I’m standing next to the Rio Grande river in northern New Mexico, about an hour’s drive north of the state capital, Santa Fe. In this part of the state, it’s not difficult to see why New Mexico is nicknamed “The Land of Enchantment.” The water is beautiful and clear. Cottonwood trees cast shade over the bank, their branches swaying softly in the gentle breeze. It’s late morning, the sky is almost cloudless, and it’s already 28°C.

The Santa Fe Brewing hop farm is located on land that was previously a tree farm and is easy to miss from the main road. Brian Lock, our guide, pulls up in a Kawasaki Mule. We climb aboard for a short but noisy and bumpy ride. Brian took the helm of Santa Fe Brewing in 1995 after moving to the southwest from Portland, Oregon. He intended to open a brewpub, he tells us, but once he heard that the owner of Santa Fe Brewing wanted to sell, he was swayed. At the time, there were only two craft breweries in the state, and Santa Fe Brewing became the first brewery in New Mexico to can their beer in 2010. Nowadays, the state has a vibrant and growing craft beer scene.

“Competition is always good,” Brian says. “It increases the quality of beer across the board. I’ve always seen it as a positive.”

We step out of the utility vehicle, and I can feel the skin on the back of my neck prickling from the heat. As we walk through the rows of hop bines, Brian explains that his decision to grow hops alongside running a brewery was more about finding a new hobby than a business decision. “There was a personal reason for looking at the property too; my enjoyment of being on the river.”

The hop farm is still young. There are four different varieties of neomexicanus (a genetically distinct hop subspecies of Humulus lupulus) growing here: Amalia, Latir, Medusa, and Neo1. Brian explains that neomexicanus hop plants tend to have a much higher flower to leaf ratio than traditional northwest varieties. The leaves are also rather different in appearance; the blades pointed and slender, reminiscent of a cannabis plant (this is no coincidence, given that hops and cannabis are related).

““If I had Chinook or Cascade and had the same situation where I lost water, they would probably die””

— Brian Lock, Santa Fe Brewing Co.

Brian first planted hops in 2014 and 2015. He’s currently only using one of the eight acres that he has available, and as a result, the yields to date have been modest. The volume isn’t enough to do large scale brewing with neomexicanus alone right now, he says, explaining that Santa Fe Brewing has primarily used the hops for dry hopping, steeping them in the serving tank right before carbonation and packaging. He would like to get to the point of harvesting two thousand pounds to produce a hop extract that can be used in small doses year-round.

The hops on Brian’s farm are fed by flood irrigation a couple of times per week, using water straight from the Rio Grande river. “This year was a bit of a challenge for me” he admits. Brian explains that his water pump broke down in early May until the middle of June, and since he was focused on other projects at the brewery, he didn’t notice the issue for some time, and the hop plants received no water for around five weeks. As a result, he says, the bines aren’t as high or as dense with flowers as they have been in previous years.

I’m stunned by this revelation. The hop bines I’m looking at—while not at their most majestic—are very much viable and alive. It seems like a miracle. For other varieties, surely such water deprivation would leave nothing but a shrivelled brown mess? “If I had Chinook or Cascade and had the same situation where I lost water, they would probably die” Brian agrees. As we climb back into the Mule, I’m bristling with excitement for what I’ve just seen; hops deprived of water for many weeks that are alive and well. As we fight climate change whilst trying to make fantastic beer available to everyone regardless of geography, these hop varieties could be a game-changer.

Our next stop is a quarter-mile south, back along the main road. We’re visiting Todd Bates, who Brian refers to as ‘the godfather of neomexicanus’. Todd found and bred the neomexicanus hops which grow in northern New Mexico to create the hop varieties that farmers like Brian are growing today. His house is along a dirt track just off the main road. A cute dog greets us in the driveway, while the front yard is full of plant pots, each one seemingly a project with a story. Todd asks if we’d like iced tea or a beer. I check my watch and confirm that it is now past noon before gratefully accepting the latter.

He wastes no time in telling us what he most loves about neomexicanus hops: their fantastic flavour. “It’s clean. You can do a massively loaded beer. I want a beer that has a great flavour and not a lot of alcohol. It’s the flavour I want, not the buzz. I’ve had enough buzz in my life.” Todd moved to New Mexico in 1991 from Ohio, “ broke as hell with no job” he says. He found work running a guest ranch and began to find wild hops during his mountain hikes. “When I started, there was no one really doing any of this, no one cared.”

The hop breeding process involves taking male and female plants and growing the seeds. Todd explains that he was fortunate to find his male plant. “I lucked out. I found a spot where there was a wild population of female [hop plants] that always made great beer, like everything that’s there, all fruity as hell. There was one male in the whole area. I thought ‘that’s my stud’. So once I finally found a stud, that’s what kind of inspired me to try and do it.”

““They’re productive. They love the world. They’re getting yield, they’re getting flavour.””

— Todd Bates, the Godfather of Neomexicanus

Todd lovingly refers to the new hop varieties he has created as his “children.” In addition to working with local brewery owners like Brian of Santa Fe Brewing, Todd has sold hop varieties to CLS Farms, a family farm located in the Yakima Valley in the Pacific Northwest. He reveals that the first time that he sold rhizomes, it was to a local monastery. “I wanted to get a cheque from the Catholic church”, he jokes. Todd explains the difference between ‘feral’ and ‘wild’ when it comes to hops, and why the terminology led to some confusion once he began approaching farms. “In the hop world, ‘wild’ was a toxic word,” he says. He explains that to the major hop farms, the word ‘wild’ is used to describe a seed that has escaped in the controlled environment of a hop farm.

Todd gestures to the breeding buckets in the yard, just like those in which he developed the Zappa hop, which was singled out by Tom Nielson—research and development manager at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.—and brought into production by CLS Farms. He explains that the name came about after a ‘2’ was misread as a ‘Z’, and we get momentarily side-tracked discussing our favourite Frank Zappa songs. People have described the flavour of the Zappa hop as “purple,” he says, which appeals to my synesthetic tendencies. Todd used five-gallon buckets in a greenhouse, growing two or three hundred plants at a time.

“I had two years where nothing was better than the parent,” he says. “Once I got to that Zappa breeding group, I had, like, fifteen winners. They’re productive. They love the world. They’re getting yield, they’re getting flavour.” Choosing which plants to gamble on was the hard part, Todd explains, especially when many in a breeding group could work. “Every seed is a unique individual when it comes to hops. It’s not like grass.”

Todd goes on to talk about the importance of terroir for hop plants by way of an example. He tells us about a plant that he developed which had a light lemon and English tea character when grown on his farm, but which gained powerful strawberry notes when grown less than a mile away on Brian’s farm. “Terroir doesn’t even have to mean a different part of the damn country or world, it can be my farm/your farm. And terroir is very, very real.”

Among Todd’s hop varieties is Amalia, which is woody and earthy with a strong accent of orange. He says that it works especially well in a brown ale. There’s also the multi-headed plant (with doublet cones,) now branded Medusa. “The doublet gene jumps around. If it lands on the flowering part, you get all these cones on a strig [where the hop connects to the bine of the plant].”

In some cases, the bines of the neomexicanus varieties have grown almost twice as thick as is typical, Todd says. “Like a grapevine, in one year.” He explains that the centre of the strig of a hop plant might normally be around the diameter of a pencil lead, whereas Zappa was like a whole pencil. “I was looking for mutant freaks, and I found them,” Todd says, wistfully as though remembering a pleasant memory. “I bred the freaks on purpose.”