OUR MISSION: To preserve, protect, and promote New York State’s hop growing heritage and to cultivate an agro-economic community centered upon the production and appreciation of place-based craft beverages.

OUR PHILOSOPHY: “We believe that beers are best when they are brewed as close as possible to the land where the ingredients grow and reflect the character of the community in which they are brewed. It is this idea of “place-based brewing” that inspires every beer we brew.”

Read the following “OUR MISSION” stories to learn more about how we have lived according to our mission statement and philosophy as we helped develop the New York State farm beverage industry over the past 20 years.

To preserve, protect, and promote New York State’s hop growing history

Our journey into hops and brewing began with a book, Railroading in the Stockbridge Valley by John Taibi. Mr. Taibi had purchased and restored the Munns Rail Station, just one mile up the road from our home. The day his book was delivered from the publisher, I ran into him at the post office and purchased the book on the spot. Reading it, my mind was captured by the history of how our small town had raised tens of thousands of dollars in 1865 to incentivize the Midland Railroad to build a railroad through the Stockbridge Valley linking the Oneida Community and Colgate University to locations north, south and beyond. As a benefit, the small hamlets of our town and it’s farms and businesses were able to move goods and people more freely. A major agricultural product of those times was hops - the flower that protects beer from spoiling, offsets the sweetness of malt, and gives beer unique flavors and aroma. I know that now, but at the time I was consumed by the question “What’s a HOP?” The year was 1996, the year Madison County Historical Society held the first “Madison County Hop Fest” to celebrate Madison County’s hops history. The first commercial hop yard in the US was established in Bouckville, NY in 1808, just 8 miles from our farm and that farm began a major agro-economic movement that led to New York State being the center of hops production and brewing in the 1880’s. More local history - I needed to dig deeper.

In 1998, we attended the Hop Fest where I learned more about hops and history while my husband and brother enjoyed some New York beer in the brew tent. In those days, there were only a handful of breweries in New York State - factory breweries including Miller and Budweiser, regional breweries like FX Matt and Genesee Brewing, and some small craft breweries and brewpubs in the cities. The concept of breweries in rural areas linked to agriculture was not even a concept at the time. 1999 we went back to Hop Fest - that year I was given my first hop plant which sadly did not survive my black thumb, but we also began to have conversations with Cornell Cooperative Extension and rural sociologists from Cornell University, with home brewers and small commercial brewers, with historians, with local leaders and with other farmers about the feasibility of growing hops in New York State again. Could hops be economically profitable and bring tourism to our Central New York corridor with its deep roots in hop growing?

Those first meetings were fueled with enthusiasm and throttled by all the things we did not know - from where to get rootstock, to how to set up trellis systems, to whether they would still be susceptible to the fungal blights that killed off the industry in the early 1900’s. Out of the meetings came “The Northeast Hop Alliance”, some startup hop yards, a market study, and still more questions. We met in a variety of locations, one of which was the beautiful Horned Dorset Inn in Leonardsville, NY where the chef’s prepared a wonderful food and beer pairing featuring beers from Brewery Ommegang and beer washed cheese from Cooperstown Cheese Company. It was here that I first saw and experienced the words “slow food”. As the daughter of a dairy farmer, the term was unfamiliar but the concept was a big part of my heritage. We ate beef and drank milk from cows we raised, baked with eggs from our 4-H chickens, and grew and canned much of our yearly needs of fruit and vegetables. But life had removed me, if ever so slightly, from that station of self-sufficiency to a supermarket and fast food lifestyle. Slow food - it sounded like home. And another journey began.

We now had hops but I didn’t drink. In an effort to find my niche and drawing upon my experiences in home food processing, I developed some recipes using beer and hops. We took our beer and hop based mustard to the Hop Fest in 2004 to be served with local beef sausage . I was astonished when the crowd wanted to purchase it. So, I reached out to my friends at Cooperative Extension. Madison County had just started a new Agricultural Economic Development Program. The unknowns and estimated $2000 in startup costs frightened me, but the AED Specialist encouraged me to go for it. Nelson Farms was a great asset in both the logistics of bringing a new value added product to market and getting it processed safely and within regulation. And this is where we became involved in the local food and beverage industry. We became producers for the Madison County Bounty farm to table program. We took our mustard to breweries and brew festivals where we talked about hops and our efforts to bring hops growing back on a commercial scale to New York and we made friends with brewers who were interested in what was happening agriculturally. Somewhere along the line, I learned to like and then love craft beer.

We also began to collect “all things hop related” including several pieces of cherished china and porcelain and some very unusual pieces of historic hops equipment including a hops press / baler from a kiln in Poolville, a hop stove produced in 1875 in Munnsville from a kiln in Madison, and several smaller tools used to work the hop yards or in the processes of hops drying and evaluation. These tools and a number of old photographs are on display in our tasting room today for all to see.

