camas, Wash., brewer Grains of Wrath. Over the summer, the two businesses will produce three different IPAs, using the brewery’s base recipe with rotating hop varieties from Crosby, to showcase how the aromatic cones transform the taste of the beer. The first in the series, which is currently pouring exclusively at TopWire’s and Grains of Wrath’s locations in Portland and Camas, uses Amarillo, Strata and Columbus hops, imbuing the beer with notes of grapefruit and apricot.

The aim, Schroerlucke says, is to demystify the crucial role hops play in the brewing process. But it also stands as a tribute to the creativity of the craft beer industry and its perseverance in the face of a challenging year.

“It’s easy to look at the last year as being a total downer, but brewers are resilient,” Schroerlucke says. “They adapt, they evolve, and they push through hard times.”

Get It Here: 8668 Crosby Road NE, Woodburn, 503-765-1645, topwirehp.com. 11 am-8 pm Thursday, 11 am-9 pm Friday-Saturday, 11 am-8 pm Sunday.