Joseph is doing his part. An avid homebrewer, he decided to try growing hops on a two-acre plot of land owned by his father-in-law in Oconomowoc in 2009. But Joseph and his wife wanted land of their own, so in 2013 they purchased a farm south of Belleville to expand hop production. Joseph now has more than 5,000 hop plants in the ground at his farm, The Hop Garden. He’s even started brewing in collaboration with Madison’s House of Brews.

Hops serve as both a flavoring agent and preservative in beer. But while we may think of hops as an essential brewing ingredient, hops are a relatively new addition to the brewmaster’s toolkit. Pliny the Elder was the first to mention hops in his Naturalis Historia, first published between 77 and 79 CE. Even then, Pliny was only interested in the botanical history of this wild plant rather than its alcoholic promise. Ancient Romans ate young hop shoots in the spring like we enjoy asparagus. Hops also found widespread medicinal use as a treatment for anxiety and insomnia; people often slept on hop-filled pillows to combat sleeplessness.

Hops don’t appear in the record in relation to beer until 822 CE when French Benedictine Abbot Adalhard of Corbie included specific instructions for the use of wild hops for brewing in his abbey rulebook. Still, hopped beers took several more centuries to become common. Hops gained popularity in brewing for the balance they bring to beer. The plant contains acids and oils with bitter flavors that contrast with the sweetness of the malt. Brewers can adjust the ratio of sweet maltiness to bitterness as they brew by using different types of hops and modifying when they are added and how long they are boiled. Hops also add floral, herbal, and citrusy aromas. But flavor was only one reason hops became more widely used.

Many of the same elements that give hops their distinctive flavor also act as a preservative, allowing beer to stay fresh longer and travel farther. Legend has it that hops gave birth to the India Pale Ale in the 18th century as British brewers added hops to their barrels of strong ale to preserve it over the months-long sea voyage to India. While the truth of the story is debateable, the preservative effects of hops are not. Unhopped ales arrived from long voyages stale and skunked, but hopped beers tasted fresh and refreshingly bitter.

Growing hops is labor intensive. Everything must be done by hand. Hops start out as rhizomes about the size of a finger and take two to three years to reach maturity. Often referred to as a vine, hops are actually a bine that uses a strong stem and stiff hairs rather than tendrils and suckers to attach and climb upward. Growers must train the hops to climb the supports. During the peak growing season, hop plants can grow twenty inches per week, towering 20 feet in the air on poles and wires by harvest time in mid-August to mid-September. When ready, the hops must be harvested right away so many hands are needed. There are no mechanized hop harvesters. Its flower of the female plant ends up in the brew kettle, and being flowers, hops are delicate and require care. The plants then die back to the cold hardy rhizome in the fall.

“Hops take care of themselves once they are established but it’s still a lot of hard work from spring to fall, which can turn off a lot of beginning growers,” explains Joseph.

The growth of the beer industry in Milwaukee was directly related to the city’s large German immigrant population. German consumers demanded lager, a German-style barley and hop brew fermented and aged at low temperatures, which greatly expanded the city’s beer industry and provided for a large and thirsty customer base. Many of these German immigrants were experienced brewers, too, saving owners both time and money in getting started. The expansion of breweries, not just in Milwaukee but all over Wisconsin fueled a boom in beer’s raw materials and supported the growth of subsidiary industries like coopering, ice harvesting, saloon furnishings, and brewing equipment. By the 1890s, malting and brewing were Wisconsin’s third largest industries.

Commercially-produced hops were first introduced into Waukesha County around 1837. James Weaver brought hops with him from New York to Sussex. The first brewery didn’t open in Milwaukee until 1840 so Weaver likely made hopped beer at home. By 1860, Weaver had started a hop growing business with his sons in Lisbon known as Weaver and Bros., Brokers in Fancy Hops. Demand for hops made the family rich.

Weaver’s timing was right. Blight devastated the crop in New York and created a kind of gold rush for hop farming in Wisconsin. As hop prices spiked in the 1860s, westward-moving settlers and Civil War veterans converged on the state looking for opportunities. A hop craze ensued. Hops need to be dried for brewing, so two-story hop drying towers popped up all over southern Wisconsin. The Weavers owned five of the six hop drying towers in Lisbon. The boom was centered in Sauk County, where, at the height of the hop craze, in 1867, the county’s six thousand acres produced nearly half of the state’s more than 6 million pounds of hops.

At harvest time, hop pickers were in great demand. Young women came from all parts of the state to pull cones from the bines while others abandoned their families for the excitement of the hop yard. Nighttime entertainment frequently included dancing, socials that came to be known as hops.

Boom quickly gave way to bust. Mildew and then aphids decimated the crop, just as they had in New York, while production out West caused prices to drop. Many farmers had plowed under their hop yards by 1870. By the early 20th century, Washington led the nation in commercial hops, a title the state still holds.

Ironically, it was blight that helped to resuscitate Wisconsin-grown hops. Skyrocketing hop prices after drought and storm damage in Europe and a major warehouse fire in Washington state brought a wave of interest in local hop production in 2008. The crisis gave birth to the Wisconsin Hop Exchange, a cooperative working to bring a commercial hop industry back to Wisconsin, as well as Gorst Valley Hops in Mazomanie.

“It’s so much easier to work with hops now,” says Grant Pauly, brewmaster at 3 Sheeps Brewing in Sheboygan, of these new hop organizations. “Because hops take time to establish, farmers make no money for a few years, so that makes it really hard for an industry to restart. Wisconsin needed companies like this to organize the raising and processing of hops locally.”

A hop yard has also taken root at the Fondy Farm in Milwaukee where the predominately Hmong growers are learning this new crop.