Hop Trip USA West-Coast

PADDI: Hey, I’m Paddi from Uiltje, and I’m sitting here with Max Coleman from Coleman Farms. Max, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what Coleman Farms is about and where you guys come from?

MAX: Yeah. So I’m Max, I’m from Oregon in the United States. We have a farm kind of south of Portland, which is the big city in Oregon. I’m a seventh generation on the family farm. So the family came to the US a while ago, and then moved out west kind of on the Oregon Trail. And from there kind of just started farming and having kids and eventually at some point somebody planted some hops. It’s a little unclear how many great-grandpas back that was, but one of them planted some hops and we’ve been growing them ever since, along with some other stuff.

PADDI: Right. But I’m guessing you guys started with the classic noble hops, as we call them. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Do you still have any great-grandchildren of those hops, or...

MAX: Yeah.

PADDI: Do you have any in your breeding program that you use in things for fun?

MAX: Yeah. I mean, our kind of hops, I remember when we were younger, we were growing Bullion and Cluster and some of these older-school varieties, and then moved to Willamette, which is kind of the most old-school hop we still have, other than Liberty, which is another USDA [United States Department of Agriculture], kind of 1980s, 1990s release.

PADDI: Okay. Tell us what Coleman Farms currently looks like. What’s happening?

MAX: Oh, we’re growing plenty of acres of Citra, Simcoe, Mosaic, Strata, Chinook, Cascade, Centennial, a little bit of everything. And then growing a number of other crops as well.

PADDI: When did you guys switch over to all of these, Mosaic, Citra...?

MAX: So we grew a lot of hops for Anheuser-Busch over time. And so we’re one of the kind of early growers in their grower-direct program, especially down in Oregon. So growing a lot of hops for, you know, Budweiser and macro beer. And then craft beer kind of started popping up around us. Oregon has always had a pretty strong scene, but we really got serious about it in about 2008, 2009. We started getting requests, and my grandpa had been involved with Yakima Chief from kind of the early days, right? So they started asking us to grow Simcoe, and then we started working with another company who was looking for some Chinook and Cascade and some of these that were a little more exciting. We started putting some of those in the ground.

PADDI: Nice. A hot topic in the last couple of years in hops has been terroir. And of course you’re from Oregon. We’re currently in Yakima. Yeah. We funnily enough selected quite some Coleman hops, which we plan to use in one beer, which is going to be a single Coleman Farm beer to showcase terroir to our consumers and make them understand that that’s a big thing that affects what we make. And could you tell us how you guys are seeing it? What are you guys up to?

MAX: And so we actually did a study in 2018 with Oregon State University, kind of one of the... not the first. There have been a number of studies on terroir and hops, but it’s just one of those obvious, like, oh, if it’s in wine grapes, it’s in every crop. We already knew about it, but we were just trying to get some scientific backing for it. And so we did some studies on... we have four locations throughout the Willamette Valley. So we did studies on kind of how they differed within Oregon and different microclimates and pieces. And then the following year, we kind of added on to that study and did Cascade and Mosaic in Oregon and Washington. So we got it from like twenty different sites in both states, a bunch of different lots, picking timing was relatively similar, trying to get a feel for how those differences show up. And a lot of the stuff that stood out to me from that research, which was done by Dr. Tom Shellhammer and his team... Of course, a lot of the stuff that stood out to me was kind of this idea of, like, Oregon being a little bit more rounded, a little more complex. Whereas I, and I’ve definitely smelled it as well, feel like Washington has a little bit more of these really strong, punchy peaks, where it’s like a very specific aroma that’s coming through super strong.

PADDI: So could you tell us a little bit more about what’s the difference between hops and why do we grow them where we grow them? Yeah. Why don’t they grow everywhere in the world?

MAX: They grow between, what, thirty-five and forty-five north and south.

PADDI: Yeah. I lived in New Zealand for a while, in Nelson, because I love the Nelson hop. So why that, and then why is Oregon different from Yakima [Washington]? What is the difference in soil types, elevation?

MAX: Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing to know about hops is that they’re perennial. So they’re a plant that you plant and then it comes back year over year. I mean, we had fields of Nugget and some other things that were on the farm for forty years being harvested.

PADDI: Wow.

MAX: But it’s where the hop is planted and kind of how it matures. So when you get a change in day length is when you start to see a change in hops, switching from vegetative growth, where they’re really just trying to climb up that string and put on a lot of leaves, to reproductive growth, which is when they’re putting on the cones, the flowers, what we all think of as hops.

PADDI: Aside from the plant. You explained it really shortly, but how much time does it take? Because I know it takes a long time.

MAX: Yeah, a long time. Oh. So like, hops are impressive. They’re a plant that can grow like a foot a day, so like a third of a meter-ish. And they will, basically from about March or April, they’ll get all the way up to the top of the trellis, about eighteen feet, six meters-ish. In, I mean, three, four months, your goal is to have them up there. If they’re starting in March or April, up to the top of the wire by July.

PADDI: Yeah. But do you harvest every year, as in from year one, or is it...

