Hopping on hops, Part 2

Here’s an update on Weyerbacher’s hop-growing efforts in Easton, Pa.

Owner Dan Weirback says the 500 Nugget and 1,000 Cascade rhizomes they set out on an acre of land are indeed part of the brewery’s long-range thinking to address the current hop shortage. By the by, the pictured hop cone was cribbed from Wikipedia's entry.

Weyerbacher is one of those breweries that works in hops (and malts) like painters work in oils, achieving textures, tones and overall complexity. Some examples: Simcoe Double IPA, Eleven Triple IPA, Hops Infusion IPA. When you pump up beers like they do, hops gain some added importance.

Planted two weeks ago, Weyerbacher’s hops so far are taking root, and the brewery is using a drip irrigation method recommended by Rutgers University. The Nuggets (a bittering hop) are leading the way over the Cascades (all-purpose hop), and Dan estimates a combined yield this fall of about 100 to 500 pounds for use in a new, special pale ale or IPA.

The brewery will have to settle for a harvest by hand, something agriculture folks see as less than ideal. But enough volunteers and friends have committed to help, and Dan’s confident the job can get tackled over perhaps a weekend.

These first-season hops will get used “wet,” meaning the traditional drying process will be skipped. Some brewpubs and breweries, Dan says, have been experimenting with hops right off the vine, and have noted a fresher flavor in the brews.

In two or three years however, Dans says, the brewery will probably look to get its hands on some drying equipment. (The Rutgers research farm that grew hops in its demonstrations used an old tobacco dryer.) By then, Weyerbacher’s crop yield could be 2,000 pounds. That may sound like a big number, but Dan thinks it's quite manageable for the brewery.

So how far can Weyerbacher take this idea? Well, they have 15 acres available for planting, and Dan estimates five acres could supply the brewery.

But they may just be content at having the flexibility to help offset hop-supply needs, especially in unfavorable market times.

Exactly how long the current shortage and ensuing price spike will last is anyone’s guess. “It could be a two-year blip, but it could also be five years,” Dan says.

China, Russia and India are all now producing more beer than ever before, he says. Stir that in with the recent bad harvest, acreage taken out of production and trend for hoppier beers and you get an idea of the ripples affecting the supply picture.

The good news for brewers is that Pacific Northwest growers increased acreage this spring by 25 percent.

Still, though we like Weyerbacher's ounce of prevention, and hope they can reap many pounds of cure.

Hopping on the hop bandwagon

Hops are growing in Ocean County. Even at this very moment.

In fact that’s them to the left, getting a good start after their early-April planting. Probably in another week, since hops grow rapidly, it may be time to get a trellis going and start coaching the bines to climb it.

This set is the more robust of four plantings we did of Centennial, a bittering hop that takes quite well to most growing areas, including the flowerbed on the side of our house. It’s good for American pale ales and American renditions of IPA (like Stone IPA), and is similar to Cascade, Chinook and Columbus.

With hop growing on our minds and the worldwide hop shortage – and the subsequent price spike – we surmised that New Jersey would be fertile ground for commercially growing hops.

After all, New Jersey falls within a hop-friendly latitude and still lays some claim to the title “Garden State.” Never mind that subdivision coming soon to fallow land near you. (For the record, we are told that hops were once widely grown in New York state, around the early 1900s, but apparently not in New Jersey.)

So we put the hop-prospects question to the agriculture folks at Rutgers University. What we got was an answer that was part recent history and part economics, something that was not entirely yes or no.

First, hops, as a farm commodity, do look attractive right now, as any crop does when it’s fetching top dollar in the marketplace.

And if you recall, hop prices have shot up lately (so has the price of your beer), thanks to some recent bad harvests and lost acreage. Meanwhile, the popular-of-late extreme beer category has further boosted demand for hops. That super-duper, triple-double IPA ultra hop bomb you told your buddy is the best beer you ever poured probably used more hops to make than all the homebrewed beers in New Jersey combined.

