Sixpack Sez

Aug. 28, 2009 | Small hops farms are springing up all over America

NOTHING on the planet smells like freshly picked hops.

The small flower cones grow on vines (or, more accurately, bines, like string beans), and their sticky, oily resins provide the essential bitterness that balances the sweetness of malt. Without hops, beer would taste like something you might drink through a straw. When you are 14.

Bitterness aside, though, it's aroma that makes hops such a wonderful specimen of nature.

Freshly plucked and crushed between your fingers, they explode with a complex bouquet that may be fruity or spicy or gardenlike, depending on variety. Chinook hops are reminiscent of pine needles baking under noon sun. Saaz are earthy, like the aroma of hard-earned sweat after a day of kneading your garden. Hallertau are at once floral and citrusy, like fresh dew on the leaves of a lemon tree.

And Cascades hops - the most popular variety among American craft brewers?

The lovely bunch I picked last week smelled like . . . your doctor's office just after he snaps on those rubber gloves and tells you, "This won't hurt a bit."

The culprit on this morning was the latex gloves that Phil Markowski, the brewer at Southampton Publick House on Long Island, N.Y., thoughtfully passed out to a dozen or so friends and beer lovers who'd volunteered to help him pick hops for a batch of ale. Hop stems feel like 120-grit sandpaper that, after an hour of labor, would turn the unprotected fingers of a city boy into raw meat digits.

Normally, hops are picked by giant machines that can strip an acre in 90 minutes. They're then either processed for their extract oils, or dried, baled and shipped around the world for later use. In America, almost all hops are grown in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Lately, however, small hops farms have sprouted across America, including New York and Pennsylvania where the crop was common in the 19th century. Most of the farms - or, in truth, gardens - are experimental and lack any mechanized planting or picking equipment. The yield may be less than 100 pounds.

Some of the do-it-yourself movement was driven by the 2007 worldwide hops shortage that saw prices leap by as much as 500 percent. Some varieties were simply unavailable at any price.

Though the crisis passed, breweries and their customers see the small hops farms as part of the growing "local food" movement.

With the hop vines perhaps just minutes away, breweries can easily produce a once-a-year variety known as fresh- or wet-hop beer.

Instead of waiting for the hops to dry, brewers - with the help of a corps of volunteers - pick them in the morning, then quickly haul them home, to be added to a brew that very afternoon while they are still moist and green. Because there is not enough time to analyze the bitterness of these hops, they are usually added toward the end of the boiling period, to extract only their fresh, aromatic qualities.

Some are extremely small batches, like the autumn ale made at Montgomery County's General Lafayette Inn & Brewery, with hops grown on a small trellis just steps from its brewhouse. In Lehigh County, Weyerbacher Brewing this week made its annual batch of Harvest Ale, an IPA with wet hops planted by the owner.

Others are more ambitious.

Sierra Nevada bottles an entire Harvest Series of ales. Chico Estate is made with hops grown on its own property in Chico, Calif. Southern Hemisphere is brewed with hops picked in New Zealand and immediately flown back to California.

At Southampton, the wet-hop batch will amount to about a dozen kegs.

When Markowski asked me to join this year's harvest, I leaped at the chance. I've visited huge hop operations in Bavaria, where towering plants climb majestically to 20 feet above the ground. I lathered up with sunblock and pulled on the rubber gloves, ready for a day of honest, hard work.

What our group of soft-skinned hop pickers found instead was three or four mangy rows of vines, none higher than 6 feet. Markowski joked that we'd have them all picked in 14 minutes.

To be fair, it was a rainy June and the owner, Gian Mangieri, never made any claims to be a farmer. He's a landscaper and, he corrected me, "This is more of a hops patch. . . . I'll never produce enough to make any real money."

Mangieri tucked his hard-calloused hands inside his suspenders and said, "I just grow them because I love their smell and Phil gives me free beer for them."

Come to think of it, that's why I volunteered in the first place. I ripped off those rubber gloves and stuck my nose into a handful of the freshly picked Cascades. Ah . . . grapefruit and daffodils with just the suggestion of cannabis.

Within four hours, they'd be steeping in a boiling copper kettle of amber wort, filling the air with their wondrous perfume. Big, small, machine-cultivated or handpicked - it doesn't really matter. There's nothing like the aroma of hops.

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