The Hop Grower’s Handbook

Laura Ten Eyck owns and operates Helderberg Hop Farm and Indian Ladder Farmstead Brewery and Cidery with her husband, Dietrich Gehring. The two have been growing hops and brewing beer at home for more than twenty-five years and have been working to restore local hop production in the northeast. Helderberg Hop Farm is located on 60 acres of Indian Ladder Farms, an extensive pick-your-own orchard with a local foods grocery, bakery, café, and retail gift shop in upstate New York that Ten Eyck previously managed. The orchard has been in Ten Eyck's family for four generations, and she and Gehring have lived there for more than twenty-five years, growing fruits and vegetables for sale to restaurants, gardening extensively, and raising sheep for meat and wool, dairy goats for milk, and chickens for eggs and meat. Ten Eyck is also senior manager of New York Outreach and Projects at American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit where she advocates for national and regional farmland conservation, and was previously a freelance journalist.

A complete guide to small scale hop production, now in demand for craft beer brewing.