Northern Girl Hops

Northern Girl Hops BY ELIZABETH CHORNEY-BOOTH

If there’s one food and beverage

trend that’s been more pervasive than any other over the last decade, it’s the drive to eat and drink local. We want local meat, local vegetables, local grains and, more than anything, local beer and spirits. But while most local beer drinkers can recognize a brewery label from Calgary, Edmonton, Medicine Hat, or some of the other Alberta communities that boast breweries, we don’t often ask where the ingredients come from.

But that doesn’t mean that hyperlocalists aren’t interested in brewing uniquely Albertan beers. We certainly have plenty of grain in these parts, but Alberta has never been a hotbed for hops. There are a few more commercial Canadian hops growers in Ontario and British Columbia, but the American Pacific Northwest is the biggest North American go-to when it comes to hop suppliers.

The women behind Northern Girls Hops want to change that — and they want to do it their own way. Sisters Catherine Smith and Karin Smith Fargey began production of their Northern Girls Hops in 2012. Their hop yard is on their mixed-use Windhover Farm, west of Edmonton, which also includes a cider orchard. The land was once owned by the sisters’ grandparents, and the pair reacquired it about 15 years ago,

“It’s really important to us to honour the landscape and its heritage,” Karin says. “There’s tremendous heritage held in that land and we’ve always wanted to uphold that. That really is the value that sits in small family farms across Alberta. We’re trying to maintain that connection with the land, and the connection to family and community. While being innovative as well.”

As Alberta’s first commercial hop yard, Northern Girls made some noise

for themselves via collaborations with breweries like Big Rock, Alley Kat, Blind Enthusiasm, and Paddy’s. The thing about growing local is that it’s nice for a brewery to be able to brag that its beer is made from local grains, local water, and local hops. But if those local ingredients don’t somehow reflect a sense of place, it’s all essentially window dressing.

Catherine and Karin spent their first few years of hop production in an experimental phase: they planted about 12 varieties of hops over the years to decide which would work with Alberta’s climate and how the hops’ flavours would react to local conditions, expressing a sense of terroir, much like a grape varietal would in wine. A cask trial of Northern Girls’ Golding hops (which they’ve since dubbed “Alberta Golding”) for example, revealed flavours of mango that an otherwise identical batch of beer brewed with Golding hops from the U.K. didn’t carry.

Building on the unique characteristics of their most successful hops, Northern Girls decided that they wanted to consistently give their customers a taste of Alberta and, being the stewards of the land that they are, also wanted to give their soil a rest. They let their hop yard go to fallow and dug out their plants to replant new crops. Which means you won’t find their hops in this year’s beers, but in the long term, they’ll be developing a uniquely Albertan product that won’t simply replicate the flavour of West Coast hops. Northern Girls expect to be able to collaborate with local breweries to start doing small batches of beer with and its heritage” their new hops in 2021, with a full crop of commercially available Alberta-specific hops ready for 2022.

“Some hop varieties are known to be more terroir sensitive than others,” Catherine says. “Once we established that, yes, we can pull off a crop with yields comparable to the major production areas of growing hops in North America, our focus turned to the unique aromas of hops in Alberta.”

While Catherine admits that Albertan-grown hops are still a “rare bird,” while she and Karin work to get

“It’s really important to us to honour the landscape

their hops growing again, they have been directing interested breweries to other small hop growers via the Alberta Hop Producers Association.

Both sisters say that there is a greater demand for hops than Alberta growers would ever be able to meet (and that’s even without many chefs — save for Christine Sandford at Edmonton’s Biera — yet exploring the possibility of cooking with hop shoots). But for now, Northern Girls and Windhover Farms

are excited to look forward to a product that reflects their philosophy as farmers, and allows them to engage in meaningful collaboration with local beer makers.

“We know the land and we are experimenters, as many farmers are,” Karin says. “We’re also creative and when you are grounded in knowledge of your land, it gives you the breadth of freedom to be able to expand it. We were looking for a sustainable, value-added product that we could crop throughout the year and that we were interested in. Hops have a tremendous, beautiful rich history.”

Cookbook author and regular contributor to CBC Radio, Elizabeth is a Calgary-based freelance writer, who has been writing about music and food, and just about everything else for her entire adult life.