MAX: Yeah. So in Oregon, we get a little bit less heat than up in Yakima. So when we plant a hop, we generally don’t pick it the year we plant it. So if we planted it in June of 2026, we would harvest it in August or September of 2027. Whereas some Yakima farmers are able to grow it in 2026 and harvest it in 2026. Just because they get a bit more heat. The hops really can get going as long as they have enough water and fertilizer.

PADDI: And what are some trends your country is seeing? Because of course, the craft beer industry has been going through quite some turbulent times in the last five years, which for sure is affecting you guys as well. And people are cutting down acreage. There’s a lot going on. How is that affecting you guys? What are you guys up to?

MAX: Yeah, I think a big part for us is kind of just tracking trends. You know, obviously when a hoppy beer style is doing really well and growing really fast, we obviously can put in more acreage. And kind of, I find that one of the, like, silver linings of it, you know, nobody wants to contract, but it’s that ability to really focus on the picking window. So hops are very sensitive to when you’re picking them, and you generally have kind of an idea of when they’re ripe. But hop ripeness is very much an art still, not all the way to a science. There are kind of some things you can look at that help you make that call. But ultimately on our farm, each field is smelled by me and my dad, just kind of going, this is the order we’re going to pick them. We know Simcoe is always going to come before Mosaic and Citra, but it’s good to kind of get in there and really pick that order out. So I think that’s been a big kind of silver lining for us. Having a few less acres means that we’re able to really select when we’re trying to pick those hops, rather than just, hey, we’ve got to keep picking until we get done.

PADDI: Yeah, of course. And now we have terroir. We have picking windows. We have the soil type, the amount of rain you get, the weather. Forest fires, which have been the thing. There are so many things going on. How do you guys try to be consistent, or try to give us, you know, because you guys do some amazing hops. How do you guys make sure that your hops are top of the line every year?

MAX: I can’t control the weather. So that’s always the caveat I have to throw out there. But generally I think Oregon’s a great place to grow hops because of that access to water. Having a little more water can mean there’s more disease pressure from certain things. But we’ve been doing it for our whole lives and know how to handle that. But for me, I think a lot of it’s really about that data-driven approach of tracking everything you’ve done. And obviously, you know, you only get one chance a year to make adjustments and try new things. So really keeping track of where you’ve changed variables and seeing how you can keep things as consistent as you can, within reason. So obviously, like this year, we had quite a bit of rain during harvest. Yakima got some as well. But for that it was kind of adjusting on the fly. We normally have a pretty good idea of what dates on the calendar we’re picking, but as soon as the weather changes like that, it shifts how they’re maturing. So for me, it’s more like keeping track of things and trying to really be intentional about how we’re doing things and when we’re doing it.

PADDI: Especially with farms like yours, where you have so many fields across so many valleys. I don’t think that’s easy. So I’m guessing you have a trusted team of people.

MAX: Yeah, we have some really strong folks on each of the farms that do a lot of the day-to-day managing, and then a lot of the family kind of bounces around farm to farm, making sure that everything’s all lined up nice.

PADDI: And are you guys in any way involved in the hop breeding program?

MAX: We haven’t been. We’ve been a host farm for a number of, like, varieties as they’re kind of being developed. So we work pretty closely with Indie Hops, which is out of Oregon, and their breeding program out of Oregon State. So that’s where Strata, Luminosa, Lórien came out of. We have a host site for kind of a commercial trial yard. So as varieties become promising in that program, they’ll move over to our farm and kind of be grown a little bit. And then some of them will get scaled up to commercial and some just kind of fade out after time.

PADDI: And you guys are growing Crush, which is the new hot favorite.

MAX: It hasn’t been in Oregon very long. It’s the first harvest we ever had. So we planted some last year, along with a couple of other farms. Just small little trial acreage to see how it did in Oregon. And...

PADDI: What’s your thought on Crush? Because we’re going to use it in the beer, and...

MAX: Oh, beautiful. I think it’s been one of the most exciting hops for me to have recently. Just getting one in that has so much punchiness. So much character, so much mix of aroma. I really like the red berry thing. A little bit of dank is nice. Just a very multi-layered, multifaceted hop, like a Mosaic or a Simcoe, etc.

PADDI: I had a friend tell me it’s Strata on steroids.

MAX: Yeah. What was the... I have a brewer friend who’s always telling me it’s the American Nectaron. That’s his favorite way to describe it, just that juiciness that you get out of it.

PADDI: Yeah. So thank you for taking the time. We do this as often as possible to educate our customers about everything that happens with beer. And how much effort and people and things go behind it. They think, oh yeah, a hop is just a plant. And you just, you know, and this is a little bit of an effort to educate them, to make them understand the amount of human effort that goes behind it and all the variations behind them, especially in the age of AI. I think it’s quite important to...

MAX: Understand all the pieces.

PADDI: Yeah, exactly. That. And also to give value to these kinds of human-driven products. So thanks for your time.

MAX: Yeah. Thanks for having me.