‘A substantial RETURN’
Wisconsin hops are making a comeback
NEKOOSA – It’s surprisingly serene in the shade of 18-foot-high hops plants.
The spindly but massive upwardgrowing plants sway, leaves rustling, on twine tied to support wires strung above the crop. The slow drip of water from the irrigation system sounds a little like something heard in the lobby of an upscale spa.
It’s mid-July and a few of the plants have bright green cones forming on them. In a little more than a month those plants, 1,000 to an acre, will be harvested for their cones. These Wisconsin hops will flavor beers made in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Bill Arendt, owner and president of Gorst Valley Hops, walks through the rows of plants, eagerly discussing production, marketing and why he added 22 acres of hops to his 150-acre cranberry farm in the sandy soils of central Wisconsin.
“There’s a huge amount of pride
seeing your product in somebody’s beer,” he said standing beside rows of Skyrocket hops located adjacent to a cranberry marsh.
Arendt started growing hops four years ago as a way to hedge against falling or plateauing prices for cranberries. Hops offered a high-value crop that could be successfully grown in Wisconsin. Harvest came at roughly the same time as cranberries.
“I needed a crop I could grow on a limited number of acres that had a substantial return,” he said.
In the late 1800s, Wisconsin — already by then a big brewer of beer — was also one of the main hops producers in the country. That changed after the fungal disease downy mildew wiped out the state’s hops in the 1920s and production moved west, especially to eastern Washington and Oregon.
That’s started to change in recent years. Wisconsin hops are on their way back.
Nationwide, hops production increased about 20 percent in 2017, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture report, with Washington, Oregon and Idaho leading the way. In Wisconsin, about 297 acres of hops were harvested last year, according to an annual report from the Hop Growers of America. That’s up from about 120 acres in 2014.
Sells around region
Arendt’s Gorst Valley sells hops to several microbreweries around Wisconsin, including Ale Asylum in Madison, and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Hops provide flavor and aroma for beer, with numerous crop varieties offering up a wide palate of tastes and smells.
Four years into his odyssey growing hops, Arendt says he’s still learning about the farming practices and the businesses of hops. As a farmer, that learning curve excites him.
“It’s pretty neat to see the end product,” he said. “This is a sexy crop until you start playing with it because it’s really abrasive, picky and itchy: the characteristics of a climbing plant.”
Arendt, 51, is a second-generation farmer who has spent most of his life on the farm, near Nekoosa. His operation is one of about 68,000 farms in Wisconsin.
He takes pride in the product that ends up in beer and cranberries on store shelves. That’s part of what’s kept in the business through strong prices and poor.
“The love of farming. The love of the land. We’re stewards of the land,” Arendt said. “This property is part of my family and there’s a sense of pride that goes along with it. It’s the pride of being a farmer. I love to grow stuff.”
As production of hops has edged up nationwide, prices have begun to fall in recent months. Depending on the variety, prices on The Lupulin Exchange ranged anywhere from $2.25 per pound to $20 (or more) per pound.
‘Get the brewer involved’
Earlier this year, Arendt finalized the purchase of the Gorst Valley name from another producer with whom he’d previously been a partner. It’s part of his ongoing marketing efforts to carve out his niche in the world of hops — and ultimately, beer.
He’s made sales going door-to-door, dropping in talking to beer makers, offering tours of his operation and samples of his product.
“Little by little I’m making progress in sales. … You’ve got to get the brewer involved,” Arendt said. “Whether it’s a 22pound order or a 2,000-pound order, I believe they’re all important. There’s no easy answers to sales. It’s like another job.”
Growing hops is labor intensive: trellising, keeping pests away, also harvesting and processing. A pair of large buildings set on concrete slabs house the bulky processing, drying and packaging equipment required to move product from farm field to beer producer.
“The message I got from growers out west was: If you can’t pick and dry them, don’t grow them, because they’ll die in the field … and they’ll become useless,” he said. “You can’t run these down to the grain mill. You have to be able to take care of your own crop.”
Arendt says the capital investment in hops — from plants to processing equipment — isn’t cheap at the level he’s producing and processing.
“It’s an expensive crop to establish, about $10,000 bucks an acre to get going, and then adding your processing equipment on top of that,” he said. “It’s a major investment.”
That investment surrounds Arendt as he walks through the shade cast by the plants. A chirping robin adds to the soundtrack.
“This is one of the great pleasures of it, to walk the field here and see it coming to be,” he said.