Hops and dreams: Cornell helps new varieties go from field to glass

Nathan Lewis stands in a three-acre yard at Gates East Farm on the Cornell AgriTech campus, plants strung high over his head. He is harvesting flowers, splitting each cone in half and rubbing the two sides together to release their aromas from the sticky, yellow gland in the middle. Is it ready?

Each of the 61 varieties of hops matures on a particular day; each has a different length of time between its initial flowering and the cone maturity; each cone requires a certain level of dryness.

Lewis is a third-year doctoral student in Larry Smart's lab in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where researchers aim to take some of risk off of farmers by assessing how hop varieties bred in the Pacific Northwest will fare in New York state.

"It's very expensive to establish a new variety in their hop yard. To put in 1,000 plants not knowing if any brewer will buy them is a huge risk," said Smart, professor in the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science. "Part of our mission is to plant those varieties in our hop yard, grow them using industry best practices, get a valid estimate of their yield, their disease resistance, the quality of their cones," Smart said. "But the quality of the beer is what matters. You've got to get them into hands of brewers to evaluate in beer."

The program also traces hops from field to pilot batch. Nine varieties - seven of which are New York heritage lines rescued from old farms and homesteads - are in brewing trials with breweries across the region.

Lewis and the team started harvesting this year on Aug. 10 and will likely be working through Sept. 25. They are evaluating 38 commercial varieties, seven experimental lines and 16 heritage varieties. And the team is raising its sights, literally: They are erecting six rows of a new 21-foot trellis using concrete Harvest Pillar posts donated by Jensen Precast.

"Our trellis is conventionally 18 feet high," Smart said. "But what we have found is some of the varieties we're working with grow taller than that. They hit the top wire and then flop over, so we lose a lot of that material at harvest."

Smart said Jensen Precast donated enough posts and hardware to put in an acre with a 21-foot-high top wire, a savings of roughly $18,000. Smart's lab can assess whether the anticipated increased yield is worth the added effort, as right now they are having trouble finding string that's long enough, and the extra height may be a challenge for their fungicide sprayer.

What it all comes down to: At the middle of a hop cone are the lupulin glands, which produce a sticky, golden powder and resin rich in essential oils and bitter acids that give beer its core bitterness and distinct flavors and aromas. This is the cornerstone of great beer.