There’s hops in them thar hills

Craft beer brewing tends to attract some of the most creative and hardest-working folks around. Take Shane Mills, for example. Shane is not only the owner and brewer at Cacapon Mountain Brewing in Berkeley Springs, WV, but he is also an avid hop breeder.

If Shane has his way, he will take a West Virginia hop offspring to beer-hall fame.

It’s very unusual for West Virginia craft brewers to grow any of their own hops, with the possible exception of a few decorative bines growing around their taprooms. Hop growing is a very specialized agricultural endeavor. Brewers specialize in brewing; they normally leave hop growing to hop farmers.

Interest in regional hop growing

In America today, hops are a major specialty crop, concentrated primarily in parts of the country where the climate is best suited for growing them. This is primarily in the high desert region of Washington where it is hot and dry, and also some in adjoining areas of Oregon and Idaho.

While the hop plant will, technically, grow just about anywhere in the country, commercial hop farming, as a profit-making enterprise, is not easy. Popular U.S. hop varieties have been bred, in part, to do well in the drier climate and longer summer daylight hours of the upper Northwest. They don’t produce as well in our Mid-Atlantic region, where summer daylight hours are shorter and our high humidity makes plant disease more of a problem.

However, with the maturing of the craft brewing industry, we’ve seen an increasing interest in new hop varieties and geographic diversification in hop sources. To give their beer a competitive advantage, brewers are often driven by a desire to make something a little bit different—especially if that includes using more local ingredients.

The damper climate & shorter daylight impediments have not stopped plant scientists and hop breeders from working to develop hop varieties that not only taste good, but that will produce well in the Eastern U.S. area. Shane Mills is one of those experimenters.

Shane becomes a hop breeder

Shane Mills tells us his interest in hop breeding began kind of by fiat 15 years ago.

“When I dropped out of college in 2009 to attend brewing school, I got a summer job driving around the Eastern Panhandle [of WV] setting up bug traps to measure emerald ash borer populations. One day I noticed a hop growing up a telephone pole near the border of Tucker County, so I took a root cutting with the pipe dream of breeding it someday.”

If a hop had been growing vigorously in the wild without any special cultivation or oversight, he figured there was a chance it might be a good prospect for having genetic material well-suited for the local climate.

From that accidental discovery, he nurtured the wild WV hop plant, tending to it for a decade before getting serious about breeding it. Fast forward to today: he has developed his own hop-growing experiment station on property located about 20 miles from his brewery in Berkeley Springs, WV.

Getting serious

A few years back, about the same time he was developing his Cacapon Mountain brewery project, Shane got serious with his hop breeding.

“In 2021, I found out about the USDA’s germplasm repository in Oregon and requested a handful of commercial cultivars and wild hops from all over the world to observe growth patterns, disease susceptibility and yield potential in our area [WV’s Eastern Panhandle],” Shane explains.

“So far I have collected about 50,000 seeds (mostly from the native WV plant), and plan to start hunting through them next year on a large scale.” 

Hop program goals

“The overall goal of the hop program is to create some unique-smelling hops that can grow in the mid-Atlantic region successfully, regardless of yield,” Shane explains. “The main focus is to do so using the native West Virginia hop, pollinate with some neomexicanus males to generate interesting F1 hybrids, and then inbreed those to get some unique transgressive segregants.”

If some of Shane’s terms are foreign to you, they were to me as well. Neomexicanus is a native, genetically distinct subspecies of hop plant that has been growing in the American Southwest for perhaps a million years.¹ Neomexicanus is a parent of newer commercial hop varieties like Medusa and Zappa, and a likely parent to other U.S. varieties such as Comet and Chinook.

Transgressive segregants can be viewed as a description of the progeny of two genetically distinct parents that are inbred together, resulting in similar—but amplified—traits of the parent, or traits not seen in the parents. The goal for each of these inbreeding events is to create an organism that is more fit than the last, or with characteristics more suited for a particular usage.

Shane hopes to produce a hop cultivar from his found West Virginia wild hop that also has commercial brewing potential.

“The only catch is that the hop genetics are really weird and display a lot of non-Mendelian inheritance patterns, so who knows what will happen,” Shane adds.

With hops, patience is a virtue

To wear the hop breeder’s hat, one must be a patient soul.

“In general, it takes about three years before a plant starts yielding a full crop,” he says.

This means it takes many seasons to fully test new cultivars and plant crosses from your breeding program.

Shane is currently growing and testing many cultivars in addition to his original wild WV hop plant. In his field are 35 standard commercial cultivars, along with 9 wild females, and 20 wild males (of which 10 are wild neomexicanus).

“So far, the native West Virginia hop shows the best yield potential,” he says, “and hopefully, we’ll have an essential oil analysis on it soon.”

Beer with his hops coming

Asked when he thought he’d have enough hops to use in making beer at Cacapon Mountain Brewing, he says: “I have enough of some traditional cultivars to use this year, and I should be able to blend [hops from] the 2022 seedlings into a beer next year. The West Virginia hop seedlings will be in a beer by 2026.”

When asked if he had discovered any other native West Virginia hop plants since his original discovery, he answers: “Unfortunately, I haven’t found any wild WV plants from any other locations yet, but I’d love to start a collection.”

While Shane has always had an interest in science, his hop breeding hobby provides even more opportunities for experimentation on the brewing side.

“It feels like I’ve come full circle, as I left college studying to become a plant scientist, looking for novel chemistries, and I am now using the brewery as a means of testing plants for novel chemistries.”

If this sounds to you like a serious hop-breeding habit, it sounds like that to me too.

Shane Mills adds another layer of depth to the discipline of beer brewing in West Virginia. He will likely be the first West Virginia brewer to ever make a commercial beer with a hop that he bred himself. We look forward to him bringing new meaning to West Virginia beer.

Visiting the brewery

Cacapon Mountain Brewing is located on the north end of Berkeley Springs, WV. It is open daily, Thursdays through Mondays. You’ll normally find 10 house-brewed beers on draft. The taproom also has a small food menu of burgers, apps, and other food.

Cacapon Mountain Brewing
42 Williams Street
Berkeley Spring, WV
Email: info@cacaponbrewing.com
Brewery Facebook page link

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¹ From an article on BeerandBrewing.com, Oct. 18, 2021
All photos in this article are compliments of Shane Mills, Cacapon Mountain Brewing.