Introduction

t was 7:15 a.m. on a hot and muggy Saturday

morning in mid-July when I woke. Despite the
early hour my husband, nicknamed Dieter, was gone
from the bed and it was already pushing 80 degrees.
Here in upstate New York we were about to suffer
through the sixth day of an unbearable heat wave
blanketing the Northeast. Last night we had sat on
our deck overlooking the pond, mesmerized by heat
lightning flashing across the night sky. The peachtinted waves of light illuminated the scalloped edges
of a brigade of dark thunderheads massing on the

northern horizon for a storm that never came. Prior

to the July heat wave we had endured a month of
heavy rain. The combination of the prolonged deluge
followed by the period of intense heat had resulted in
massive swarms of insects, and on the deck we were
soon enveloped in a cloud of mosquitoes that eventually drove us into the house. To beat the heat Dieter
had taken to getting up early to do farm chores,
patrol our newly established hop yards for the latest
outbreaks of insects and disease, and cut down the
rampant weeds flourishing in the heat and moisture.

Helderberg hops growing in front of our barn, with a view of our pilot hop yard the first year it was planted.

The Hop Growers Handbook

Japanese beetles do a lot of damage to hop yards in the

eastern United States but have not yet become a problem
for hop growers in the Northwest.

Whether you call it climate change, weather weirding, the new normal, or just bad luck, we had
picked a heck of a year to start our hop farm.
I waited for a bit, then called Dieter on his cell
phone. I was a little concerned about where he was,
but mostly I wanted him to make coffee. Over
twenty-five years of marriage it has become a traditional job of his to, each morning, make espresso for
himself and caffe latte for meand lately for our
teenage son, Wolfgang. I could tell as soon as Dieter
answered the phone there was something wrong. He
gave his field report in a dismal voice. The Japanese
beetles that we had noticed to be increasing in number in the hop yard over the past two days had
exploded overnight into a major infestation, decimating our yard of heirloom hops and swarming
into the first- and second-year plantings, the beetles
innumerable munching mouths reducing our hop

bines thick green leaves to lace. A disaster. But yes,

he would come in and make the coffee.
As for me, still in my nightgown, I rushed downstairs and pulled out the Field Guide for Integrated
Pest Management in Hops, a cooperative publication
of Oregon State University, the University of Idaho,
and Washington State University along with the
United States Department of Agricultures
Agricultural Research Service. Yes, I realize we are
talking about the integrated management of pests on
the other side of an enormous continent from our
little hop yard. But right now thats all weve got.
Virtually all the countrys major commercial hop
production happens in the Northwest. The only
thing anyone has written lately about hop growing in
the East is a history book.
In the 1800s New York State was the biggest
producer of hops in the country, but the hop industry has been dead here for about one hundred years,
victim to a combination of fungal disease, hop
aphids, and Prohibition at the turn of the century. I
quickly flipped to the well-worn section Arthropod
and Slug Pest Management and ran my finger
down the long list. Bertha armyworm, California
prionus beetle, hop looper, root weevil . . . wait a
minute, what about the letter J as in Japanese beetle? Nothing. Do they not have Japanese beetles in
the Northwest? I consulted Google. No, they dont.
Yet our hop yard here in upstate New York is crawling with Japanese beetles. Whats an Eastern hop
grower to do?
At this point it might make sense to ask why we
are growing hops here in the first place. Well, like
many things in life, it started over a few beers. My
husband and I went to high school together, and
thats where we first became friends. We grew up in
the countryside near the city of Albany, me living on
my familys apple orchard and him living just a mile
or so down the road. We are now in our early fifties,
but we became beer enthusiasts at a young age. Keep
in mind this was back when the drinking age in New
York was eighteen. There werent many local places

Introduction
to go for a beer back then, but there was a German
restaurant and bar in the next town called Scholzs
Hofbrau Haus. Scholzs served German beer. We
became particularly fond of Spaten Dopplebock,
which was served in a 2-liter glass boot. It was over
one of these boots that my husband and I became
more than friends.
Good beer grew to be an even bigger part of our
lives when we moved to Boston to go to college and
both worked part time at Beacon Hill Wine & Spirits,
a small fine wine, cheese, and liquor store that featured a ridiculously broad selection of beer for such
a tiny place at the time. Leaving Boston, we moved
into a farmhouse on my familys farm and married.
By this time our fascination with beer had reached
epic proportions. On our honeymoon we took our
first trip to Europe and brought only one guidebook,
Michael Jacksons Pocket Guide to Beer, published in
1986, the year before we were married. The book is
now in its seventh edition. Whether we found ourselves in Amsterdam, Brussels, or Cologne, Jacksons
recommendations for the best brews and pubs led us
well off the beaten path, which was exactly where we
wanted to be.
Perhaps our most memorable visit was to the
Duvel Moortgat Brewery in Belgium, outside of
Brussels, where one of our favorite beers (Duvel, a
potent Belgian ale with 8.5 percent alcohol by volume) was made. Jackson reported in his pocket
guide that the Duvel Moortgat Brewery offered tours.
After hours of searching for the place, we pulled up
in front and entered a bar that was filled with rowdy
Flemish-speaking brewery workers drinking from
gigantic chalices of dark beer. When we asked in
English if the brewery provided tours, the room fell
utterly silent, much like that scene in the movie An
American Werewolf in London at the bar called The
Slaughtered Lamb. Then the workers all burst into
raucous laughter.
A small, bespectacled man with wispy hair
emerged from behind the bar and, speaking perfect
English, told us he would be happy to give us a

