Southern Oregon Beer by Busse Phil;Mills -Founder Caldera Brewing Company Jim;

Author:Busse, Phil;Mills -Founder Caldera Brewing Company, Jim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rows of hops. Oregon Hops & Beer Archives.

Buoyed by the rising tide of beer drinking throughout America, the demand for hops also rose. In part, that growing market contributed to the growth of Oregon’s hops industries; but more pressing, over the next three decades, three distinct factors established Oregon as the leading hops grower in the world.

First, the transcontinental railroad reached the West Coast in 1880. The lush farm fields of the Willamette Valley had been settled over the previous generation and were producing watermelons, almonds and apples—more than enough for the population of the Northwest—and were being shipped across America. Likewise, from 1870 to 1890, hops production in Oregon boomed from 9,745 pounds in 1870 to 244,371 in 1880 and then by another multiple of 15 to 3,811,320 pounds in 1890.

Within this industry, Southern Oregon was a secondary provider for hops, with particularly productive clusters around Grants Pass and the Applegate Valley—many of the same fields that today grow marijuana plants. In 1888, seventy thousand pounds of hops were shipped from Josephine County, according to the book History of Josephine County by Jack Sutton.

By 1890, there were an estimated two thousand growers in Oregon. Many were small plots, what would today be called “boutique.” In 1916, even Governor Oswald West, who supported Prohibition and signed the statewide ban on beer into law, managed a small hops farm. There were only thirteen hops farms in Josephine County, a number slightly higher than the number of breweries in Southern Oregon at the time, but those farms were moderately large tracts—90 to 150 acres—and growing hyper-productive hops clusters. The group of hops farms in Josephine and Jackson Counties were large and organized enough to form their own trade association, the Southern Oregon Hop Growers Association, separate from the Willamette Hop Growers Association.

The next opportunity for growth in Oregon’s hops industry was a marketing coup. In 1905, Portland hosted the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition; much like a world fair (although not formally sanctioned as such), the event was a massive party that highlighted the wonders of the world, such as marble statues from Europe, blimp excursions and locally grown commodities like lumber and hops. Over the summer months, more than 2.5 million people attended, a remarkable number considering the entire state population of Oregon at the time was 413,000. As a direct result, the population of Portland nearly doubled from 1905 to 1910, from 161,000 to 270,000, growth mainly attributed to the fair. Likewise, between 1900 and 1906, hops production enjoyed yet another massive jump, nearly doubling over six years from 15,330,000 pounds in 1900 to 23,985,000 in 1906, the year after the Lewis and Clark Exposition.

It would seem logical that Prohibition would grind this production to a halt. Wheat and barley were grown in eastern Oregon, but those crops were somewhat immune to restrictions on beer production, as they have a multitude of other applications, while hops is a fairly specific product. But the early Oregon hops industry was largely structured

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