Discovering NC Agriculture is a social media series focusing on N.C. grown, raised, caught, and made commodities. Originally started in 2025, this series has been renewed to run for another year! Tune in each month to see how an N.C. commodity is grown, harvested, packed for consumer use and more. Learn nutritional value, find fun recipes to try, hear from local chefs who use that product, and other unique commodity facts throughout the series. We look forward to helping you better understand some of our N.C. commodities and how they impact your everyday lives!
Over the last decade, hops have been a buzzword across the agriculture industry as farmers and research stations alike seek to grow them domestically. Historically, hops have been grown in the northern parts of our country, including Washington and Oregon. As the “drink local” movement began to spread across our state, however, North Carolina farmers began to look for ways to produce local hops. In 2009, Jeanine Davis, Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in Horticultural Science at N.C. State University, started the Hops Project to explore the possibility of hops as a specialty crop for farmers, researchers and local businesses.
Jeanine Davis has spent her entire career, thirty-eight years to be exact, working for N.C. State University as both an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist. Unlike most university employees, Jeanine Davis is not stationed in Raleigh, but at the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research and Extension Center in Mills River. “After graduating with my PhD from Washington State University, I began my job at N.C. State University at the research station,” she said. “I was hired to do commercial vegetables, ginseng research, and (soon after) commercial herbs. Today, I continue to work within those areas, but specialty crop research has become the focus of my work.” In addition to hops, she is currently working with medicinal herbs (like ramps and ginseng), agroforestry (aka forest farming), truffles and organic veggies (like tomatoes).
In 2009, Jeanine started to get questions from farmers across the state surrounding hops and the local beer/mead industry. “The ‘Drink Local’ movement was huge at that time, which really got farmers thinking of ways that breweries could create a completely local beer,” she said. “I did all my graduate work in Washington State where they produce hops, so I was familiar with the process of growing and harvesting them. Here in North Carolina, as I became interested in hops, two other researchers on campus were awarded a grant from the Golden Leaf Foundation to conduct a hops variety trial in Raleigh. They invited me to join them and conduct the same trial in Mills River. The original trial location in Mills River, including the posts and wiring system, is still standing today! As the variety trials progressed, a research specialist on Jeanine’s team began to look at hops from another angle. “Dr. Luping Qu, a plant breeder, came to me one day asking to breed some of the hops at the station to create a domestic variety that would grow well in our state,” Jeanine said. “I told him that if we could find a grant program to help fund the breeding project, he could do it. Not only were we awarded one grant, but two from the NCDA&CS – which is where our hop breeding project began!”
Hops are grown by purchasing plants that are then transplanted outside. “Hops are an incredibly expensive crop to produce, as well as labor intensive,” Jeanine said. “The crop requires a lot of specialized equipment, like harvesters and dryers (Oasts), as well as a trellis composed of 20-foot posts set across the field and wire support systems for the hops to grow on.” When it comes to planting, hops are flexible and can be planted either during the fall or during the spring. Here in North Carolina, plants emerge in very early spring and are ready for harvest in July and August. In the interim, Jeanine and her team (along with some volunteer farmers/home growers) will prune the plants and manage diseases to ensure proper growth and high-quality buds. “In our state, the biggest disease we battle with hops is downy mildew, although we are starting to see more powdery mildew as well,” Jeanine said. “Pruning to improve air flow to the hop plants, good nutrition management and specific fungicides are used to prevent downy mildew.” Once the growing process is complete, Jeanine and her team harvest the hops, mostly by hand. “We do have a small harvester, but most of our harvesting is done by researchers and interested volunteers,” she said. In fact, last year, their entire hops crop was worked by volunteers. “They were amazing,” Jeanine said. “Large hop producers, specifically in other states, have giant machines that will cut the hop bines from the top wires, gather the plants together and put them on a truck. At the station, however, we have dedicated volunteers and researchers that make harvest possible each year.” In a commercial hop yard, once harvested, the hops are taken to the dryer (aka the Hop Oast) and usually ground into pellets for brewers, meaderies, and other interested customers.
North Carolina hop farmers found that commercially available hop varieties produced very low yields in North Carolina. The yields were often a fifth of what producers in the Pacific Northwest got. The reason is that hops flower in response to daylength and our daylength here in the south is much shorter than where those varieties were bred in the north. “Luping Qu bred ten new lines of hop varieties that grow well in the Southeast and produce a high-quality yield,” Jeanine said. “In fact, these new lines have the potential to produce almost as much as large hop producers in the northern states.” For many years, Sierra Nevada partnered with the Mountain Horticultural Crops and Extension Center to test their hops. “They would brew with our hops and serve the finished product to customers at the brewery to get their honest feedback and opinions,” Jeanine said. “Their trials really helped us during the breeding process to be sure that new varieties we bred not only performed well in the field but were good for brewing too.” In addition to breweries, hops are used by companies that produce nighttime teas, chefs who enjoy cooking with and using bitters, floral companies for use in bridal bouquets and wedding arrangements, and herb companies for medicinal purposes.
Today, the Hops Breeding Project is winding down with the ten lines of hop varieties produced by Luping Qu, who retired at the end of last year. “We are currently in the process of releasing two of the lines as public varieties and looking for nurseries interested in obtaining a license to grow one of both of these varieties. These new varieties are appropriate for commercial hop farmers and homebrewers growing hops in their home garden,” Jeanine said. “We are also working with the university Micropropagation Unit to safely store and propagate these lines for future use.” Anyone interested in obtaining a license to grow these new varieties can contact Jeanine Davis at Jeanine_Davis@ncsu.edu. More information on the hops project can be found on the program website at https://newcropsorganics.ces.ncsu.edu/specialty…/nc-hops/.
“I think it will take a very specific type of person to grow hops commercially in North Carolina because they take a large investment and are both challenging and risky,” she said. “However, once these new high-yielding varieties are commercially available, for those who can afford it and want to grow something new and unusual, these hop varieties are the perfect place to start.” We look forward to seeing hops research continue through N.C. State University, research stations, and farms across our state. As a new and upcoming specialty crop, hops are part of the collective effort to revitalize and innovate our state’s number one industry!
