Beer with a taste of home

BC craft brewers turn to home-grown organic hops that reflect the local terroir

Matt Phillips plucks a bright green hops cone from the vine and peels back its sticky, paper-thin petals to reveal a set of tiny yellow lupulin glands. He rolls the tip of his thumbs across one of the pollen-like sacs, releasing a complex aroma that’s equal parts citrus, pine forest and cannabis, with just a hint of freshly brewed beer.

“These are Cascades,” he points out, noting that the pungent variety grows particularly well in BC’s southern coastal region and was developed in Yakima, Washington. The owner of Victoria-based Phillips Brewing Co. notes that hops are a close cousin of both marijuana and stinging nettles.

“The only thing they’re good for is making beer,” he says. “It would be a shame to do anything else with them.”

It’s a crisp fall morning on a Saanich Peninsula acreage about 20 kilometres north of Victoria and Phillips, with his assistant, Bill Stuart, and landowner Vic Davies, are hard at work harvesting a small but coveted crop of organically grown hops.

Matt Phillips (right) and Vic Davies
examine a hops cone.

One by one they tote plastic pails brimming with fragrant hops into Davies’s garage to dry on a series of large window screens. Once they’re dried, they’ll be vacuum-sealed and hauled back to Phillips’s brewery to add flavour to a batch of all-organic beer.

“Hopefully the beer we make from these will showcase some distinct Vancouver Island flavours,” Phillips says. “This gives us something more local, with more of a connection with the community where the beer is produced.”

BC's hops industry, then and now

Sixty years ago, the sight of workers harvesting hops in the fall was commonplace in BC, especially in the Fraser Valley, where as many as 4,000 seasonal labourers were needed to pick more than 1,600 acres that were under cultivation when the industry peaked in the late 1940s.

But today on the Saanich Peninsula, a dozen years after a prolonged price slump drove the province’s once-thriving hops industry to extinction, a fresh crop of locally grown hops is an exceedingly rare commodity.

Phillips is one of a growing number of BC microbrewers who, driven by record-high prices and unstable supplies in recent years, are seeking partnerships with local farmers to grow the essential beer-making herb on contract.

BC’s hops industry came to a crashing halt in 1996 with the last commercial harvest on the Lower Mainland. By then, the province’s major corporate-owned breweries were buying cheaper hops almost exclusively from Washington state’s rapidly expanding and heavily subsidized hops industry.

BC growers also suffered from disease and pest damage, the result of years of “mono-cropping” – planting single varieties over large areas using the same rootstock, a practice that weakens hops’ genetic resistance.

“You also had new high-potency varieties and higher yields per acre, so the major breweries didn’t need to use as much and less acreage was being planted,” Phillips explains.

But just as commercial hops farming in BC was dying, province’s emerging craft brewing sector created a new but undeveloped market for locally grown hops.

“When the craft brewing industry started, it was really hard to get hops at all because the big guys had them all,” Phillips says. “It forced a lot of us to get real creative about how we secure our supplies.”