But hyperbole aside, higher demand plus tighter supply equals sharply higher prices, something that puts smiles on farmers’ faces. So, yeah, hops are kind of lucrative at the moment. And New Jersey still has farmers, and RU did some hop growing demonstrations in the mid- to late-1990s at a research farm in Hunterdon County, planting Willamette, Nugget, Cascade, Perle and Chinook varieties.

RU sent some of their hops to a Pacific Northwest lab for testing to determine the alpha acid/bittering strengths, critical information any brewer needs.

What RU learned was that the bittering potential of the Jersey hops generally fell within the preferred range of hops from Washington State’s Yakima Valley, where over three-fourths of U.S. hops are grown. (Some of the high alpha hops, like Chinook and Nugget were slightly below their Yakima cousins, but not much. Chinook, by the way, used to be the bitttering hop in Flying Fish’s brews but has since been replaced.) Also, the Jersey hops didn't fall victim to pests that couldn't be handled.

RU’s efforts came just after New Jersey finally entered the craft brewing era. The Ship Inn brewpub, the British ales specialists in Milford in Hunterdon County and a front-runner in the Jersey pub brewing movement, served beer it made with the Garden State hops at dinner for folks involved in the project and a local legislator, Assemblywoman Connie Myers.

(FYI: Myers sponsored legislation that would have provided incentives for producing hops, so long as they were used by microbreweries in New Jersey. The bill never cleared committee, another reason to frown about craft beer's status in this state. Myers, by the way, gave up her Assembly seat in 2005.)

To underscore that growing hops around here isn’t a far-flung idea, RU folks mentioned that Weyerbacher Brewing in Easton, Pa., just across the Delaware River from Phillipsburg, planted an acre of hops a couple of weeks ago. Dan Weirback, the man behind such Weyerbacher brews as Double Simcoe IPA, Blithering Idiot (barley wine) and Black Hole (porter-stout) wasn’t immediately available to elaborate on the scope of their efforts. (We still hope to find out from him.)

So given RU's past work and current market conditions, things look favorable for Jersey fresh hops, right?

Sort of. But here’s where things become the bitter truth, so to speak.

While easy to grow, RU folks say, hops are expensive to harvest. Unlike some kinds of produce, they’re a crop you can’t efficiently harvest by hand. As RU’s John Grande, a fellow with PhD in horticulture tells us, it would be like trying to harvest corn one kernel at a time.

The vines are easy to cut down, but getting all the lupulin-packed cones is another matter, and for that farmers would need to mechanize. But the equipment needed for that job is pricey enough to cut deeply into profit potential, if not sour the deal outright.

Sigh.

But, remember RU’s answer wasn’t an outright "no," either.

There’s always the farmer’s old standby, the co-op, like-minded agriculturalists pooling resources so the overhead gets spread around and the price of that expensive harvesting and drying equipment (hops are generally dried somewhat before they’re used in brewing) isn’t coming out of one pocket. So there's some hope, if you're championing the idea of New Jersey becoming a player in the hop field.

But realistically, what’s the wind-up for Jersey hops? It’s like any new business venture: develop a sound game plan front to back and hope you’re in the right market at the right time.

Who knows, though, maybe Weyerbacher is smart to hop on hops. Maybe now is the right time.

Cash, flow

We’ve kept some distance from weighing in on the hop shortage (bad harvest, less acreage in production) and that sharp spike in malt prices (farmers growing corn for ethanol).

No one likes wallowing in bad news. Maybe we were just hoping the whole thing would go away or sort itself out before too long.

Wishful thinking.

And then this item tumbled into the inbox last week, throwing us more of a scare than higher beer prices we’ve seen lately: Krogh’s brewpub in Sparta, in New Jersey’s northwest, announced that the hop shortage was forcing it to suspend sales of beer to go.

Ah crap. Now we're witnessing hop shortage affecting beer availability (albeit beyond the pub’s pints at the bar), not just higher prices.