tourbut first we shared a draft Duvel at the bar.

The dark beer the workers were drinking was
Maredsous Triple, 10 percent alcohol by volume
compare that to Budweiser, your average American
working mans beer, weighing in at 5 percent. Our
guide was the brewerys public relations man. He
explained that when we had first entered the bar the
workers had just been joking about how long it had
been since anyone had come looking for a brewery
tourhence the surprised silence, then laughter. As
we talked we noticed the mans face was crisscrossed
with healed scars. He explained that the brewerys
products were very high in alcohol and he had been
in several car accidents driving home from work. He
cautioned us against drinking and driving. His tour
took us past giant open-air vats of beer brewed with
a form of wild yeast that had become the brewerys
signature and over a maze of elevated, narrow, and
slippery catwalks that took us through the brewing
apparatus. From the catwalk I looked down to see
the workers on the brewery floor peering up the skirt
that I had unfortunately chosen to wear that day.
When we returned from our honeymoon, Dieter
began working as a salesman for Bill Newman at the
Wm. S. Newman Brewing Company, located in
Albany and one of the first craft brewers on the East
Coast. Needless to say our beer of choice during that
era became Newmans Albany Amber Ale and,

Our interest in hops grew out of our interest in beer.

The Hop Growers Handbook

A panorama image of Indian Ladder Farms beneath the Helderberg Escarpment.

recruiting friends to work the Newmans beer truck

at festivals such as Albanys Pinksterfest, we drank a
lot of it. Although the Wm. S. Newman Brewing
Company eventually went out of business, the craft
beer industry took off. Dieter got into home brewing,
led the formation of a local beer club that meets
monthly to try new beers, started a beer blog that
became very popular, and began growing hops in the
gardenand up the side of the house.
But before beer there was farming, and in hindsight it was inevitable that these two occupations and
preoccupations would merge in our lives. Both our
families have roots in dairy farming. Dieters family
had a dairy farm in New Yorks Mohawk Valley, and
he spent many summers of his youth living and
working there. My familys farm, on which we live
today, was originally also a dairy farm. It was started
by my great-grandfather, Peter Ten Eyck, a businessman, politician, and farmer who in 1915 purchased a
tract of land made up of five individual farms in
western Albany County beneath the limestone cliffs
of the Helderberg Escarpment. There he created a
single farm and named it Indian Ladder Farms, after
a Native American trail that once scaled the cliff face.
The farm started out as an orchard and dairy, then
turned to raising beef cattle, and eventually converted

Dieters mother as a child, standing on her fathers

shoulders on Matis Farm in St. Johnsville, New York.
Photograph Courtesy of the Matis Family

Introduction

Bins of apples on Indian Ladder Farms, in the Ten Eyck family since 1915.

The Hop Growers Handbook

entirely to orchard. Today the farm, operated by my
father, who is also named Peter Ten Eyck, remains
primarily an apple orchard, with a sizable retail farm
market and pick-your-own business. As I write, he is
in the process of retiring and turning over management of the business to my brother, another Peter
Ten Eyck, and me.
After we moved back to the farm, Dieter and I
experimented with various types of agriculture. We
grew specialty vegetables for restaurants, kept a flock
of sheep for meat and wool, raised chickens for eggs
and meat, and created a small herd of dairy goats.
Today we continue to produce much of our own
food, gardening extensively and raising small livestock. I have worked on my familys farm ever since
I was a child. As an adult, giving up on my not-
necessarily-lucrative career as a freelance journalist
and newspaper reporter, I served a long stint helping
my father run the farms retail operation before
launching a new career in farmland conservation.
Today I work for the New York State office of the
national farmland conservation organization American Farmland Trust. Dieter, a photographer and
photo editor by trade, also helped out on Indian
Ladder Farms over the years. A while ago my father,
in his seventies, gave us the house we live in along
with 60 acres (24.3 hectares) of land. Twenty acres of
the land we now own are still cultivated by Indian
Ladder Farms through an informal lease arrangement; however, the remainder of it is not. After
taking ownership of the land we began to cogitate
about what we should do with it. Right around that
time New York State adopted new legislation called
the New York State Farm Brewery Act, intended to
stimulate economic development in the state by elevating beer making to the same level as the states
extremely successful vineyards and wineries. Brewing beer was now not only allowed but encouraged
on farms as long as it was made with ingredients
grown in New York State.
Needless to say, a lightbulb went on in Dieters
head. We began planting more hops and barley,

