the good earth

Of Cones and Bines and Lupulins

By Gary L. Howe / Photography By Gary L. Howe | November 27, 2018

It’s an unmistakable sight when you approach a hop yard: As you roll over gentle hills on any side of the Grand Traverse bays, suddenly rows of 20- to 30-foot poles are sticking out of the ground, one after the other, like a kind of weird farm for giants. Some are at angles; others reach straight to the sky. By end of summer they can look like vertical jungles and, if the light is just right, blooming flowers shine golden with a luster similar to the brightest autumn leaves that will change color and drop shortly after the hops are harvested.

“It looks like a vineyard on crack. It’s just amazing,” says Brian Tennis, owner of Hop Alliance, while we are overlooking his 30- acre hop yard in Omena. “It’s a very sexy plant to grow, because it’ll grow 20, 22 feet every single year. If you look at the infrastructure there’s nothing like this in the world. And it goes into one of our favorite products, which is beer,” he adds, hitting on one of the keys to the unique attraction of this rebounding Michigan industry.

Most Michiganders—including many future hop farmers—did not even know what they were seeing when they first encountered a hop yard, which were rare until around ten years ago. “Until a few years ago, people didn’t really understand or appreciate what a hop was or what it actually did in the brewing process. I don’t think I knew what one looked like,” says Tennis.

However, 100 years ago, Michigan was one of the top hop-producing regions in the country, along with Wisconsin and New York. Unfortunately, without an understanding of its crop issues, the industry faltered and production followed a growing population out west. There it found a more hospitable home in the Pacific Northwest, specifically the arid Yakima Valley, where pests and irrigation could be better controlled.

But over the last decade, those of us living in Northern Michigan have enjoyed a front-row seat to the resurgence of the Michigan hop industry. In 2017 Michigan more than doubled its hops acreage of 2015 and is now the fourth-largest hops producer in the country, according to The Hop Growers of America annual report. Idaho, Oregon and Washington were the three largest producers by thousands of acres, but the Michigan hops presence is real and growing. And Michigan’s craft beer market has grown in synchrony.

THE HOP HARVEST

As for the harvest process, according to Tennis it really starts when the snow melts in the spring. “We’ll come out here and spread compost and then a few weeks after that we’ll mow everything down, so we’ve got a nice, clean field. Then we’ll go through and start stringing. Every plant takes two strings, and you’ve got a thousand plants per acre, so you’re looking at 30,000 strings in this yard alone.”

After the plants have been strung, the next step is to train the climbing “bines” to the strings by hand. Then the summer is spent making sure the yard is watered and receiving the right nutrients, managing pests and doing basic maintenance of the trellis system—strong windstorms can be very unkind.

The picking of the hops begins in late August. Harvest involves a tractor pulling a flat wagon down the long rows of trellised hops as the strings, now loaded with hop bines and flower cones, are cut from the top with an appropriately named machine called a top cutter and from below with a bottom cutter. When the wagon is full, the two- to four-person crew runs it back to the hop house, where each bine is run through a hop picker and the cones are separated from the plant, and then sorted.

The first orders of the year are for fresh, or “wet,” hops and are used for special harvest beers. This is where the synergy between local hop producers and craft breweries like Short’s, Filling Station, Rare Bird and Stormcloud—all Hops Alliance partners— is really localized, as the freshness of the hops and the relationship between farmer and brewer are critical. Wet-hop beers offer a taste of seasonality to hop and beer lovers. Hops not used for wet-hop beers are kiln-dried and either baled or turned into pellets that can be stored and used for three to five years.

Although the hop cone gets the attention, it is the oil and resin inside of the papery flowers that adds flavor to hoppy products. The resin is called lupulin, a waxy substance that can be seen by breaking open a cone’s scales. This is the golden essence that gives the hop its own flavor depending on variety and terroir. Some will be more floral while others will have a bitterness many American beers exhibit.

Even the decade of growth hasn’t meant success for every hop entrepreneur. Many early adopters in Michigan have moved on after finding hops too difficult to sustain. “They either picked the wrong variety, became disinterested or market conditions weren’t what they thought,” says Tennis. “It’s all economy of scale. You’ve gotta be a certain size to be profitable and if you’re not profitable, there’s no sense in doing it. You gotta get big enough to bring your cost down so you can sell more product and in order to do that, you gotta have just a ton of capital behind you, and a lot of intestinal fortitude because, you know, it’s farming. A lot of things can go wrong.”