Hops to it

Evan Price is the president and owner of FiddleHop Farms. Fiddleheads are currently grown on the farm, located near Truro. Hops are being added next year. (Danny Abriel Photo)

A Dalhousie student entrepreneur is harvesting opportunities from two specialty crops.

Evan Price, a fourth-year co-op student majoring in finance, has inked a five-year contract with Garrison Brewing Co. to supply the microbrewery with organically grown hops. He’ll grow the hops on a 10-acre plot of land along the Folly River near Glenholme, about a 20-minute drive from his hometown of Truro.

The field is now being prepped for planting in the spring. Like grapes, hop plants are climbing vines that grow on trellises. And like grapes, the hops—actually the female flower clusters of hop plants—capture local flavours, reflecting the climate, soil and geography of where they're grown.

'100-mile diet'

And, in this the age of the 100-mile diet—and the 100-mile brew—Mr. Price notes his FiddleHop Farm is located exactly 70.8 miles from beer connoisseurs in Halifax.

The farming venture is a direct result of a co-op work term in which he was challenged to operate his own business and figure out how to move it forward. At the time, he was already leasing the land to grow fiddleheads—that’s the ‘fiddle’ part of FiddleHop Farm—to supply the local gourmet market. Last fall, more than 12,000 crowns were added to the 6,000 plants already thriving along the riverbank.

The season for fiddleheads is short, just five to eight weeks in the spring. So the question was, what could he do with the remaining growing season and the remaining acreage?

“We looked at corn, soy and hops,” says Mr. Price, 26, discovering corn was a “losing proposition” and soy was tough to grow organically—an important consideration. But hops, now that was interesting.

Hops revival

Hops grown at Ross Farm Museum went into Garrison Breweries' 3 Fields Harvest Ale. (Matthew Gates Photo)

There’s a kind of hops revival underway among a new generation of small farmers in Canada, spurred on by the international hops shortage of a few years ago. The shortage was brought on by a blight affecting major hops-growing countries such as the Czech Republic and Britain and unstable weather conditions in the United States.

Garrison Breweries in Halifax, meanwhile, was actively looking to ramp up production of its 3 Fields Harvest Ale, a “wet” hopped beer featuring hops from local producers. “Wet” means the hops are harvested and shipped to the brewery on the same day.

“No one’s really taken the initiative to develop a local hops industry,” says Jason Pelley, a Dal grad (2006) who majored in biology. He's the director of research for Fiddlehop Farm. Mr. Price and Mr. Pelley are friends and former roommates who’ve discovered a shared love for farming.

“The worst day can be completely fixed just by taking a walk around the property and digging in the dirt,” says Mr. Price. “We’ve enjoyed that part the most.”