Farm to glass
Growing hops
Hops are a demanding perennial crop grown in a handful of narrow latitude bands, and almost everything distinctive about modern beer traces to decisions made by plant breeders.
Why this matters to beer
The entire modern IPA lineage is a story about agriculture. Cascade in 1972, the New World varieties of the 2000s and the thiol-rich cultivars that followed each opened flavours that had not previously existed in beer. Brewers did not invent those aromas; breeders did, and brewers found uses for them.
A difficult perennial
Hops are climbing perennials grown up strings on trellises five or six metres high, and they need a long day length to flower properly — which confines commercial growing to fairly narrow bands of latitude in both hemispheres, roughly between the mid-thirties and the mid-fifties.
They are also capital-intensive and slow. A new hop yard takes several years to reach full yield, the trellis infrastructure is expensive, and harvest requires specialised machinery that only makes sense at scale. That combination — long payback, specialised plant, narrow geography — is why hop growing concentrates in a small number of regions rather than spreading.
The plants are dioecious, and commercial yards grow only female plants. Fertilised cones produce seeds, which brewers do not want, so male plants are removed from growing areas except in breeding programmes.
Harvest, and why it is a race
A picked hop is around eighty per cent water and begins degrading immediately, so it must be dried within hours. Bines are cut, taken to a picking hall where the cones are stripped mechanically, and kilned at low temperature to preserve the volatile oils that carry aroma.
Most of the crop is then milled and pressed into pellets. This is not a compromise: pellets are more stable, easier to store cold, more consistent in dosing, and give better utilisation than whole cones. Whole-cone brewing survives in some breweries as a deliberate choice with real trade-offs, not as a purer method.
The exception that proves the constraint is wet-hopped beer, brewed with cones that were never dried. It has to be made within about a day of picking, which ties it to hop-growing regions and to a fortnight each autumn, and it tastes distinctly greener as a result.
Where they grow, and whether terroir is real
The major regions are the Hallertau in Bavaria, Žatec in Bohemia, Kent and Herefordshire in England, the Yakima Valley in Washington State, the Willamette Valley in Oregon, Nelson and Motueka in New Zealand, the Styrian region of Slovenia, Tasmania and Victoria in Australia, and the Elgin and George districts of South Africa.
Terroir in hops is real and measurable, which is not true of every terroir claim. The same cultivar grown in the Hallertau and in Yakima produces different oil profiles — enough that brewers specify origin as well as variety, and enough that some varieties are effectively different products depending on where they were grown. Soil, day length and water availability all contribute.
What that does not mean is that a region owns a flavour. Cultivars are widely licensed and grown in several countries, and the differences, while real, are smaller than the differences between varieties.
Breeding is where the styles come from
Hop breeding programmes — some public, some private, several long-running — select for disease resistance, yield, alpha acid and, increasingly, aroma. Disease was the founding driver: downy and powdery mildew and verticillium wilt have repeatedly threatened whole growing regions, and much twentieth-century breeding was defensive.
The change since the 1970s has been the deliberate pursuit of aroma. Cascade, released in 1972, was the first widely successful American aroma hop and it defined the flavour of American craft brewing for thirty years. The New World varieties that followed opened tropical and stone-fruit character that had no precedent in European hops.
The most recent shift is that breeders now understand some of the chemistry they are selecting for. Thiol compounds, present in tiny quantities and released by yeast during fermentation, account for much of the tropical-fruit character in modern hops — and once that was understood, both breeding and brewing could target it deliberately rather than stumbling on it.
What people get wrong
Whole-cone hops are better than pellets.
Pellets are more stable, easier to store, more consistent to dose and generally better utilised. Whole cones are a legitimate choice with real trade-offs — some brewers prefer the character and the filtration effect in a whirlpool — but they are not a purer or higher-quality form of the same thing.
Questions
How are hops grown?
As climbing perennials up strings on trellises five or six metres high, in narrow latitude bands where day length suits them. Only female plants are grown commercially, since fertilised cones produce seeds brewers do not want. At harvest the bines are cut, cones stripped mechanically, and kilned within hours — a picked hop is mostly water and degrades immediately.
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Connected
What this is about: Cascade · Citra · Fuggle · Dry hopping
Styles: American IPA · New England IPA
Places: Kent · Hallertau · Žatec · Yakima Valley · Nelson
History: Modern beer
Last reviewed 2026-08-29.