Gaye LeBaron: Hops have history in Sonoma County

Hops! In early Septembers 70, 80 or 100 years ago, they were the main topic of Santa Rosa’s street-corner conversations. It was not only the hop ranchers but the brokers, the bankers, the politicians — they all talked hops come September.

“Is the price stable?” “What does the crop look like in Bavaria?” “How about Southern England?” “Will we get a dollar a pound as promised or settle for 8 cents?” “Are there enough pickers? Some say there are 10,000 in the camps already.”

A century ago, in 1920, Sonoma ranked eighth among the entire nation’s farming counties in agricultural production. One of the main reasons, along with poultry and tree fruit, was an odd little bright green bud of the vine that looks like a tiny pine cone known to botanists as Humulus lupulus which has been used since the 11th century to flavor beer.

A better-smelling cousin to Cannabis sativa, it is a persnickety crop at best. When the hops are ripe and ready, they can’t wait — which is why the concern over pickers in pre-mechanized times.

As an old hop grower once told me about this short harvest time. “There are two things you can do with a hop. You can make beer, or you can throw it away.”

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THIS SNIPPET of agricultural history is particularly relevant just now — because Sonoma County farmers are growing hops again. Mike Stevenson of the 5-year-old NorCal Hop Alliance counts a dozen hop yards in the county ranging in size from a quarter-acre to 2 acres or more. These are not new farmers. They are agricultural families that have raised fruit and sheep and cattle and goats and definitely wine grapes, some for generations. As Stevenson puts it: “These are people who know how to grow things.”

For anyone old enough to have picked hops for school clothes money in the 1950s and early ‘60s, it would be something like “time travel” to stand in a field of hops on one of the several Crane family ranches on Petaluma Hill Road. It is Ron Crane, a helicopter pilot retired from the military, who is back on the ranch. His hop yard was where he and his crew were picking on a blessedly foggy morning Sept. 3.

But, excepting the unmistakable sweet odor of hops and the look of it all, vines scaling the tall poles, it was nothing like the old hop harvest when dozens of pickers, grandmothers to teens, arrived at the fields before dawn to fill their baskets with just the buds, picked carefully and slowly from the vines on poles three times their height.

Picking now — with modern equipment waiting to do the tedious work — involves hooking those vines with a pole, loading them into a truck moving slowly along the rows and rushing them to a German-made machine known as a Wolf, which “picks” the vines quickly enough that they can be on their way to whatever craft brewery has spoken for them in advance.

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AT THE CRANE hop yard harvest, buyers Natalie and Vinnie Cilurzo of the Russian River Brewing Co. were happy to explain what’s different today. Vinnie, the undisputed dean of the craft beer movement in Sonoma County, explained what lies ahead for the truckload of hop vines.

While Russian River still relies on the huge-by-comparison hop ranches in Washington’s Yakima Valley for the traditional processed hops to make their traditional craft beers, Vinnie is enthusiastic about a comparatively new brewing process that calls for “wet hops,” a term used for buds that were picked, washed and put into a brew within hours of the morning harvests.

Thus, the truck loaded with at least four of the six varieties of Crane hops — each with its own special “flavor” — led a kind of parade that included Ron and his wife, Erica Crane, and the Cilurzos as it headed off to Redwood Hill Farm near Sebastopol. There, Scott Bice of that 50-year-old goat dairy’s founding family is growing hops and has custody of the machine that makes wet hops possible. Crane’s hops were part of a vat of a new Russian River brew called HopTime by 1 p.m. This past Friday Vinnie added the last batch of Crane wet hops to the finished HopTime Harvest Ale.

Ron Crane’s 1.25 acres is part of a typical Sonoma County farm with a harvested grain field on one side of the hop yard and horses and cattle grazing on another, as sheep keep the grass down between the vines.

“They know better than to graze on the “money crop,” he said.

Crane is selling to four other local breweries besides Russian River this year but, with plans to plant more next year, perhaps for the Cilurzos only.

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ANOTHER VOICE to be heard in the ongoing, ever-changing saga of the noble hop is Tom Frazier’s. A former Santa Rosan who lives in Sun Valley, Idaho, to be close to the giant-by-comparison fields of commercial hops in Idaho and the eastern valleys of Washington and Oregon, is the grandson of Florian Dauenhauer, a Santa Rosa hop grower in the years before World II.

Dauenhauer, whose family owned a machine shop near the NWP station, was a tinkerer by nature. His frustration with the competition for pickers in the short harvest season led him, with his brother, Joe, to invent a stationary hop-picker that revolutionized the industry.