TO BE CONTINUED….

and to cultivate an agro-economic community centered upon the production and appreciation of place-based craft beverages.

In the meantime, our hopyard, planted out of curiosity, had burgeoned into a 3 acre agricultural venture. Friends and family rallied to help with harvest in the early years, but by 2006, the size of the harvest and the manhours needed to hand pick all those hops far exceeded our ability to quench the thirst of our volunteers and keep them motivated. We needed a harvester but again, we knew nothing, and at 3 acres, we were too small for the bohemoth equipment being produced for Pacific Northwest commercial growers. Larry and a friend with engineering and welding background spent an entire winter studying old hop harvester patents and drawing designs on whatever piece of scrap paper might be handy. In 2007, we built a horizontal harvester that had a number of issues in bine handling and cone sorting. In 2008, a total redesign and 100’s of hours of hand bending picking fingers resulted in a relatively successful stripping system. It took another several years to figure out cone sorting. That only came after we worked again with the Madison County AED to apply for and secure a grant to purchase a 40 year old small acreage harvester from Poland which we observationally reverse engineered and then used that knowledge to design the system of inclined screens and conveyors that separate the hop cones from the leaves and stems. With the harvesting hurdle cleared, both by having a working knowledge of how to design homebuilt harvesters and having established contacts to procure more small scale harvesters from Europe, we felt confident in the ability to grow and harvest hops on a small commercial scale. As our story spread far and wide across the Northeast, other growers visited, learned, copied, and improved upon our systems and New York was on its way to having a viable, if somewhat small, commercial hops industry.

At the 2009 Madison County Hop Fest, we approached the owner of Empire Brewing Company and his brewer about using our hops. At the time, we were only harvesting, drying and vacuuming sealing our hops as whole cones. This format worked for home brewers, but we soon learned that commercial brewers had different needs. Empire owner, Dave Katleski, said he would be happy to work with us, but they needed pellet hops. Hops in pellet form are the preferred format due to their longer shelf life, smaller packaging footprint, better utilization in the boil, and ease of disposal. There always seemed to be something new to learn. My response to his apprehension about working with us was “Pellets? How hard can that be? I’ll make you pellets!” And as everything seems to go, it was much more technical than I had anticipated. We researched the pelletizing process and commercially available pelleting equipment. We learned more about how high temperatures destroy the sensitive volatile oils that make up the aroma and flavor in beer. We discovered that no OEM pelletizing equipment existed that would form pellets at temperatures under 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Why was nothing easy? We finally settled on a small bio-fuel pelletizer that we purchased from a lumber producer in northern New York in the middle of a snow and ice storm. Of course, the temps that day affected the manner in which the pelletizer worked. At home, it was running far too hot. We experimented with various ways to cool the hop material and the pelletizer using first, liquid nitrogen and then, pelletizing frozen hops in a walk-in freezer. Finally we were able to mass produce acceptable pellets at desired temps. We we took the pellets to Empire for evaluation and with some prompting - they didn’t use Cascade hops at the time - we had our first brewery customer. Empire State Pale Ale (ESPA) was the first 100% New York hopped beer to be served year round. The year was 2010.

With that beer launch, the hops industry virtually exploded. A series of hops conferences coordinated by the Northeast Hop Alliance gave prospective growers the information needed to make decisions and get started. We coordinated the purchase of hops rhizomes (the plant roots) and coir (the string that the hops grow on) in bulk for 100’s of growers, We applied for and secured a grant to hire a NYS Hops Educator to help both new growers and established growers like ourselves with concerns about fertilization, pest control, processing and quality evaluation and control. Brewers rallied to support the concept of farm brewing using New York State farm grown ingredients and allowing tap rooms, service by the pint, self-distribution, farm market sales and many other advantages over prior licensing levels. The NYS Farm Brewery legislation, first proposed by our Assemblyman William Magee and Senator David Valeski and based upon our business plan, developed with support from Madison County Ag Economic Development, was passed by the Governor following the first New York State Wine, Beer, Spirits and Cider Summit in 2011. The first farm breweries opened in 2012 which stimulated growth in hops and barley production and processing. The number of New York State breweries grew from 95 in 2012 to over 440 today including Foothill Hops Farm Brewery which opened in November of 2017. Other beverage industries have followed suit with the passing of laws allowing farm based production of spirits, cider and mead. Each wine, beer, cider, spirit, or mead produced by New York’s farm beverage producers has its own unique place-based character centered upon its local ingredients and the community that supports and consumes it.

A new agro-economic community has formed around agriculture and farm beverage production with concurrent growth in associated businesses including raw ingredient processing, packaging, graphic design, marketing, media, insurance and professional services, restaurant service with farm to table agricultural impacts, and tourism to name just a few. We are pleased to be part of that community.