Andrew Morford’s grandmother, Dolores, was the first woman crowned Queen of the Moxee Hop Festival. Or was it the second? Over the decades, this morsel of family lore has acquired a couple of loose ends in the retelling, so Andrew confers with his dad.
“She always told us she was the second,” confirms Gary Morford.
That would have made Dolores Hops Festival Queen in 1949*, the same year she married Wes Morford Jr. The same year the couple bought land in Wapatu, and planted hops on it. The acreage has expanded and contracted over time, but their Green Acre Farms continues to grow hops to this day, the work passed on first to Gary, and now to Andrew.
Gary has recently been working to restore the hundred-year-old home his grandparents built, so he’s been thinking a lot about the past. “I don’t want the history to go away” he says, “even with us.” So he gets to reminiscing.
His grandfather, Wes Morford Sr., is remembered to have started growing hops on his farm as early as 1945, but he was mainly known for potatoes. So, that’s what Wes Jr. started out planting, when he established Green Acre. But before long, he would turn the focus to hops, and not look back. On this point, Gary brandishes another detail regarding his mother’s role in the legacy. “The later years, she said it was her that told my dad to get into hops,” he remembers. “Because she came from Moxee.”
Moxee and Wapatu are a couple of small farming towns in a fertile part of south-central Washington State collectively called the Yakima Valley. Hopyards were first planted in the valley more than 150 years ago, and Dolores’s family began growing them in 1907. And whether or not they knew it, the Yakima Valley happens to reside the latitudinal sweet spot for growing hops. The crop flourished to such a degree that, since about 1930, the region has been looked upon as the hops growing capital of the world.
While other agricultural commodities became heavily corporatized in the 20th century, a smaller and less predictable market has kept hop farming the domain of family farms. Green Acre is but one of dozens of farms that have stuck with it, generation after generation, to help make Yakima Valley the most prolific hops growing region on the planet.
However, despite its successes, survival has never been consistently easy for Yakima’s hop growing community. “Hops,” says Gary with a sigh, “It’s always tough. I can remember the good years: ‘80, ‘92, 2000. It’s like every 10 years.” But the in-between times, he recalls, are what determine whether a family will be able to stick it out. “There used to be 500 growers in in the 50s,” he says. And Now? “You know, we’re down to 60 families.”
Cycles of boom and bust have regularly brought Yakima’s entire hops growing industry to the brink of collapse, whether due to pestilence, the Prohibition, or price fixing. The families who remain have survived mostly thanks to resilience, adaptability, and to a great degree, cooperation. In fact, we only have to look back as far as 2006 to find a hops industry in crisis.
However, what happened next stands among the all-time great comeback stories in the history of American agriculture.
Going back to 1996, the hops market had sustained a decade-long down cycle, as demand hit a generational low. Over those ten years — according to annual reports by the trade association, Hop Growers of America — the industry experienced a more than 30-percent decline in both acreage and market value, while the price per pound barely budged, failing to keep pace with inflation. What had been a $135 million industry in 1995, lost more than $30 million in annual value by the beginning of 2006.
Nowhere was the impact felt more than the Yakima Valley. Roughly 99-percent of America’s hops are grown in the Pacific Northwest, while the vast majority are raised here. As Jeff Widdows — a Marsh & McLennan broker and Agribusiness specialist based in the city of Yakima – puts it: “Roughly 75% of the hops in the United States are grown within about a 40-mile radius of our office.”
Widdows works with all manner of farms in the Yakima area, which may have a bigger reputation for growing America’s apples. However, while the economy of tree fruit agriculture tends to attract venture capital, the local hops business remains in the hands of the families who built it. And the farmers are more close-knit as well. “They’ve grown up together. Their dads grew up together. Their grandfathers grew up together. it’s more family oriented than any business than any industry I’ve ever seen or worked with, and I feel very fortunate to be a part of it.
Which made it all the more distressing when that ten-year downturn further winnowed their numbers. Some families were able to survive by diversifying: repurposing hop fields as vineyards or orchards. Green Acre stands as a prime example of this, having survived in part by investing in wine grapes, cherries, apples, pears, and mint. Others farms divested, letting go of hops acreage, or even selling their farms altogether.
Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Toppenish, Washington, Perrault Farms went into foreclosure.
Established in 1902, Perrault Farms traces its origins to the Moxee Company, a real estate operation backed by investors including the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell. From the end of the 19th century, the company marketed 50-acre parcels of irrigated land in Moxee, touting its fertile soil and sunny climate to lure farmers from across the midwest. Many who responded hailed from French-Canadian families, including that of Alberic Perrault, who’d recently emigrated to Minnesota.
