As American craft beer and beer farmers begin to weather the storms of unnecessary trade wars we are also preparing to gather at The Craft Brewers Conference in Indianapolis.

I’ll preview CBC 2025 and it’s dearth of hop focused workshops. Then cover bad news at the USDA and for US Organic hops headed to the EU. And finally share lighter anecdotes from US hop history.

CBC 2025

No hops.

There are no hop focused seminars at CBC this year. Here’s the full list.

How could this be? Craft beer’s most important* and certainly most iconic ingredient is shutout from craft beer’s most important and iconic conference.

The simplest explanation is that hops are hurting and enthusiasm is low. And with craft brewers also hurting, what brewer has the time for ‘superfluous’ education on nerdy ingredient stuff? The CBC seminar list and marketing messaging feels like there is much more focus on the business side of operations than brewing.

Also this is a terrible time to have no hop education at CBC. The US hop market is in a phase of potentially dramatic change that will have profound impacts on every beer maker in the world. Hop danger and opportunity abound for brewers. It’s a shame they won’t be learning anything about it at a CBC seminar.

The lack of hop seminars makes me wonder if this downturn of craft beer will mean less focus on the production and quality of the beverages made and more on the small business challenges faced. I hope breweries can continue to prioritize quality in process and product, without quality we’re nothing. If money is the top concern for breweries, engaging proactively in the hop market should be a high priority on their list. There is money to be saved through smart and intentional sourcing.

For a less myopic view on CBC seminar content, my good friend Shanleigh covered CBC seminars extensively in her latest post.

*Malt, Yeast and Water are important too, I guess.

What I’m watching

As craft beer’s boom has waned the energy at CBC has waned too. If this year’s seminars are any preview, I’m expecting an increased business-like coldness to this year’s conference.

On the hop side, I wonder if we’ll get any new brand name hops released, any new products, or new news. How will the passing of US hops’ craft beer fueled glory days impact the peacocking of hop merchants at CBC?

• What is the presence of various hop merchants? Last year I saw smaller booths and less fancy displays from a number of players, I kinda think this year we’ll see even less merchants and even less fancy booths.

• Will any of the hop extract companies have a new product or pitch that moves the needle? I have been waiting for someone to introduce something that breaks from the current limitations of these products.

• How much presence will the circus of industry parties in the evenings have? Indy being a smaller destination than Las Vegas might help these events capture more attention.

Tumultuous times hit hops

In the last month US hops took two tough blows.

First, Francisco “Paco” Gonzalez, the recently hired USDA scientist in the public hop program was fired. The capricious nature of the firings of federal employees has received plenty of attention and was already sad enough to see - and then this news hit the heart of our hop industry and was crushing. This man, his family, and his work to better hops for all of us were completely upended, basically overnight, for no clear reason. Needless to say the loss of his expertise and efforts hampers our public hop research program at a crucial time in US hops. We can only hope reason and humanity prevail and his role is re-instated. Market uncertainty and consolidation, climate challenges, growing pest and disease resistance and increasingly narrow export chemical residue targets are all reasons to invest more in the public hop research program, not less.

Second, the European Union rejected a large shipment of 2024 US Organic hop crop for failing chemical residue tests. This was a major surprise to the exporter, Yakima Chief Hops (YCH). Of course before the hops even left port testing was done in the US which showed the hops should pass EU standards. When hops arrive for entry to EU they are tested again, by EU labs. These tests are ‘harmonized’ to a certain extent to try and avoid what happened here. However, this time the EU labs tested and then failed this shipment. Word on the street is that different and or additional tests were done on the hops than what US labs had tested for, perhaps going above or beyond the agreed-upon testing standards.

The impacts of this are twofold: the supply of Organic US hops in the EU is now short and future US Organic hop exports to the EU are going to be more costly and risky to deliver. This rejection may have just set an impossibly high standard of minimal chemical residue levels for EU Organic imports that US growers will have a very difficult time reaching.

Hop history corner

Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley by Peter Kopp is part text book, part love letter to Oregon’s hop growing legacy. It’s about 195 pages of thoroughly sourced Oregon hop history. Some of my favorite tidbits (so far, I’m on page 134 as of this writing);

• Kopp provides a few examples of how in the early days (mid-1800s to early 1900s) hops attracted gamblers and high risk tolerance swashbuckling types. For anyone

  familiar with modern hop market characters: some things never change.

• Leading up to prohibition as the no-alc fever was sweeping the nation, hop farmers found themselves in the blast radius of the moralists - in a 1894 report the Oregon State Board of Horticulture noted that hop bines are the “indirect cause of most of the leverages that make wrecks of men.”

• In 1900-1910 over a thousand farmers grew hops in the Willamette Valley, centered around Independence, Oregon. Today there are less than 70 commercial growers in the entire Pacific Northwest.

• One of the first US-based hop merchant corporations was the E. Clemons Horst Company. Emil Clemens Horst was a German immigrant who began hop farming in California and then scaled and led fellow US hop farmers through marketing and education. Despite European brewers holding a poor opinion of US hops, he sold Oregon hops to Guinness in 1904.

• The Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis started experimenting with hops in 1909, functionally the start of US publicly funded hop research.

• Hop harvest has always been incredibly labor intensive but was even more so before the wide spread adoption of mechanical pickers. In the 1940s when Oregon was second only to Czechia in hop acres at 26,000 acres of production, fully 70,000 seasonal laborers arrived annually in the Willamette Valley to hand harvest hops.

US hops have been up and down dozens of times over the last 200 years or so. We’re down now, but we’ll be up again.

Share Hop Notes

More hop content:

• Crosby Hops is starting to publicly talk about their private breeding program varieties. This is a notable move from the largest non-HBC aligned US hop seller and long time, big time supporter of the public breeding program. These experimentals be on show at Crosby’s CBC booth and are top of the list of varieties I’m most looking forward to smelling.

• Brulotte Farms, 1944 - 2025. It’s awful to lose such a longstanding and active US hop family farm. More farms are in trouble too, it’s a hard time.

Thanks for reading Hop Notes 22. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please consider subscribing or forwarding it to a friend.

That’s all for now. If you have topics you’d like to read about in Hop Notes my inbox is open 24/7: ericsannerud@gmail.com.