I’ve been reading a lot about the hop industry recently. My interest in hops at this particular point in time stems from the fact that I am working with some colleagues from Rutgers University, Pennsylvania State University, and Simon Fraser University, on a project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The primary goal of the project is to identify which agricultural commodities exhibit knowledge-driven locational clustering and, where such clustering exists to isolate the specific underlying drivers.

Part of the project involves doing case studies of particular specialty crops, with a view to understanding the geography of their production. With my interest in the brewing industry, I volunteered to lead a case study of the American hop industry. I was particularly interested in documenting the impact of the growing popularity of craft beer on hop production – not only changes in which varieties of hops are being grown, but also where these hops are being grown.

As I started searching on Google Scholar for scholarly pieces on the hop industry, I came across a couple of papers that explored the decline of the hop industry in various parts of England during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of those pieces, interestingly enough, was by a young Assistant Lecturer of Geography at the University of Bristol, by the name of David Harvey. As my Geographer friends know, Harvey would go on to become one of most influential  geographic thinkers of the twentieth century. It is interesting that one of his early papers examined changing land use patterns in Kent’s hop industry.

Another paper I found was written by Paige Raibmon. It explored the hop picking industry in the Puget Sound area of Washington in the late nineteenth century. It focused, in particular, on indigenous women who worked in the industry. In the northern hemisphere, hop harvesting lasts for approximately six weeks, starting in mid-August. During this period, there is a need for seasonal labor. As a result, thousands of people from the surrounding regions would  migrate to the Puget Sound. These included large numbers of indigenous peoples. Such was the demand for hop pickers in Washington state, that an  estimated twenty-five percent of British Columbia’s indigenous population traveled to the Puget Sound during the hop harvest. Of those who migrated south, the number of women outnumbered men. The indigenous women, it turned out, were particularly hard working and adept at picking hops. Indeed, popular accounts of the time often noted the industriousness of indigenous women. Writing in 1898, Susan Lord Currier, observed that:

“the Indians, on the other hand, gather the hops they pick into woven baskets. They pick with a deftness and skill rarely equaled by the whites. Even old Indian women in their dotage and almost blind, manage to pick their three boxes a day, while the white man or woman who picks two boxes a day is considered an expert”.

While working in the hop fields, the indigenous hop pickers became something of a tourist attraction. Every day, hundreds of visitors traveled to the hop growing regions. They did so for the opportunity to see “authentic Indians”. They traveled by carriage and interurban passenger trains, and stayed in hotels that had been built, by entrepreneurs, near the hop fields. Indigenous hop pickers would often pass through Seattle on their way to and from the hop fields. In Seattle, they would stop-off and sell handmade wares such as baskets from the sidewalk. Locals and tourists alike would also pose for photographs with the indigenous travelers, with the latter receiving payment in return.

As I was reading Raibmon’s account of indigenous hop pickers in Washington, the name of one of my favorite authors, George Orwell, popped into my head. I have read almost everything that Orwell has written, including his essays. Like most people that have read it, I found Orwell’s 1984 to be a particular haunting piece of work. Another one of Orwell’s novels is A Clergyman’s Daughter.  Published in 1935, it tells the story of Dorothy  Hare (a clergyman’s daughter) who suffers a bout of amnesia, and as a result, ends up wandering the English countryside with three hobos – Nobby, Charlie, and, Flo. The four of them decide to head to Kent (the same part of the country that the aforementioned David Harvey wrote about) in southeastern England to seek employment  picking hops. In telling the story of Dorothy and her three friends, Orwell provides some interesting insights into the life of a hop picker in 1930s England. Most hop pickers fell into one of two broad categories. First, there were the  Gypsies. Second, there were individuals and their families from poorer parts of London, who regarded hop picking as a working holiday. During the hop harvest, they descended on Kent and other hop growing regions of England. Indeed, by the 1870s special trains were laid-on to take families from London to the hop fields.

Pickers worked six days a week. Sunday was a day-off. The work day started at 8am and ended between 5pm and 6pm; this period included two meal breaks. While picking hops was not a particularly difficult task, and was quite mechanical in nature, the tiny thorns that were found on the stem of the plant meant that the pickers’ fingers were soon bleeding in multiple places. “Measurers” would make their rounds twice a day. Their job was to measure the number of bushels each group (often a group comprised a family) had picked. Pickers were paid by the bushel. There were tricks that the pickers learned, which were designed to maximize their income. For example, while “foreign” material such as leaves and stalks in the collecting bins were undesirable, a certain amount was tolerated. The gypsies were particularly adept at knowing how much of the contents of their bins could be foreign material, without jeopardizing their wages.