“My great-grandfather,” explains Jason Perrault, the CEO of Perrault Farms, who now represents the fourth generation of his family to farm hops in the Yakima Valley. “When [Alberic] was about 18 years old, his family sent him out here. He established that first homestead, and the rest of the family, including his mother and father, followed.”
Alberic Perrault, and his wife Salome, started growing hops by 1928. In 1969, their son Bernard bought his own land. He and wife June planted the first plots of what would become the family farm in Toppenish. It’s Jason’s father, Steve Perrault, who was running the farm in 2006, when the Yakima Herald issued a public notice that the foreclosed farm would be sold at auction on steps of the county courthouse.
“It wasn’t just us,” says Jason Perrault, “It was industry wide. That extended term of low market prices, that put a lot of pressure on a lot of the family farms. We just about lost the farm completely.”
In fact, it was the same circumstances that put the farm in jeopardy, that gave the family one more chance to turn things around. The hops market remained so dire, not a single bid was placed on the property. When the farm didn’t sell, the Perraults were granted one more year to get right. “Kind of a last minute, hail Mary, you know, from my father,” Jason says, “getting financing and giving us that one more year. And that’s what did it.”
Jason insists the family never lost hope: “As a farmer, you always think things are gonna be better around the corner.”
And as it turns out, just around the corner came the aromatic fruits of a long-term investment Steve Perrault and a handful of fellow farmers made in the late 80s.
Hops, from the plant humulus lupulus (‘wolf of the woods’ in Latin), are typically the last ingredient added during the production of beer. They grow in clusters of dense cones that more closely resemble small artichokes than pinecones. Each hop cone is rich in bitter acids, which are added by brewers to balance against the malt sugars that would otherwise make the taste of beer cloyingly sweet.
Alpha acids, as these bittering compounds are known, grow in higher or lower concentrations, depending on the variety of hop. However, as the brewing industry evolved over the course of the 20th century, the massive companies that dominated the market never actually laid eyes on the hops themselves. Rather, macro-brewers such as Anheuser-Busch would buy high volumes of hop oil extract, which is easier and less messy to work with, particularly for a brewery producing at a scale of millions of gallons per year.
A hops market based on extract meant that harvested hops needed to be shipped somewhere for processing, generally to the Midwest. Which meant the market wasn’t in the hands of the farmers who grew the hops, but with businesses that produced the extract, and sold that to the breweries. A middleman.
“Back then, the brewer and the grower rarely interacted,” explains Jason Perrault. “In between, you had a typical dealer network, where the business model was buy low, sell high. The larger the disconnect they could make between the grower and the brewer, the more profitable their business would be.”
This proved extremely hard on anyone farming hops, particularly due to the amount of labor needed to harvest the plant each summer. “Back in the 30s,” Gary Morford says, “They picked hops by hand. At the American Hop Museum [in Toppenish], you could see an old poster: ‘Wanted 10,000 hop pickers.’” Virtually everyone in the valley would be put to work.
Even with modern farming advances, the process takes a lot of hands. As a teen growing up in such a heavily agricultural area, Jeff Widdows remembers all his summer jobs revolved around harvests. “I’d work cherry harvest early on,” he recalls, “And then right before school started, I’d drive truck for hop harvest. It was long hours and dirty work, but it was fun. I mean, this is what you did.”
And hops are no less labor intensive during the spring planting season. Hops are a climbing plant species: rather than grow on an upright stalk of their own, they grow up bines that wrap around a vertical host. For hop farmers, that means twining young plants to grow up along 18-foot lengths of string, which are held taut by 18-foot-tall trellises. Twining is work that still can only be done by hand. Even before the state of Washington established one of the nation’s highest minimum wages, hop farmers were consistently feeling the squeeze between high operating costs, and suppressed market value.
A coalition of farmers, and the breweries themselves, fought to relinquish the hold of third-party dealers, culminating in antitrust lawsuits brought by both ends of the market. But the big push that finally linked them would come from Anheuser-Busch itself, when it launched its AB Direct hops buying program, and established a presence in the Yakima Valley to work directly with growers.
Anheuser-Busch’s arrival would open up a new era of cooperation between Yakima’s hop farmers, but it wouldn’t be extract sales to big beer companies that would pull them out of that ten-year slump.
“There’s a lot of hop varieties now,” says Gary Morford, “up to 80.” But for a long time, he reflects, Green Acre, and most of the valley farms, focused on one: cluster.
“In the late 60s,” Jason Perrault agrees, “cluster was kind of the ubiquitous American hop.”
