"Hoptopia argues that the current revolution in craft beer is the product of a complex global history that converged in the hop fields of Oregon's Willamette Valley. What spawned from an ideal environment and the ability of regional farmers to grow the crop rapidly transformed into something far greater because Oregon farmers depended on the importation of rootstock, knowledge, technology, and goods not only from Europe and the Eastern United States but also from Asia, Latin America, and Australasia. They also relied upon a seasonal labor supply of people from all of these areas as a supplement to local Euroamerican and indigenous communities to harvest their crops. In turn, Oregon hop farmers reciprocated in exchanges of plants and ideas with growers and scientists around the world, and, of course, sent their cured hops into the global marketplace. These global exchanges occurred not only during Oregon's golden era of hop growing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but through to the present in the midst of the craft beer revival. The title of this book, Hoptopia, is a nod to Portland's title of Beervana and the Willamette Valley's claim as an agricultural Eden from the mid-nineteenth century onward. But the story is fundamentally about how seemingly niche agricultural regions do not exist and have never existed independently of the flow of people, ideas, goods, and biology from other parts of the world. To define Hoptopia is to define the Willamette Valley's hop and beer industries as the culmination of all of this local and global history. With the hop itself as a central character, this book aims to connect twenty-first century consumers to agricultural lands and histories that have been forgotten in an era of industrial food production"--Provided by publisher.

Excerpt from Hop Culture in the United States: Being a Practical Treatise on Hop Growing in Washington Territory, From the Cutting to the Bale The writer first engaged in the business two years later, planting a couple of acres, and raised the first year a few hundred pounds; The yard has gradually been enlarged, until his crop-yield of 1882, was more than seventy-one tons, giving the Puyallup valley the banner crop, as to quantity, of any in the United States, and as claimed by some, in the world. A short description of the soil, climate, resources and location of this now famous region, will doubtless be interesting to non resident readers. It is a region underlaid with coal, and is to the Pacific coast, what Pennsylvania is to the Atlantic seaboard. Words cannot convey an adequate idea of the immensity of the timber supply or of its value. Lime and iron are found in abundant quantities and in convenient localities. Fish abound in the waters of Puget sound and the numerous rivers emptying into it. Game is abundant and affords rare sport for the hunters; coupled with. This is the equable climate, never excessively cold in winter, or hot in summer and always healthful. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.