Photo of hop flowers by Flickr user Dave Shea. Published under Creative Commons license.
Over the weekend, the Beardslee Hop House in Pittsfield hosted a few hundred curious visitors -- there to learn about the area's agricultural history, check out the design of an authentic 1860s-era hop barn, or just to taste local beer from Cooperstown's Brewery Ommegang.
When the region's hop business went on the decline in the early 20th century, the hop barn was converted into living quarters for hired hands to work on the Beardslee family farm. About ten years ago, William Beardslee hired two master craftsmen to rebuild the hop barn to the authentic look in its heyday. Both the hop barn and the Beardslee homestead are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Hop farming used to be big business in upstate New York, before plant disease and Prohibition destroyed the industry. Recently, the New York Times covered another tribute to beer's long legacy in the state: The New York Historical Society's exhibition "Beer Here: Brewing New York's History."
Edward Rothstein wrtes that in the mid-nineteenth century, New York State was the nation's hop basket:
Beer, we learn, under the firm guidance of the show’s curators, Debra Schmidt Bach and Nina Nazionale, is one of those small things through which large forces can be discerned. And its history in New York is as unexpected as the variations in taste produced during today’s micro-brewing renaissance.
The tastes at the end nicely pulled it all together. That distinctive tang of hops, for example? We learn that these light green, cone-shaped flowers became a commercial crop in New York State in 1808, and that by 1840, New York led the country in their production (at least until blights of mildew in 1910 led to their local decline). We see, on loan from museums in Cooperstown, where hops thrived, a painting of their harvest in September, along with hops poles used for their plucking, hops gathering baskets, and even a graffiti-covered door from a farm where migrant workers were housed.
The hop arbors that were once a common sight in upstate New York have mostly disappeared. But with microbrewing and demand for local ingredients on the rise, there's some hope for their return. Here's another New York Times story from November 2011, on the pioneers seeking to bring hop growing and farm breweries -- and a new kind of agrotourism -- back to the New York State landscape.
“We’re trying to create a beer culture in the area, much like you have a wine culture,” said Jeremiah Sprague, a home brewer and full-time vineyard employee who recently helped oversee the first major harvest at Climbing Bines Hop Farm in Torrey, which overlooks Seneca Lake. With his high-school friends Chris Hansen and Brian Karweck, Mr. Sprague is transforming the site into a farm brewery where hops will be grown and dried.
“The coolest thing we’re going to have,” he said, “is the ability to offer some estate-hopped ales,” the fruits of the roughly 1,500 hop plants the farm has already cultivated.
