Fiesta and Famine

With the repeal of Prohibition and the reemergence of a domestic beer market, Willamette Valley farmers once again caught “hop fever.” Acreage expanded to its peak level in history by 1936. This chapter explains how hop farmers became more organized and initiated the first successful hop grower organizations. These organizations achieved success in marketing controls and improving the region’s reputation. Simultaneously, Willamette Valley growers successfully expanded the celebratory nature of the hop harvest by implementing a Hop Fiesta to attract workers. The event became one of Oregon’s most important annual cultural affairs, as growers drew in thousands of harvest workers with the promise of clean camping, live music, dancing, parades, and even the crowning of a Hop Queen. Despite this success in the 1930s, however, a botanical disease, called downy mildew, had crept its way to the Pacific Coast, leaving many hop fields in ruins. By 1943, Oregon relinquished its hold as the national leader in hop production.

Hop-Picking Time

Because of the West’s scarce labor situation, hop growers early on recognized the need to hire workers from all walks of life, including men and women, old and young, and across racial and ethnic lines. From the beginning, the three-week hop harvest was a multicultural affair that revealed the diversity of the West. The first half of this chapter explains the English origins of the American harvest season, including the actual demands and the festiveness of the harvest that many called a paid vacation. The second half of the chapter explains the opportunities and challenges that American Indian and East Asian agricultural workers faced while working in the Pacific Northwest hopyards during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Wolf of the Willow

Hops, the cone of a climbing plant by the same name, are a key ingredient in beer. Brewers use hops to impart flavors and aroma in their malted concoctions, and they value the ingredient’s preservative properties. This chapter explains the global origins and botanical characteristics of the common hop, Humulus lupulus l., used in brewing. It then describes how brewing, and hop agriculture along with it, spread from Europe to temperate regions across the world. Hop growing reached North America along with the early English colonies and fared quite well. By 1800, New York and New England emerged as producers for the global economy.

Hop Center of the World

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Oregon became the leading hop producer in the United States, with the Willamette Valley contributing millions of pounds of hops to the world’s brewers. The region claimed to be the Hop Center of the World. This chapter explains how those in the industry sought to professionalize by connecting with local and international brewers, including Ireland’s Guinness Brewery, and international hop distribution companies. Additionally, industry leaders championed the region’s hops as the finest in the world and benefitted from the emergence of a hop research program at the Agricultural Experiment Station in Corvallis.

Epilogue

This epilogue comments on hop culture from 2000-2012. It looks at transformations in technology and acreage, but also informs the reader that most hop farms in the Willamette Valley are fourth and fifth generation, emphasizing the long-term commitment from farming families. It also explains how the visibility of the hop (in the field and on supermarket shelves) and continuity of success despite challenges (while many other specialty crops failed) support part of initial thesis that because hops are grown in relatively few places in the world and have connected Oregon’s rural agriculture and urban production continually over time, the history offers an imaginative way of understanding place.

After the Hop Rush

The botanical disease downy mildew destroyed Willamette Valley hop acreage, leaving only dozens of farming families tending the crop by the midcentury compared to the hundreds earlier. Their worries did not end with disease, though. Growers during that period feared their prospects because large brewing companies used increasingly fewer hops in their beers, initially to meet post-Prohibition mandates and then the bland tastes of the 1950s and 1960s. In hindsight, the hop growers need not have worried. Even though American beers were less flavorful and hoppy, successful marketing by the big beer companies led to a major expansion in beer production and sale. During this era, big beer also supported Willamette Valley hop growers. Famers persevered because of these connections and because the growers also adopted industrial farming methods of the early Cold War. Yet, the fruit of their labor became less visible to American consumers.

The Surprise of Prohibition

The threat of prohibition inspired Willamette Valley hop growers to join their farming brethren on the Pacific Coast to enter a political fight. It was a fight, however, that failed, as Oregon voters approved an initiative to prohibit the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcohol five years before Congress ratified the Eighteenth Amendment. Many hop growers abandoned the trade in fear of prohibition, along with others farmers that moved in the direction of grain, fruits, and vegetables to help in the World War I era. But those who stayed planted in hops were wise to do so. As the Great War unfolded in Europe, agricultural lands lay ruined. Additionally, Germany’s aggression corroded their hold on the international hop market. Willamette Valley growers seized the opportunity to expand their distribution shortly after the war and through the 1920s. So great was the success that even during Prohibition that eliminated domestic beer markets, Oregon growers expanded acreage in every year of the “dry decade.”

Hop Fever

Following increased settlement of the Far West and the completion of transcontinental railroads by the 1870s, farmers expanded specialty crop agriculture. This chapter provides context for the movement to hops and other specialty crops in diversified farming to provide cash income, not only in the Willamette Valley but elsewhere across the Pacific Coast. The chapter is framed by the story of Ezra Meeker, of Puyallup, Washington, who, from the 1860s to the 1890s, was the largest producer and promoter of hops in the Pacific Northwest. His story and others show how hop growing was an intensely global enterprise, from the importation of hop roots to the Far West to the transfer of knowledge that included multiple trips back and forth across the country and across the Atlantic to establish markets and acquire information.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s argument that the recent revolution in craft beer is the product of a complex global history that converged in the hop fields of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. While many beer enthusiasts know that Portland, Oregon, at the northern edge of the valley, has been called the Craft Beer Capital of the World, they do not know that the region’s farmers once held the title Hop Center of the World. From approximately the 1890s to the 1940s, Willamette Valley farmers led the nation in hop production, competing on a level with famed German hop-growing districts. While acreage dwindled after that point, the valley had established itself as a global center of hop marketing, science, and technology. That foundation, and the regional, national, and global connections that arose along with this history, played a direct role in the craft beer revolution from the 1970s to the present.

Hop Wars

Alfred Haunold’s hybrid hops saved the Oregon hop industry by appealing to macro brewers such as Anheuser Busch, Miller, and Coors. But, at the same time, a craft beer revolution unfolded on the Pacific Coast. This chapter explains that, while the big brewers helped sponsor the hop breeding efforts, they did not always want the end result. In fact, the big brewers used only a handful of the two dozen hop varieties that Haunold released until his retirement in 1996. The hops we have in our microbrews today are the result of newfound collaborations resulting from the craft brewers of the 1980s and 1990s. And, unlike the 1950s and 1960s, the hop has become a visible component of beer marketing.