Pickers lived in tents, barns, and stables. Conditions, from a hygiene  perspective, were generally poor; even being described as “squalid”. The camps became breeding grounds for a variety of diseases. In 1849, cholera took the lives of forty-three hop pickers on a single farm. So poor were the conditions that, in 1866, two priests established the Society for Employment and Improved Lodgings for Hop Pickers. During the second half of the nineteenth century hopper huts became increasingly common. A typical hopper hut was nine feet by nine feet and was made from a variety of materials, including timber (surrounded by corrugated metal), brick, and breeze blocks.

Orwell’s account of hop picking in his novel was based on actual experience. In 1931 Orwell went hop picking in Kent. He recounted this experience in an essay, titled Hop Picking, published later that year (under Orwell’s real name, Eric Blair) in the New Statesman & Nation. While Orwell bemoaned the low rate of pay received by hop pickers, there is a sense from reading his New Statesman essay that he enjoyed the work:

“One can talk and smoke as one works, and on hot days there is no pleasanter place than the shady lanes of hops, with their bitter scent – an unutterably refreshing scent, like a wind blowing from oceans of cool beer.”

Another author who describes hop picking in Kent is W. Somerset Maugham. He does so towards the end of his 1915  novel, Of Human Bondage. While providing a less detailed description of hop picking than Orwell, Maugham’s account is consistent with Orwell’s. Here is a passage from Maugham’s work:

“They were all hard at work, talking and laughing as they picked. They sat on chairs, on stools, on boxes, with their baskets by their sides, and some stood by the bin throwing the hops they picked straight into it. There were a lot of children about and a good many babies, some in makeshift cradles, some tucked up in a rug on the soft brown dry earth. The children picked a little and played a great deal. The women worked busily, they had been pickers from childhood, and they could pick twice as fast as foreigners from London. They boasted about the number of bushels they had picked in a day, but they complained you could not make money now as in former times: then they paid you a shilling for five bushels, but now the rate was eight and even nine bushels to the shilling.”

Today, hop harvesting is a highly mechanized process. As is the case with many other industries, the worker had been replaced by technology. I got to witness modern-day hop harvesting and processing first hand in September 2015 when I spent a day in Washington’s Yakima Valley. I watched hops arrive at a processing facility, in trucks, still attached to the bines. The bines were fed into a machine, which then separated out the hops.

For individuals looking to experience manual hop picking, there are modern-day opportunities to do so.  In Essex, northeast of London, it is possible to go hop picking for a day, thanks to an initiative (Company Drinks) started by artist Kathrin Böhm in 2014. Company Drinks is an:

“arts project and community drinks enterprise that links east London’s history of ‘going picking’ with a full drinks production cycle: from picking to bottling, branding to trading and reinvesting”.

The goal is to:

“combine local heritage (‘going picking’ and the area’s agricultural and industrial past) with local resources (spare fruit, growing spaces), local skills (recipe ideas, specialist and localised knowledge, drinks production) and a local economy.” 

During hop harvesting season,  individuals can go to local hop fields and pick hops by hand. The hops are then taken to Kernel Brewery in London, where they are used to brew somewhere in the region of nine thousand bottles of a one-off beer.

So there it is – the humble hop. As I drink a beer, particularly an India Pale Ale,  I never give much thought to the idea that the hop that plays such a critical part in its flavor and aroma has such a fascinating historical underpinning. But it does. And it is a history, of which I have barely scratched the surface here. There is, as my research demonstrated to me, quite a lot written about the history of the hop industry – particularly its economic and social history. It is a fascinating history, and one well worth delving into.

Further Reading:

Blair, Eric. 1931. Hop Picking. New Statesman & Nation, 17th October.

Currier, Susan Lord. 1898. Some aspects of Washington hop-field. Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, Volume 32, Issue 192, pp. 541-544.

Harvey, David. 1963. Locational change in the Kentish hop industry and the analysis of land use patterns. Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers), Volume 33, December, pp. 123-144.

Maugham, William Somerset. 1915. Of Human Bondage. New York: The Modern Library Publishers (read chapters CXVIII and CCIX).

Orwell, George. 1935. A Clergyman’s Daughter. London: Penguin Books. (read chapter 2).

Raibmon, Paige. 2006.The practice of everyday colonialism: Indigenous women at work in the hop fields and tourist industry of Puget Sound. Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp. 23-56.