PNW Hop Growers featured in new Documentary and History Book
Get hopped up and primed for the hop harvest with a new Washington focused documentary on hop growers and a photo book that digs into Oregon’s hop growing history.
With only about three months to go before the annual hop harvest and fresh hop season gets underway, there is a new documentary and a hop history book to get pumped up about and primed for the season. Hopped Up: How Yakima Valley changed craft beer forever is a feature-length documentary premiering this fall that is streaming online now for a limited time, and HOPS is a historical photograph compendium of visual splendor that takes a look at Oregon’s hop growing pioneers throughout the years.
Hopped Up, is a feature-length documentary about the world-famous hop growers of Yakima Valley and how their innovative breeding practices have changed the way craft beers are consumed and brewed. This film goes into the science and lives of 5th generation farmers that are enjoying the fruits of their labor after many years of struggle. The yearly harvest is the pinnacle event for craft brewers worldwide who come to this Washington state region yearly to select the hops for the craft beers they will create in the coming year.
Produced and directed by Daniel A. Cardenas, Hopped Up recently won the Best Documentary Feature and Semi-Finalist Best PNW Feature from the Ellensburg Film Festival and is now available to stream online for a limited time.
Hops: Historic Photographs of the Oregon Hopscape, is a great new coffee table tome released by Oregon State University’s publishing arm. This large format book really puts the images on display to give readers a real sense of just how long and storied the states history as the #2 grower in the country goes back.
Oregon’s agricultural landscape has been shaped by the craft brewing renaissance and vice versa. This compendium of photographs offers a visual dive into the distinctive physical presence of hops in the state. From pickers and poles to cones and oasts, Kenneth I. Helphand brings the landscape and culture of hops to life.
For much of the first half of the twentieth century, Oregon was the leading producer of hops in the United States, with the Willamette Valley deemed “the garden spot of the world for the cultivation of hops.” The author has scoured archives across the state to gather together images of the hops landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The photographs featured in Hops portray pickers of all backgrounds through different eras of agricultural practice. Here are children, nuns, families, immigrants, and college students in fields, hop driers, and tent camps. The photos range from the candid to the highly professional, including images from Dorothea Lange’s iconic Farm Security Administration work.
The 85 high-quality photographs are accompanied by captions that provide, variously, factual background, selections from oral histories, and visual guidance. A historical essay provides a short overview of the plant’s history and the world of hop growing and picking.