Virgil Gamache Farms was founded in 1913 in Yakima Valley. Originally named Sunshine Ranch, hops was not the industry it is today, so that farm grew other crops. But when prohibition ended, the Gamache family saw an opportunity. Some of the hop fields planted then are still in production today.
Virgil Gamache Farms is named after the second-generation Gamache to farm the lands. And today, Darren Gamache, with his brother Andy, are the fourth generation to work the Yakima Valley farm. Virgil Gamache Farms helped popularize Sorachi Ace hops and were the first to cultivate Amarillo hops.
Suffice it to say, the Gamache family has seen a lot, including the rise of the hop-obsessed craft beer industry. All About Beer recently chatted with Darren Gamache on the farm during hop harvest and gathered some interesting tidbits about hop farming.
How A Landrace Hop Emerged At Just The Right Time
While most of the popular hops today are purposefully bred for the specific characteristics sought by brewers—oils and thiol precursors are sought today, while alpha acids were highly sought a couple of decades ago—one popular hop variety was simply found.
Amarillo was introduced commercially in 2000. But it was simply found on the Virgil Gamache Farm. Hop farms go to great lengths to ensure only female bines grow. If male plants are present, they can fertilize the female cones, causing them to produce seeds, which are unwanted by the beer industry. So how did a new variety of hop simply appear on the Gamache farm?
“It doesn’t really speak highly of our roguing crew,” laughs Gamache. In agriculture, the removal of unwanted plants is known as roguing. “So somebody screwed up, and now we have Amarillo.”
Gamache is joking, but it is a bit of a guess as to what exactly happened. “At the time, we did not have powdery mildew as a disease in the valley… And so we would take the hop choppings right out, and we would spread them in the field to rejuvenate the soil… So all the seeds would be shaken out of the cones. Even if you have a 1% seed count, you’re talking millions or hundreds of thousands of pounds of hop seed.”
One of those seeds took hold and grew with vigor. “It was discovered in a field that was of a Hallertau variety,” says Gamache. “At the time there was a movement towards the super alpha varieties, and that had a specific structure in the field. We were looking at the physical structure of how it grows, and everything else was columnar…Nothing looked like this plant, other than these supers, and so we saw that, and we’re like, ‘Oh, that looks different.’”
That first Amarillo plant, though it was not so named at the time, “overtook this hill because it’s a very vigorous grower, and because the variety that was planted there isn’t,” says Gamache. “So we thought, we’ll just let it fruit to cone, and then when we smelled it, Mom and Dad were like, ‘Oh my God, I wish beer tasted like this.’”
At the time, craft brewing was still nascent. Interest in and the infrastructure to test new hop varieties was not like it is today. “We hand picked it and dried the samples, and sent the samples off to the company that was known as Hop Union at the time,” says Gamache. “And also to OSU [Oregon State University] to a hop scientist there by the name of Gail Nickerson, who was brilliant… And so we ran an analysis, and it was described as a high alpha Cascade or Centennial type, which we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s weird. What’s a Centennial?’”
The Gamache farm gave samples away in the following two years to the small group of people promoting hops to craft breweries. Craft beer was almost a distraction to hop growers. At Hop Union, one person needed to get permission to pursue the craft business. The hop industry only looks the way it does today, thanks to the handful of people who saw the potential of craft beer.
Poor agricultural practices and a curious mindset led to a serendipitous discovery, at just the right time, that led to the development of Amarillo hops. To this day, Virgil Gamache Farms holds the exclusive trademark to that variety.
The Good And Bad Of Protecting Germplasms
Amarillo is not the only hop variety Virgil Gamache Farms helped popularize. But the story of Sorachi Ace is different.
“I would routinely go down to the Washington State University Experiment Station down in Prosser, and down there they have a germplasm repository that had representative samples of multiple varieties from around the world,” says Gamache. Germplasm repositories are like seed banks or yeast banks. By keeping germplasms in different parts of the world, they can be saved if disaster or disease were to strike somewhere.
