The hops in your beer – a beverage made with only water, grain, yeast and the vibrant green cone-shaped flowers – are more than likely sourced from Germany or the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
That is, unless it so happens you’re drinking a beer from Barnside Brewing tucked into a forest off Regional Road 10 in St-Eugène.
Turn down the gravel driveway that’s been cut through the trees, and the rails and poles and ropes of the towering trellis structure on which farmers Danick Lafond and Natalie Chapados grow their hops are immediately visible.
Over the past week or two, however, the trellises have been picked clean of the year’s harvest and, after drying in the barn, some of the hops will head to London Brewing, 700 kilometres away, or to Broken Stick Brewing Company, about an hour’s drive to Hammond.
“That makes it a really local brewery,” says Lafond. “We call ourselves a farmstead brewery.”
The neighbourhood local
Built within the trees near the barn is the Barnside taproom with a concrete-topped bar with room for eight people and four beers on tap, a retail cooler with cans of beer made with Barnside hops, a display of some salty snacks and several tables and chairs.
The venue has become something of the neighbourhood local for area residents to visit for a pint and conversation: on tap currently are a lager, Pilsner and Front Porch, an IPA, by London Brewing.
There’s also available Broken Light, a light lager at 3.5% ABV made by Broken Stick Brewing in Hammond.
Pinned to a board behind the taps are dozens of numbered green tags – the ear clips used for animal identification numbers on cattle, a suitable agrarian theme here – for members of the “Barnsiders club:” for $75, as a member you receive your own Barnside beer stein filled with a complimentary beer, a Barnside ball cap and discounted pricing on a 20-oz beer.
Lafond and Chapados both have PhDs in health sciences and backgrounds in research, and they have put in a decade or so researching hops.
Their crops have been used commercially for the last several years, but they only formally opened the taproom at the end of June.
“When we started the project, we sat down, we read, we asked advice, and there was lots of trial and error,” Chapados says
Lafond was born and raised on a farm and draws on some of that experience for growing hops
Barnside currently has 10 acres of certified organic hops, which breaks down to about 25% Chinook and 25% Cascade with other varieties making up the other half. Most of what they grow is exported.
A history of hops
Stating that everything “that puts the character” into a glass of beer is from the hops, Lafond adds that there are hundreds of varieties which have been associated with brewing since at least 800 BCE.
But hops are current, too. A couple of years ago, Ontario’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness and Ministry of Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) published the “Brewer’s Guide to Ontario-Grown Hop Varieties.”
Given the popularity and resurgence of locally-made beer, the OMAFRA document is designed to help grow this agricultural sector and is a resource for brewers to connect with hop growers.
When dried, the green cones add a bitter quality to ales and lagers that balance the sweetness of malted barley, for example, as well as adding fruity, floral and citrusy flavours.
Perhaps even more important is that hops act as a stabilizing agent for the beer and help as a natural preservative, even centuries ago. Many varieties of the perennial plant are proprietary, having been developed in the U.S.
“We grow public varieties here, like Cascade, as do most growers in the world,” Lafond notes.
While they seem to proliferate easily, their rhizome-like quality helping them spread quickly, Lafond says hops are somewhat difficult to grow. Nevertheless, economies and families depended on the climbing plants into the early decades of the twentieth century, including here in eastern Ontario.
He cites that between 1900 and 1920, there were more than 100 acres of hops grown on farms adjacent to County Road 10 between St.-Eugene and Riceville.
Lafond mentions the myth that Molson buyers once came to the region to purchase hops.
“That’s not confirmed, but it’s pretty sure that we exported hops to New York State,” Lafond says. “Many families grew hops, and we are re-establishing that as one of the only farms growing on a commercial scale.”
In the few years after WWII, however, hop farmers had abandoned growing hops and switched to other crops. Barnside is a unique throwback, therefore.
The “technology” is pretty much the same as it was: the trellis system, erected in a sort of triangular shape with the soil reaching five or six metres in the air, attached to strings and wires, is now bare after the recent harvest.
In the spring, however, new shoots will be trimmed and cleaned up before being tied with strings called “bines” to train the plants to grow along the long poles for maximum exposure to sun and heat. Hop plants are heliotropes which “follow” the sun as it appears to move across the sky and can grow several inches a day in optimal conditions.
The start of the season depends on two factors, Lafond says: soil temperature and amount of sunlight.
“When the soil temperature is high enough, the hops start to produce shoots from the crown. We select the good shoots that will produce a good yield for the year. They want to climb, but they need a little bit of assistance in May. By first of June, the plants are two or three feet high and then can go by themselves up to 19 feet.”
Barnside hops are harvested mechanically, usually starting at the end of August, and yield between 2,000 and 3,000 metric tonnes. The process with a harvesting machine, a wagon and tractor and people inside the warehouse requires about a half dozen workers
Growing aspirations; local collaboration
While COVID-19, the Ukraine war and inflation, have decreased significantly the demand for organic products in Europe, including foreign-grown hops, the brewery element in the Barnside name remains aspirational: Lafond and Chapados are looking at building their own small-batch brewery in the near future.
Until then, Barnside plans to start growing new hop varieties to help brewers create new beers as they move from exportation to more local collaboration, Lafond says. The goal is brewing eastern Ontario beer with eastern Ontario ingredients, including the hops.
“Right now, we have good partners in London, at Broken Stick and at Brasserie Sir John in Lachute and others in Quebec. We want to educate people that you can make good beer with locally grown hops. Beer has always been linked to agriculture – and not agriculture 5,000 kilometres away.”
