Photos and text by Hannah Miller, October 2010

• Introduction
• A local market of pubs and breweries
• Wet hops, dry hops
• The five-year test
• Download the full article as a

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Introduction

If you’re traveling through rural western North Carolina and come upon climbing plants wrapping themselves around a trellis, don’t automatically think “pole beans.” If the plants are 17½ feet tall and the trellis covers an acre or so, think “hops,” the plants that give beer its flavor and aroma. For the first time in many years, there’s a serious effort under way to cultivate the plant in the state.

In the country’s early years, says Amy Hamilton, research specialist with NCSU’s Mountain Crops Research and Extension Center in Mill River, “the hops came over with the settlers.” But disease and pests that thrived in North Carolina’s moderate climate spelled an end to local growing, and serious hops farming left in favor of drier growing regions in Washington and Oregon.

The current popularity of locally grown food, plus farmers’ search for alternative crops to replace tobacco, have brought it back into the sights of some 15 farmers in Madison, Henderson, Buncombe and Haywood counties and the Watauga-Ashe area. Many farmers, says Hamilton, are no longer able to make money from tobacco and conventional crops. “They’re not able to keep their farms going.” So they’re looking to nontraditional crops like medicinal herbs, organic produce, ethnic vegetables, and hops.

Two of the pioneers are Haywood EMC members Scott Grahl and Stephanie Willis of Winding River Hops in Clyde. Until two years ago, their one-acre plot held little more than a brush pile, a blackberry thicket and a couple of trees. Then, assisted by a $6,000 grant from Cooperative Extension’s WNC AgOptions, they bulldozed the brush and erected a trellis to hold 1,320 plants. The plants are grown from rhizomes, and their cones, containing the acids and oils that give beer its flavor, are hand-harvested. This year, Winding River harvested 125 pounds and sold it to four western North Carolina breweries and a brewery supply house catering to home brewers. Prices paid by western North Carolina brewers in 2010 ranged from $10 to $15 per pound for “wet” or fresh hops like Grahl’s, one brewer said. Western North Carolina home brewers reportedly bought their preferred version, dried hops, from growers at $2 to $4 an ounce.

A fully mature acre, says Chris Reedy, coordinator of the Southern Appalachian Hops Guild, can yield about 1,000 pounds. But Grahl’s plants, like most in the state, are a long way from maturity. All the North Carolina plots are less than five years old and under two acres in size, says Reedy. “You’re not going to see significant yields the first three or four years,” he says. “Next year, we’ll start seeing significant yields.”

“The overall health and vigor of the plant is what my concentration has been on this year,” says Grahl, who estimated that he and Willis spent $20,000 to get the hop yard established. That included fertilizer, herbicide, trellis, rhizomes, improving the soil, and their own labor. “It costs between $5,000 and $10,000 to set up a trellis system to last you 20 years,” estimates Reedy.