Hellbender Hops Farm Reintroduces Locally-Grown Hops to East Tennessee After a Century

In Cover Stories, Food & Drink by S. Heather Duncanleave a COMMENT

cover_hopfarm_2In a field behind a shack where his grandfather lived while logging what would become Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Trent Gilland is farming. But although Gilland’s family land is steeped in tradition, the crop is not. It’s not tobacco or corn, but something that mostly disappeared from the East Coast almost a century ago: hops.

On Hellbender Hops farm, Gilland is learning how to grow beer. Or at least, the cones that provide its distinctive flavor.

Gilland was the first in the region to venture into hops (although several hop farms are in the works for Knoxville) at his 1-acre Townsend farm named for an Appalachian salamander. This spring he was training his hop vines to climb a trellis of woven coconut husk lasts (basically, rot-resistant rope). The lines travel upward from each plant to another horizontal rope about 20 feet in the air.

A disgruntled rooster crows repeatedly as Gilland, sporting a bushy beard and floppy hat, shows off his eight different hop varieties. His oft-repeated mantra is, “The work of every man is the envy of another,” and Gilland would know. Like many local brewers, the Maryville College graduate is on his second career after he tired of taking orders from corporate bigwigs—in his case, as a mathematician in customer analytics at Family Dollar. He returned to his family’s valley, which turns out to provide the ideal air circulation for a crop usually associated with the Pacific Northwest. The constant breeze that keeps hop lines a-tremble also keeps the plants from developing blight and mildew.

Gilland estimates he’ll earn $15,000 to $20,000 from his hop yard if it achieves full yields, but that hasn’t happened during Hellbender’s first two years. Gilland is learning by trial and error because hops really haven’t been grown on the East Coast since the 1920s. “A bad case of blight took out a bunch of hop farms, and a bad case of ignorance called Prohibition took out the rest,” he jokes.

cover_hopfarm_3Gilland is switching a few of his hop varieties, but his big change this year is adding an underground irrigation system. He attended a recent conference with hop growers from Virginia and North Carolina, learning that his lack of constant watering was the only thing keeping him from their high yields. The plants take seven to ten gallons of water a week, he says.

Gilland sold his first two harvests to the home-brewers’ supplier Ferment Station in Knoxville. (Hops for home brewers sell for $3 to $4 an ounce, while brewers pay just $6 to $8 a pound, he says.) But he’d eventually like to be able to work with a brewer like Bluetick in Maryville to supply local hops for a single beer variety. He says he’d love to see more local hop farms because farmers could pool their harvests to support a brew year-round, earning a higher profit at the same time.

Local hops could be more than a marketing tool: They could help develop a distinctive-tasting East Tennessee beer.

Different hops produce different flavors, and many of Gilland’s provide the lighter, lemony taste of a lager or India Pale Ale. They could become the key ingredient in an Appalachian IPA.

“My Mt. Hood hops will taste different from any others on Earth, based on the minerals in the soil, the bacteria in the air, and how the plant develops lupulin,” Gilland says. Lupulin is a golden oil found in each pocket of the hop cone. “If there is gold in these hills, that’s the gold you’re mining for,” Gilland says. “It’s the flavor and bitterness of hoppy beer.”

East Coast hop farming began anew in the last 15 years or so, when efforts like the North Carolina Specialty Crops Program began helping farmers diversify, particularly those who had been growing tobacco. North Carolina has about 80 hop farms, but hop growing is still unusual in Tennessee.

In July and August, Gilland’s hop vines will be covered in little cones, which can range in size from the length of a thumb to the length of a fingernail. When Gilland brushes against them, he’ll walk away smelling like beer.

In some respects, hop farming is easy; hops require few, if any, chemicals or fertilizers. Once trained up the trellis, they just have to be picked and dried.

But that can be tougher than you’d think. Each plant produced 500 to 1,000 hops. Even with mediocre yields, Gilland is picking half a million hops a summer. First he pulls down the vines, which are scratchy in a painful way, like insulation. Picking the hops off is labor-intensive, so he makes a party of it. Gilland brews some beer and feeds his friends a big meal in exchange for their help—not unlike what people in Townsend did during harvests and barn raisings 150 years ago. “We spend an evening in the parking lot picking them off and eating and having a big ol’ time,” he says.

Gilland has been using industrial dehydration units to dry the hops, but it can’t keep up with an increased harvest. So he’s interested in converting a wooden outbuilding—once his grandparents’ portable logging cabin—into a smoking shed. It’s hard to believe the dark, cramped space once housed a family.

Can’t you just see this as a stop on a future hop farm tour?

cover_hopfarm_4“I’d like to turn hop yards into vineyards,” Gilland says, complete with tours and tastings. At a wooden picnic table next to his hop field, Gilland opens a glass jar. “This used to be called ‘poor man’s asparagus,’” he says. The jar contains long, spindly hop stems pickled with vinegar and herbs. While they’re a little difficult to manipulate into your mouth, the taste is strong, spicy, and addictive. Hops are a natural preservative, so Gilland cans vegetables using beer and vinegar.

Gilland chose to grow hops instead of becoming a professional brewer because, he says, “If I’m a brewer, even if I’m great, I’ve got to beat 2,000 other people. But if I grow hops, I’m in the game from day one, and I’m guiding the beer.”

Also: See our main story on Knoxville’s ever-growing microbrewery scene.

S. Heather Duncan has won numerous awards for her feature writing and coverage of the environment, government, education, business and local history during her 15-year reporting career. Originally from Western North Carolina, Heather has worked for Radio Free Europe, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London, and several daily newspapers. Heather spent almost a dozen years at The Telegraph in Macon, Ga., where she spent most of her time covering the environment or writing project-investigations that provoked changes such as new laws related to day care and the protection of environmentally-sensitive lands. You can reach Heather at heather@knoxmercury.com

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