started a hops test plot, and eventually put in a smallscale commercial hop yard. Today Dieter divides his
time between photography and farming, and he and
our business partner, Stuart Morris (a friend from
our days at Beacon Hill Wine & Spirits) have
launched the Indian Ladder Farmstead Brewery and
Cidery. Like all Eastern hop farms, ours is new by
agricultural standards. Nearly thirty years of growing
hops for pleasure has given us insight into the plant,
but having commercial aspirations and a full hop
yard has brought many new lessons our way.
Which brings me back to the day we had our first
Japanese beetle alarm. While we drank our coffee on
the porch, Dieter called my father, who went to
Cornells School of Agriculture in the 1950s and
majored in insects and how to kill them. Indian
Ladder Farms is not an organic orchard, but my father
is committed to using as few pesticides as he can. The
farm operates under the terms of an environmental
label called Eco Apples, which ensures its growers
adhere to strict Integrated Pest Management principles and a low-spray program. Located in the middle
of a nonorganic apple orchard, our hop farm will
never be able to obtain organic certificationbut our
goal is to farm in an environmentally sustainable way.
My father said he was also fighting Japanese beetles
in the apple orchard and told Dieter he was going to
have to spray the orchard with insecticide to kill them.
Dieter decided to try another routespraying the hop
bines with neem oil, made from the crushed fruit and
seeds of the neem tree, which grows in India. Neem
oil contains azadirachtin, a natural pesticide approved
for organic use. He also set up some Japanese beetle
traps near the hop yards. By the next morning the
traps were filled with thousands of Japanese beetles,
and during his morning patrol Dieter noticed many
of the beetles still clinging to the hop leaves were in
fact dead. One problem down.
A couple of weeks later we went on our annual
one-week pilgrimage to the beach. We expected the
hops to come to maturity a week or ten days after our
return. Dieter planned to spend the time in between

Introduction

Our pilot hop yard before the trellis collapse. Note the trellis is beginning to sag under the weight of the hops.

our return and the harvest setting up the drying area

in the barn. When we returned we found that a section of the hop trellis had collapsed beneath the
weight of the bines. After using the tractor to try to
pull the collapsed section back up and nearly taking
down the entire hop yard and trellis in the process,
we decided to cut the bines down even though all the
hop cones werent quite ready.
We spent the entire day on our deck with friends
pulling the cones off the bines. We were amazed by
how many flowers there were. It was just our second
year, so we had not expected the bines to produce so
many so soonand we didnt have a mechanical
harvester yet. I began to feel extremely stressed, but
Dieter seemed to be perfectly content drinking beer
and picking hops. How in the world were we going
to harvest all of this by hand? But the more immediate question was the following: without the drying
area set up in the barn, where were we going to dry
several bushels of hop flowers? Picked hops must be
spread out to dry immediately after harvest so they
dont mold.
Hops are a soporific, and hop picking made me
very sleepy. I went upstairs to lie down for a bit. I

The section of collapsed trellis we encountered upon

returning from vacation.

The Hop Growers Handbook

heard a lot of commotion in the living room but tried
to ignore it. When I came back down I found all the
furniture had been pushed to the edges of the room
and a giant blue tarp had been spread across the
entire floor. The tarp was covered with a layer of
hops and surrounded by four box fans turned on
high. Dieter and a couple of our male friends sat
around drinking beer and waiting to see how mad I
would be. Absurdly, a small child-size rake lay in the
middle of the sea of hops. I had to laughbecause if
I didnt I would have cried.
These were just some of the new challenges that
reared up when we began to scale up our garden-
variety hop hobby to a commercial venture. As a
gardener, whether you are graduating from cultivating tomato plants in raised beds to field production,
expanding a handful of backyard fruit trees to an
orchard, or transitioning from a single hop bine
growing in a corner of the garden to a hop yard, you
will face new issues. Sure, you know how to take care
of a tomato plantbut when you apply that knowledge to taking care of one hundred or one thousand
plants, you find yourself on a different playing field
entirely. Insects and disease can quickly run wild in
even a small-scale monoculture planting. Meanwhile
weeds will happily take advantage of the water and
nutrients you are providing for your crop. And if you
are successful your harvest will no longer be picked
in a couple of hours on a pleasant afternoon. Because
of the increased scale of a crop produced for market,
controlling pests on a plant-by-plant basis, and weeding, youll find cultivating and harvesting by hand
may no longer be practicalespecially if you are
working on your own.
Today we are growing hops on a small-scale commercial basis. At our Indian Ladder Farmstead
Brewery and Cidery, we are making hard cider, flavored with our own hops, from apples grown on
Indian Ladder Farmsas well as beer made with
the hops and barley that we grow along with some
that we purchase from other farmers in New York
State. The brewery has a tasting room where people

We tried to pull the trellis back up but it didnt work.