“I was just looking for something new because I was very interested in supporting craft,” says Gamache. “We had just come out with Amarillo, and it was starting to gain legs and traction… This is at a time when you were mostly growing high alpha for the big brewers.” But Gamache took a personal interest in craft beer, “because it was so much more interesting.”
“I pulled a cone off this plant,” recalls Gamache. “I smelled it, and it literally stopped me in my tracks. And I turned around and I said to Dr. Stephen Kenny, ‘Ooh, I want some roots off of this plant.’ And the reason it was so striking to me is that it had a dill and lemon aroma note, and that is something I had never smelled in hops before. Everything I had smelled up to that point in time were Cascade-based, Centennial-based, Amarillo, Liberty, Crystal, Ultra, high-alpha Cluster. I’d never smelled anything like that, and it blew me away.”
“It was used commercially by Sapporo for a couple of years in ’81 and ’82, I believe,” says Gamache. “But they moved away from it and went to another varietal. But you don’t necessarily like to see varieties go away. And if there was an outbreak of disease in Japan … they had the comfort of knowing that this germplasm was on a different continent and was protected.” So Gamache discovered Sorachi Ace and repurposed it for craft beer just because someone wanted to save the germplasm of a hop nobody was using anymore.
Protecting germplasms from extinction is a noble endeavor, and it led to the discovery of Sorachi Ace in craft beer. But there could be a downside to sending hop germplasms across the world.
When Amarillo was discovered, there was no powdery mildew in the valley, which is why they laid the hop choppings in the field. Might sharing germplasms also spread disease?
“I do know that for powdery mildew, we didn’t have it in the valley until sometime in the mid ’90s,” says Gamache. “That came in on a susceptible varietal that was part of an exchange that occurred, so those risks exist.”
Why Hop Farmers Don’t Rotate Crops
In grain farming, it is important to rotate crops. One crop might take nitrogen from the soil, so other crops are planted in other years to return nitrogen to the soil, for example. Also, new varieties of those grains are constantly in development so that they can continue to resist diseases, which also mutate and try to infiltrate the grains.
For the most part, crop rotation and varietal replacement does not happen in hops. Why not?
“Crop rotation in hops generally comes from market conditions because it’s a perennial plant,” explains Gamache. “Sometimes farms will do a replant program to rejuvenate the germplasm to start over again because you may have like a virus or something…”
But when the hop market is soft, farms might idle some fields. If they think hop markets will return, they may leave the poles and wires up, and plant a crop in between.
“Beef prices are up. Beef herds are profitable,” says Gamache. So, some hop farmers have turned to growing feed corn. In Yakima today, it is not uncommon to see hop fields, readily identifiable by their poles and wires, but with crops that are obviously not hops.
Those intermittent crops are agronomic reality; farms are businesses, too. But the crop rotation that happens as a result benefits the land. Absent those economic reasons to change crops, there is not as much risk of monoculture disaster, as there is in grain farming.
“When you’re farming hops, you’re trying to perform in the top two to three percentile of the performance of what that plant is capable of,” says Gamache. “So, you’re taking care of the nutrient needs, the fertility needs, the water needs. You’re watching that thing!”
“From a brewer standpoint, when you find something that works, you don’t really want to change it,” says Gamache. Thankfully, the valley is home to farms growing a multitude of other crops, from peaches to apples to berries. That breaks up the monoculture and the farms naturally diversify geographically.
“If you look at the Amarillo varietal, just as an example, we have a farm that we work with up in North Idaho,” explains Gamache. “We have farms that we work with down in South Idaho. We have farms that we work with up and down Yakima, Moxee, down in Woodburn, Oregon, and then we also have growers that we work with over in Germany. It’s interesting because you’re trying to protect a variety.”
“I think barley farmers don’t care so much about the variety,” says Gamache. “They just want disease resistance and agronomics. The brewers don’t care if it’s a Copeland. What they care about is the protein levels, the diastatic power, that sort of thing. Whereas it’s important for you to protect Amarillo as Amarillo.”
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