But then, thankfully, this happened: No sooner than they iced growler and keg sales, Krogh’s did an about-face, saying they could oblige folks coming in with their half-gallon jugs.

“After a few changes to brewing schedules, and acquisition of an additional supply of these key ingredients, we are happy to announce we are once again able to accommodate "To Go" sales of beer …” Krogh’s said in the follow-up announcement.

Whew!

But half-barrels and sixtels are still unavailable, Krogh’s says in its emails, adding that the situation could last up to a year before things return to normal.

After that, we started checking around a little bit to see if any other Jersey brewers were looking at workarounds to manage availability.

Happily no, or at least among the clutch of brewpubs we surveyed. Just some higher prices (25 to 50 cents her per pint).

The Ship Inn (Milford) is still putting its Brit style ales to go in their signature boxes (kinda like wine in a box) and doing growlers. (Their pint price went up from $3.95 to $4.25, by the way.)

Meanwhile at J.J. Bitting (Woodbridge), Mike Cerami says the higher price at his brewpub (from $4 to $4.50) is only the second hike in 11 years. Mike credits his brewer, August Lightfoot, with aggressively working to make sure the pub’s hop supply was safe and sound so it could keep offering the range of beers patrons have come to expect. (J.J.’s has its O’Halloran’s Irish Red, a 4.7% ABV session ale, on for St. Paddy’s Day; also look for their Barley Legal barleywine and an IPA.)

Tim Kelly at the Tun Tavern in Atlantic City says pints went up to $4.50. Our advice, join the VIP club there and save a buck per pint. (Last we check, all you had to do was sign up.)

Something else we found: Despite the double whammy with hops and malt, the bigger beer styles, like IPAs and strong ales, weren’t being sacrificed because of the extra malt or hops they require. Case in point: Harvest Moon has a Belgian strong ale (8-8.5% ABV) coming on tap (if it’s not already), and another big Belgian beer in the works. Brewer Matt McCord says patrons have been supportive in the face of higher prices.

Matt adds that it helps to get the word out about what’s driving the increase. And others say the tale of hops and small-batch breweries, where locking in prices three years out isn't affordable (like the giant brewer A-B can do), goes something like this:

Small-batch brewers (who often work on thin margins to begin with) last year had to make a snap decision and commit to hops at sharply higher prices. How much? Suppliers couldn't immediately say, but not committing meant the risk of not having hops. (An example of sticker shock: It’s costing Flying Fish in Cherry Hill a skyrocketing 80 grand just for the Styrian Goldings it uses in its seasonal Farmhouse Summer Ale.)

Then there's malt costs. Sowing barley has taken a back seat to corn and soybeans. Brewers need malted barley, the government thinks corn figures into the next fuel source (yet, sugar cane yields better results as far as ethanol goes) ... The commodity shift has picked craft brewers' pockets.

Wheat beer brewer High Point Brewing says their barley went from $20 to $35 per 55-pound bag; owner Greg Zacardi Butler says the brewery uses 15 to 20 of those bags per 15 barrels of beer. (Prices for the noble hops he uses jumped from $5 a pound to $20 to $25. Greg says High Point luckily overordered hops for 2007, so they got plenty at the lower price point. Still, the higher prices bring pressure.)

So yeah, we’re paying more for beer, a buck or so more per sixpack at the liquor store, and that quarter to half-dollar more for pints at the brewpubs. But don’t shove everything into the woe unto us column just yet.

Pint prices we surveyed hadn’t hit 5 bucks yet – you could pay as much as 6 bucks for a pint of Sam Adams at traditional bars – and folks at Triumph Brewing’s Philly location told us back in December they hoped to hold the line on pint prices if at all possible.

Also, consider this: Craft beer prices hadn’t really risen much for some time. And while no one likes paying more, your money is going for a better product: fresh, more flavorful beers.

So save any bitching for gas prices.