Photograph by Laura Ten Eyck

Collecting an early harvest in the bucket loader. Photograph

by Laura Ten Eyck

Our son, Wolfgang, carrying hop bines to the deck where

we handpicked the cones. Photograph by Laura Ten Eyck

Introduction

Laurie handpicking hops on the deck.

Bucket starting to fill with hops from collapsed trellis.

can buy beer and hard cider by the glass to drink

on-site; they can also fill growlers. Plans are underway to build a post-and-beam barn to house the
brewery and cidery, expand the tasting room, and
add a shop. To think it all began with a single hop
growing in the garden!
And we are not alone. Outside the hop-growing
stronghold of the Northwest, productive hop yards
have taken root in other states, including Colorado,
Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio. In the
eastern United States, hops are being grown from
Maine to North Carolina. Whether they are homesteaders, home brewers, or in it to make money,
people are growing hops and using those hops to
brew local beer.

The Hop Yard in Gorham, Maine, got its start on a

potato farm and is now supplying the craft beer scene
in Portland, Maine. Addison Hop Farm supplies its
organic hops to breweries and home brewers in its
home state of Vermont, which has the largest number of breweries per capita of any state in the nation.
The Hop Farm Brewing Company, in Pittsburgh, has
its own hop yard outside the city and is working with
regional farmers to increase hop acreage in western
Pennsylvania. Old Dominion Hops Cooperative is a
group of ninety-plus farmers producing local, sustainably grown hops to supply the craft beer industry
in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.
When we first started planting hops beyond the
garden gate there were few resources to guide

The Hop Growers Handbook

Our first hop harvest on the living room floor.

Easterners interested in growing hops in the garden,

on a small scale, or commercially. The number of
East Coast craft brewers was rapidly expanding, and
many were starting to clamor for locally grown hops.
But all the books, research papers, and online
resources available were primarily about hop production in the Northwest, which takes place at a vast
scale under completely different climatic conditions.
By 2009, under the direction of agronomist Heather
Darby, the Hops Project at the University of Vermont
had put in their experimental organic hop yardand
results from their variety trials and research into diseases and insect pests began appearing online. The
Northeast Hop Alliance formed, and a couple of
conferences were held in New York and Vermont.
The year after we put in our pilot hop yard, Cornell
University put in their own experimental hop yard;

in 2014 the Northeast Hop Alliance and Cornell put

out the Cornell Integrated Hops Production Guide.
We devoured all the material we could get our
hands on. It was clear that lots and lots of great science had been done on hop nutritional needs,
varieties, insects, and diseasebut nowhere could
we find self-contained, simple, step-by-step instructions for growing hops commercially (hop-yard
construction, planting, tending, and harvesting and
processing). To complicate matters further, whether
it was about soils, bugs, disease, or the hops themselves, most of the language used was highly
technical and difficult to understand. Weve worked
hard to learn what we have learned, and we are still
learning. So we decided to create the book we wish
we had when we started out, in the hopes that it will
help others who want to grow hops, either for their

10

Introduction

Dieter holding hop bine in the one-acre hop yard.

Photograph courtesy of John Carl DAnnibale/Times Union

Laurie checking out a sample from a brewers cut in the

Yakima Valley, Washington.

Wolfgang paying homage to hops at Crosby Hop Farm in the Willamette Valley, Oregon.

11

The Hop Growers Handbook

own use or for market and help fuel the renaissance
of small-scale, sustainable hop growing in the East.
In the pages ahead, youll gain a general understanding of the hop plant itself, its botany, its history,
and its role in the brewing of beer. Youll also learn
about hop varieties, how and where to grow and care
for them, and what kind of infrastructure and equipment you will need at various scaleswhether you
are growing hops on a city balcony, in a backyard garden, in a miniature hop yard, or as the real thing. We

also explain how to process the cones to ensure the

highest quality for beer making, explain the basics of
how beer is made, and talk about the role of hops in
brewing beer. As a grower, the more you know about
how hops are used by brewers, the better. At the end
of the book, friends who are commercial brewers and
home brewers share their recipes for beer they have
made with our hops. One thing we have found is that,
like drinking beer, growing hops is a social activity
that brings together friends and community.

12