Hops vines, pulled from the poles, were trucked to the picker, which separated the kiln-ready cones. Along with other factors in the production of beer, it would spell the end of Sonoma County’s historic hop culture — for the next three decades and more.

With the “Dauenhauer,” growers could deliver ripe hops in a matter of days, not weeks, with no need for brigades of pickers. It became possible to grow AND pick 1,000 acres of hops in the time allotted by nature to get them to the kiln, into bales and off to Budweiser or Pabst in the time allotted.

Sonoma didn’t have 1,000-acre hop yards. The largest may have exceeded 200 acres, but just barely. The crop disappeared. Not all at once, but gradually. The biggest producer, the Wohler Ranch, grew its last hops in the mid-1950s. The final harvest — with pickers — was in 1961 on the Bussman Ranch’s 90 acres in Windsor.

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THERE WERE other factors in Sonoma’s exit from the hop market. One was a government-surplus fertilizer that produced mold in the soil along our waterways, the ideal hop land. Another was a drastic change in beer-drinking tastes. In a 1950s issue of “Hopper” magazine, a writer decried the trend to regard beer as merely “a thirst quencher,” comparing it to root beer and 7-UP. Women and teenagers, he wrote, “with the undeveloped palates and the taste standards of a jellyfish” had begun to drink beer. The result, he wrote, was a trend to consider “a good, hearty brew” as “heavy and fattening.”

So, for nearly 40 years the only hop vines to be seen in the county were the ones that grew wild up the guy wires of phone poles or were lovingly cultivated in a nostalgic former grower’s flower garden.

The Dauenhauer is still serving the big hop growers. Frazier owns the family business and sells machines all over the world. He has watched the rising interest in craft beers. In what is looking like a shrewd move, he also has acquired the U.S. franchise to sell the smaller, simpler more economical German-made Wolf, like the one that processed Ron Crane’s hops earlier this month. The trend toward big, flavorful wet-hopped beers has made that move look very wise

Nor has Frazier forgotten the roots of his family and his business. It’s no accident that the 2021 American Hop Growers annual meeting is scheduled to meet at the Blackman Center in January in Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square, a couple of blocks south of where the Dauenhauer machine was born in the machine shop at the foot of Fifth Street, a building which is still family-owned.

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IT SEEMS appropriate to end with the memories of people who experienced the old hop era here. In video histories recorded between 20 and 30 years ago (and available online in special collections at Sonoma State’s Schulz Library) growers and pickers were eager to talk about the county’s most “interesting” crop.

The late Talmadge “Babe” Wood’s memories were happier. Born in 1901 and known to generations as a pioneer Santa Rosa automobile dealer (Reo Speedwagon, Cadillac etc.), Wood, who spent his early adult years on the family ranch on River Road where his father grew hops as well as prunes remembered … well, let him tell it.

“We had families that came with a horse and buggy. They came in early in the morning with the light, lanterns. And they had a bale of hay in their wagon, you know, and one horse and coming down the road in the dark. “

“And we had families that came from San Francisco and other places. Every year they’d take a vacation — what a vacation! We would dam up the creek, Mark West Creek, and we had a beautiful campground.

“That helped us to beat the band. And it had a natural arbor, ceilings down there, wild grape vines. And they used to make houses out of ‘em. And they camped there. And they stayed a month or maybe two months sometimes. And we’d dam the creek up so they’d have a swimming pool. And the kids would love it.

”Of course we had pears and we had apples too. But everything was in the hops. That’s where the money was and that’s where the fun was. And that’s where the work was.”

The memories of a teenage picker may lack a grower’s enthusiasm. Marian McMurtry is 93 now. More than 20 years ago she sat for the camera to share her hop recollections.

“I picked hops, but under duress. When I was in high school my dad said that you have to learn how to pick hops because that’s a lot of fun. We always had such fun when we were kids, picking hops. So, high school classes started at 8 and we were out there in the hop field at 6 in the morning because you had to pick ‘em when they were wet because they don’t weigh anything. And you have to fill these sacks that are 12 feet long or something like that. And if you don’t pick ‘em wet they won’t weigh anything. So, that only lasted until I was sure that I could get away with saying, “No. I’m not going anymore.”

Sonoma County’s new hop era comes without that teenage angst.

And, for beer drinkers, it offers new adventures. The Cilurzos aren’t the only craft brewers experimenting with wet hops.

Just wait and see.