Agriculture & Ingredients
Hop growers
Hops are the ingredient beer drinkers talk about most and the archive knows least about. It can tell you what a beer tastes of and not one variety that made it so, who grew that variety, or who bred it.
There is no hop field in this archive
No variety, no pedigree, no crop year, no acreage, no grower contracts. What is below is 2 farms recorded as places and 3 breweries whose grain record mentions hops in passing. We would rather design the hop layer with the people who breed and grow them than invent one now and correct thousands of records later. If you grow, breed or broker hops, the archive would like to hear from you.
The farms
Recorded as places in their own right. A hop farm is not a brewery, and where no brewery link is established that is a finding rather than an omission — both of these supplied a network rather than one buyer.
Hop farm
Campbell Creek, east of Kamloops
Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada · until 1972
Site detail
Sick's hop property, renamed Molson's Kamloops Hop Farm Ltd per the Sick's Breweries 1961 annual report, manager J. Blankenship. On 11 February 1966 Molson donated 106 acres for what became the BC Wildlife Park at 9077 Dallas Drive. Fixed assets were sold on 31 August 1972 to K. Morelli and N. L. Campbell. NOT ATTACHED TO A BREWERY: a hop farm does not brew, and which breweries used its hops is UNKNOWN. An abandoned tin-clad hop-processing building was reported standing beside the Trans-Canada Highway east of Kamloops in 2016; condition and exact location unverified. LAC holds the corporate file at RG95 / R1008 / file 52145, covering 1931-1979. SEPARATE QUESTION: the archive already holds Rainier Brewing Co. of Canada Ltd. in Kamloops. Whether a Sick-network brewery and a Sick-network hop farm in the same town were connected is NOT established and must not be assumed from geography. Successor at this site: BC Wildlife Park (part).
No brewery link established
Hop farm
Sunnyside area, Yakima Valley, Washington
Sunnyside, Washington, USA
Site detail
Emil Sick operated two hop farms by 1949, at Sunnyside Washington and Kamloops BC, per a historic-structure study of the Seattle Rainier brewery. EXACT PARCEL UNKNOWN. Washington State heritage material identifies Emil Sicks Brewing Corporation among agricultural corporations in the Lower Yakima Valley operating private agricultural labour camps, within the wider history of Mexican and Mexican-American agricultural labour there. Acreage, hop varieties, and any link between this farm's hops and a specific beer are UNKNOWN and must not be assumed.
No brewery link established
Breweries that grow their own
Taken from each brewery's grain record, which is the only place the archive currently writes this down. Read them as a starting list for the hop layer, not as a survey of it.
- Farmery Estate Brewery
Farmery estate, Manitoba
Grows and harvests its own barley and hops on the prairie.
Neepawa, Manitoba, Canada
- MacKinnon Brothers Brewing Co.
MacKinnon family farm, Bath, Ontario
Farm-grown hops, wheat and barley.
Bath, Ontario, Canada
- Ruhstaller
Sacramento Valley, California
Locally grown and malted grain, alongside homegrown hops.
Dixon, California, USA
The discovery layer this feeds
From Field to Pint
A pint followed back to the hop yard that grew it, the programme that bred the variety, and the year it was picked — alongside the same chain for the malt and the yeast. Barley growers and yeast & fermentation are the other two ends of it, and are just as unfinished.
None of that exists here yet. It is written down so the version that does get built can be checked against what was promised. How the archive decides what to publish.