Rogue Farms Hops

Rogue Innovation Brewer Danny Connors smells freshly picked hops at Rogue Farms in Independence, Oregon.

Rogue Hop Farm, 3590 Wigrich Rd, Independence, Oregon 97351

Overhead shot of 52 acres of hops growing on Rogue Farms in Independence, Oregon during hop harvest.

We first decided to grow our own hops during the massive global hops shortage of 2007 and haven’t looked back. 52 acres and 10 hop varieties later, we find ourselves with an opportunity for change. This year we will be ripping up nearly half of our fields to plant new and more modern varieties. These new hops won’t produce for another two years, and there’s really no guarantee they will produce at all, but that’s a risk you have to be willing to take when you grow your own.

The Willamette river floods the hop fields, bringing with it

What’s the difference? Vines climb and grow upwards using tendrils and suckers while bines used downward pointing bristles to aid in their grip. Our hops are trained onto a material known as coir. This is composed of Sri Lankan coconut husk and we use it for two reasons: the material is perfect for the hops to latch onto and it is also compostable, producing little to no waste.

During peak growing season hops can grow 12 inches a day.

Alluvial loam at its finest. This is the soil where we grow beer.

The ground where we grow our hops, pumpkins, marionberries, cucumbers and garden botanicals has some of the best soil a farmer can wish for. It's alluvial loam, a rich mixture of clay, sand and silt that was deposited here by floods.

Western Oregon’s famed rainy winters are great for hops, delivering moisture at the time when they need it most. What’s not so well known is that the summers here are mostly sunny and warm, delivering sunshine when hops are rapidly growing.

Rogue Farms is smack dab on the 45th parallel north. Not only do we get lots of sunny days in summer, we get long periods of daylight. From about mid- May to mid-July, the daylight stretches 15 hours and longer. This is perfectly timed to the hops’ growing season.

FUN FACT! Last year we grew 10 varieties of hops on 52 acres of land. 5 acres yields an average of 7,660lbs of hops-thats about 79,664lbs of hops to brew with!