The hardy and balanced variety known as cluster hops was virtually the only one planted in the U.S., all the way through the 1970s. In addition to those bittering alpha acids, it possesses another favorable quality brewers look for in hops: aroma.
Pine, citrus, tropical fruit. Ask any craft beer drinker today about the hops in his or her glass, and you’ll hear of a succession of flavors and aromas described with the earnest reverence usually reserved for wine or coffee. But that wasn’t the case when the maker of Budweiser came to Yakima to buy hops.
“Anheuser-Busch stepping into the market back then, and starting to buy directly from growers, that was a real eye-opener,” explains Jason Perrault. But not because it wanted aromatic hops. The lighter beer styles the mega brewer is known for require subtle aromatics. Rather, says Perrault, “Anheuser-Busch wanted alpha hops.”
That demand would prove a guiding force for growers at the time, including the Perraults. In the late 1980s, Steve Perrault joined forces with friends and fellow growers Tom Carpenter (of Carpenter Ranches) and Mike Smith (of Loftus Ranches) to form a joint venture that would come to be known as Yakima Chief Hops. As described by its own website, it’s “a 100% grower-owned global hop supplier with a mission to connect brewers with family hop farms.”
In the next decade, Yakima Chief would bring ten other farming families into the fold, pooling enough capital to build a hops processing plant in Yakima Valley. With that, they could claim further control over distribution of their product, and optimize their returns.
And, crucially, they invested in hop breeding.
“We started working with Chuck Zimmerman,” says Jason Perrault. A renowned research scientist who’d developed new hop varieties for a vegetable breeding program run by the USDA, Charles E. Zimmerman was credited with cultivating a new generation of aromatic hops that fueled a burgeoning craze for hop-forward pale ales among home brewers and microbreweries. Hops with names like Columbus, Centennial, and CTZ gave a new palette of flavors ranging from citrus to pine. And Zimmerman was just getting started. “He had a long history in breeding, and suggested that when we start looking at doing it privately.”
So in addition to cultivating relationships with brewery hop buyers. Yakima Chiefs developed a separate operation to cultivate new varieties of hops. Initially called Select Botanicals Group, its original aim was to breed a hop that wouldn’t require any more resources to grow, but would yield a significantly higher level of alpha acids. Among other things, that effort led to a hop called Simcoe.
“It was really selected for that utility. To go into that big macro market,” remembers Jason Perrault. The experimental hop YCR 14 was officially released as Simcoe in 2000, boasting high, 12- to 14-percent alpha acid levels, compared to 6- to 8-percent levels in cluster hops. There was only one problem. “When we first released Simcoe,” Perrault says, “we could hardly give a pound away.”
It would stay that way for years: Simcoe couldn’t break through during the ten year down cycle beginning in the mid-90s, when hop prices stubbornly remained below $2 a pound. Then, appreciation for the new hop arrived from an unexpected source. “Around 2006,” Perrault recalls, “craft brewers started to use Simcoe.” And not just for its alpha acids: “It had this incredible aromatic profile that was making some really great IPAs.”
India Pale Ales had become the headlining style of a bona fide craft beer boom, and Simcoe delivered exactly the sort of boldness and complexity hopheads craved. Its oils practically burst with earthy, piney bitterness and a mélange of fruity aromas that show up in IPAs as flavors of citrus, tropical fruit, stone fruit, and/or berries.
A number of craft brewers had started working with Simcoe as early as 1999, before it had even been named. Most notably, Russian River Brewing Company would use it as an aroma hop in its beer Pliny the Elder, one of the most celebrated — and highly sought — IPAs in craft beer history. America’s giant, lager breweries may not have appreciated Simcoe, but the craft brew world was singing its praises.
So the Perraults and their partners at Yakima Chiefs would make a game-changing decision. “After 15-plus years of investment in breeding with very little payoff,” Perrault recalls, “we really, as a breeding program, made a pretty significant pivot: from being an alpha focus to aroma focus.” In 2003, Select Botanicals — now rebranded as Yakima Chief Ranches — partnered with another private hop breeding company, John I. Haas, Inc., to form a new entity, The Hop Breeding Company. It would create the two most popular hops of the last decade: Citra and Mosaic. Having learned the hop breeding science from Chuck Zimmerman, Jason Perrault servs as head hp breeder.
What looks like a no-brainer decision now would have been less obvious at the time. Craft breweries were relatively small-time operations. Russian River didn’t have capacity to make enough Pliny to meet demand, let alone could it purchase enough hops to make a dent in Yakima Chief’s supply. However, the craft brew industry was poised to explode.
