A hundred years ago, the hills of central New York—from Syracuse to Cooperstown and beyond—were covered in hops farms. For a significant time in the American history of brewing, it was the place to grow the bines that produce those bitter little cones. Those were the days before wire trellises, when hops farms would train the bines to climb around wooden posts planted in the ground, and it took manual labor to strip the cones from the bines.
Then something horrible happened—an outbreak of downy mildew decimated the 1909 crop, and an infestation of aphids in 1914 was enough to convince most of the major farms to shift gears. By the time Prohibition rolled around, the hops farms were mostly gone, and hops production shifted to the Pacific Northwest. Farmers planted other crops or switched to dairy, as refrigeration made it possible to ship their goods down to the burgeoning population of New York City. Hops became a footnote of New York state history, buried under layers of soil now fertilized by gentlemen’s farms.
But hops, you know, are a hardy plant. They might die back in the winter, but they sprout again in the spring. In dry years, the bines might die off but the root rhizome conserves its energy to live another year. They’re hardy and hard to kill. And if you can’t see where this metaphor is going, then let me just explain it to you—New York’s homespun beer heritage might have gone dormant for a while, but it was just biding its time for more favorable conditions.