Hop Notes 11: 2023 USDA Hop Report.
Expert analysis to help you make better hop decisions.
Reviewing the annual 2023 USDA National Hop Report.
Edited 1/11/24 for accuracy about the companies who control the most acreage.
The 2023 USDA National Hop Report is out (linked here). Here are 3+ highlights
1. Acreage Cuts Make Their Impact.
With the official numbers in, the 2023 acreage cuts can be more fully analyzed. Overall acreage was down 10% from 2022. Production was up 2%. It was a better growing season and alpha acres, which increased, tend to yield more per acre.
I had my concerns that the cuts would not be metered out in an equitable way. And they were not. Oregon growers were hit the hardest, losing 11% of private acres compared to last year. Idaho growers lost 8%. Washington growers lost just 3%. And just to be fair, I removed Strata™️ acres from this calculation, Strata™️ is a primarily OR-grown variety with it’s own market dynamics. The numbers above most accurately capture the changes in allotted acreage controlled by the dominant private player HBC.
The USDA report does not cover specific farm-by-farm numbers. Anecdotally, speaking with farmers across the PNW, it is clear that smaller, newer, and non-owner growers faced the bulk of these cuts.
More cuts are coming next year. I have already heard from farmers that HBC varieties (led by Citra®️ & Mosaic®️) contracts are being cut again. Again, I expect these cuts will be primarily forced on non-Washington, non-owner growers, smaller and newer growers.
2. The Endangered Hops list.
I’ll expand on this idea in another Hop Notes issue someday - but here are hops that have lost enough acres in recent acreage reports to be on my Endangered Hops list:
Cashmere: down to 349 acres from 857 last year, a loss of 508 acres, a dramatic 60% drop off after a number of years of relative stability.
Comet: down to 437 from a high of 532 in 2021, a loss of 95 acres, 17% loss.
Sabro™️: lost 345 of it’s total 548 acres in last year’s acreage cuts, a 62% loss.
Talus™️: debuted at 426 acres on the 2022 report, and it dropped to 147 acres for 2023, a 65% loss.
(Side comment: the impact of the failure of Talus™️ to launch may be seen in the delay or hesitancy for HBC to name HBC-586.)
Triumph: debuted on the crop report with 72 reported acres in 2021, it dropped to 55 acres in 2022, and in this year’s report it fell below the threshold for reporting. USDA does not report numbers of acres if they could identify a specific farm, this means Triumph is on life-support. Probably being grown at just one or two farms on any meaningful acreage.
3. Control of the US hop crop remains predominantly private.
Total privately controlled acres decreased slightly from 64.1% in 2022 to 62.1% in 2023. Total acres planted in public varieties increased slightly from 35.8% in 2022 to 37.83% in 2023.
This incredibly small fluctuation of ~2% of overall acres is a result of the Citra®️ and Mosaic®️ acreage cuts due to over supply and the response by US farmers to shift those cut acres into alpha acreage, most of that new alpha acreage went into CTZ, which is classified as public.
When looking at acreage ownership it’s important to look more closely at the aroma portion of the market. The alpha market is it’s own beast that balances on a global scale and is a heavily commodified market market - ie: it doesn’t really represent brewer's preferences in the same way the much more subjective and specialized aroma market does.
Private-public split in the aroma market looks quite a bit different. From the 2023 report I mark ~37,000 acres of aroma hops, 11,300 in public, 25,800 in private for a 69/31% private-public split in the aroma market. When we remove the influence of the alpha market we see the market is even more slanted towards private acres.
Acres controlled by the Haas and Yakima Chief Hops networks of companies (including HBC, YCR, WCHB), made up 47.12% of total US acreage. At 25,596 acres of control their control is greater than all other private variety acreage (8,174 other private acres) and greater than all public variety acreage (20,548 public acres).
More hop content:
Toronto, anyone?: I’ll be in Toronto next month at the Ontario Master Brewers Technical conference, talking about experimental public hops! Learn more here. I am very excited for the conference but I don’t think anyone will be tracking my flight.
Get to know (a young) Dr. Henning: Obviously I’m obsessed with the In Hop Pursuit archives. Here’s an excellent interview by writer Roger Worthington with USDA hop geneticist, Dr. John Henning.
Hop Water: it’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. Will this non-alc hoppy sipper category be a boon to shaky US hop market? No, probably not. But, maybe?
Thanks for reading Hop Notes 11. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please consider subscribing or forwarding it to a friend.
That’s all for now. If you have topics you’d like to read about in Hop Notes my inbox is open 24/7: ericsannerud@gmail.com.