Consider this: In 1996, there were fewer than 1,000 breweries in the United States. By 2006 there were nearly 1,500, and nearly all of them were now seeking out new and aromatic hops. At the same time, we’ll recall that Yakima’s hop farming had declined by roughly a third over those same ten years, dropping from 30,000 acres to 20,000. Then, European hop growers experienced a disastrous growing season in 2007 that would choke the global hops supply.
“In 2007-2008, there was a shortage of hops, and the price spiked,” Perrault explains, “And we were able to, at that point, lick our proverbial financial wounds.” In 2006, the average price of Yakima-grown hops had finally breached the $2 mark. By 2008, it hovered near $4 per pound.
But these events didn’t just save Perrault Farms and the Yakima hops industry as a whole — even as the hops shortage passed, hop farmers entered a new Golden Age. The brewery count continued to rise — and with it the demand for exciting new hop varieties. By 2011, there were more than 2,000 breweries in the U.S. That number would double by 2014, then again by 2019. Today, it approaches 10,000.
And virtually all of the newer breweries make heavy use of aromatic hops. While the average 2006 IPA mightemploy two pounds of hops per barrel, newer trends of dry-hopping — which adds additional hops late in the brewing process to boost aromatics — resulted in a new category of so-called double IPAs, which may use up to four pounds per barrel.
In Yakima, this growth translated to peak seasons planting hops on more than 40,000 acres, and seeing prices reach $6 per pound, as tracked by Hop Growers of America. The organization also recorded a drastic shift in which type of hops Yakima was growing. In 2007, roughly two-thirds of its output were alpha hops. By 2017, about three-quarters of its crops were aroma hops.
And since the annual value of the hop industry fell to $100 million in 2006, it’s ballooned to more than $600 million.
“I’ve seen it, boom, I’ve seen it bust,” comments Jeff Widdows, “That’s as steady a positive trend as you’re gonna see in any commoditized industry. Maybe ever.”
“We’ve seen kind of an unprecedented period of time here,” acknowledges Perrault, “Kind of a perfect storm of craft beer, and a beer drinking consumer that loves flavor, and novelty, and creativity.” With modesty characteristic of Yakima’s hop farming families, he adds, “We’ve been able to capitalize on that success and build some stability that hopefully will carry us forward for at least another generation.”
Even amid the boom, Yakima’s hop farmers remember the lessons of those bust years, and have refused to sit on their laurels. Yakima’s family farms, including Perrault and Green Acre, have found myriad ways to reinvest their profits, to brace against the next down cycle.
“You don’t want to be doing 10 years of not updating, because then you’re really behind,” explains Gary Morford. Even as the lifelong farmer reflects on the history of his family, and of his homespun industry, he’s always thinking about the future. “You’ve got to be on the forefront,” he insists, “You’ve got to keep getting efficient. It never stops.”
That can mean upgrading equipment to increase growing capacity, even when facing a cost of labor increase, or a labor shortage. It can mean updating irrigation practices to hedge against water rationing. And it can mean finding yet new hop varieties to grow. Green Acre produces upwards of 20 types these days. “You you’ve got to update your varieties, Morford says, “You’ve got to change these varieties out all the time.”
And not only for higher acid levels or new aromas. Back in 2000, the Morfords likewise invested in a hop breeding operation. They partnered with another multigenerational Yakima hop farm, Roy Farms, to form what is now called Latitude 46. It’s been responsible for the popular aromatic hops called Azacca and Summit, plus a newer variety called Adeena.
However, more recently, Latitude 46 has adjusted its focus. Now, it’s developing varieties ready to face the net wave of problems threatening to beset hop farmers. That means creating disease resistant hops, and varieties that can adapt to different growing regions and climactic conditions. Similar efforts are being made by the Hop Breeding Company.
Because, as the past couple years have proven, the next downturn could happen any year. The pandemic hit the craft brewing company hard in 2020, and subsequently demand for hops dropped to the point that hop farming collectively reduced by 9,000 acres in 2022. Further confounding things has been the universally challenging weather patterns of 2023.
“We had snow in the middle of April, up in the orchards,” Morford tells us, “12 inches of snow! You seem like you go through some tough years and that was a tough year.”
But as we hear again and again in the Yakima community, the folks at Green Acre feel optimistic about future, both of his family farm, and the future of the Yakima Valley. “I’m usually a guy that, a glass is more than half full,” he says. “Andrew’s got two sons that are pretty young, so we’re a long ways from the fifth generation. But we hope they’ll take care of the soil and land, as we preach. And we’ve got to take care of it. And take care of the people in the community.”
*According to official event history, in 1948, the inaugural crown went to Miss Marie Bergevin, because she sold the most tickets to the event.
Originally written for Limitless Magazine
