Besides an opportunity to select hops for the coming year, a pilgrimage to the American Northwest for hop harvest has become a rite of passage for brewers. Of course, not every small brewery has the budget for the trip, and many individual brewers don’t have the time. Likewise, merchants would be overwhelmed if representatives from more than 9,000 breweries all showed up in September.
But that doesn’t mean that the 7,200-plus breweries that produced less than 2,000 barrels of beer in 2024 have to settle for leftovers. Together, those breweries made 2.9 million barrels of beer in 2024, and they likely used more than 6 million pounds of hops. Although that’s less than 10 percent of what farmers in the Northwest harvested in 2025, merchants continue to introduce new ways to accommodate smaller breweries.
For example, Hollingbery & Sons hosted events in Los Angeles and Minneapolis after harvest. “These events were open to anyone from a brewery and offer a hands-on experience to rub and smell a curated selection of hop varieties, similar to what you’d experience during harvest in Yakima,” says Juno Choi, Hollingbery marketing and account manager. “Attendees could select specific lots for their use.”
Other merchants have launched new programs—including lower minimums to qualify for selection—clearly intended to include opportunities for smaller breweries. To take advantage, the people in charge at those breweries may need to change their mindset.
Do the Homework
At the 2024 Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas, there was a presentation entitled, “Selecting Quality Hops: Alternative Methods for Small Breweries.” Delivering the blueprint were Aaron Justus, cofounder of East Village Brewing in San Diego, and Sam Pecoraro, brewmaster at Von Ebert in Portland, Oregon.
A few takeaways to consider when working with merchants:
- Understand and quantify what you need. “A lot of breweries don’t know how to make a projection,” Justus says. “All of a sudden, ‘I want that hop, and I want this hop,’ and they end up with 2,000, 3,000 pounds, and they are overwhelmed.”
- Choose the method of selection that suits your brewery. Most often, brewers think in terms of assessing raw (leaf) hops, probably with a merchant and in the Northwest. That’s what Von Ebert does. On the other hand, Justus at East Village selects based on finished goods at his San Diego brewery.
- Develop a system for selection. Learn the lexicon needed to describe the aromas you want and establish sensory profiles.
- Track data and build a database over time.
- Mitigate risk with diversity. Select from different varieties, crop years, growing regions, and suppliers. Tie beers to flavor profiles rather than specific varieties.
- Understand the supply chain and develop relationships with farmers and merchants.
Making Selection Accessible
Gabi McCarter, senior business development manager at Crosby Hops, says they prepared 1,880 leaf plugs for selection in 2025. They shipped most of those to breweries across North America, Britain, and the European Union.
Based in Woodburn, Oregon, the grower, processor, and merchant hosted 101 breweries for selection on-site, while it sent samples to 366 breweries that did remote selection. Once 2025 pellets became available, Crosby also scheduled 136 remote pellet selections.
“We’re focused on small to midsize brewers,” McCarter says.
Crosby recently introduced an Estate Grown contract tier for six varieties harvested at Crosby Farms: Amarillo, Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Comet, and Thora. “Three ways to brew” gives brewers a choice of three levels of contracting. Estate Grown includes access to Crosby-grown varieties with no minimums, free storage, maximum flexibility, and priority processing (shipping by October 31).
The Select level includes hops from Crosby and its grower network, no contract minimums, 1,100 pound minimum for leaf selection, “best effort” flexibility, and shipping by December 31. Finally, the Essentials level requires a contract minimum of 1,100 pounds and a leaf selection minimum of 4,400 pounds. Product must ship by March 31.
“We’ve worked hard to make hop selection more accessible for breweries of all sizes because quality hops and meaningful selection shouldn’t be limited by scale,” says Christine Clair, VP of sales and marketing. “Selection isn’t just about giving brewers control over their ingredients. It’s also a valuable opportunity to exchange information. It allows us to share updates on the growing season and new or experimental hops, and to hear directly from brewers about what they’re seeing in their beers and in the market.”
Crosby selections were up 215 percent in 2025. McCarter’s teams began shipping Centennial samples at the beginning of September. “Super-time-sensitive,” she says. “I have to keep it going, sending plugs out in waves.”
Most brewers selecting remotely received four lots from which to choose. For Centennial, they might all have been from Crosby. Because many brewers prefer Chinook grown in Yakima Valley’s Moxee region, their Chinook box would have included two lots from Crosby and two from Roy Farms.
“If you’re not doing something like this, then you’re not going to win the contract,” McCarter says.
Focusing on Sensory
Garry McShane, head brewer at Triple C Brewing in Charotte, North Carolina, is an advocate for making the trip to the Northwest for hop harvest.
“Any brewer who is passionate about their craft needs to do it,” he says. “If you can go every year, you should. Skip your Munich trip. For me, if you can’t get these hops, it totally will change your beer.”
Yet McShane, whose daughter wasn’t yet a year old when 2025 harvest finished, is perfectly happy he stayed in Charlotte to select the hops he’ll use in 2026. He selected Centennial, Citra, and Mosaic as part of the John I. Haas Next Gen Program. “It was a no-brainer,” he says. “Amazing. Everything came to us. It saves the brewery tons of money, and they treat you great.”
Next Gen selection requires a minimum commitment of only 220 pounds per variety, and brewers can choose from a range of different blended profiles. Those are a product of the Haas Sensory Plus program, which blends select lots to fit specific profiles. For instance, one Citra choice may present more citrus-forward than another that has more berry-currant-catty character.
At Triple C, selection worked like this: A box that “smelled incredible” arrived at the brewery containing four choices for each of the three varieties. For each variety, “each lot had the same alpha, the same oil,” McShane says. “That was really rad. You could just focus on the sensory.”
Triple C produced about 3,700 barrels in 2025, and McShane expects to brew about 4,000 in 2026. He has contracted for 10,120 pounds, and he anticipates they’ll purchase about 10 percent more during the year. Half of his contracts are with Haas, a quarter with Yakima Chief Hops, and the remainder with Segal Ranch, Crosby, BSG, Hollingbery, and Charles Faram.
Between the first week of September and October 10, Haas had about 150 total selection appointments—two-thirds of them on-site and the rest remote. Sixty percent of the remote selections were Next Gen. Some brewers requested several varieties, while others chose one or two.
“Personally, I’m bullish on Next Gen, as I think it represents a compelling opportunity for smaller brewers to dial in one of their core ingredients,” says Shana Solarte, marketing communications. “I’m hopeful that Next Gen continues to grow and make hop selection more accessible.”
Blasts from the Past
Most of the 2025 Strata crop is under contract, and Jim Solberg at Indie Hops estimates that brewers will use about twice as much Strata in 2026 as farmers harvested the previous year. That doesn’t mean there won’t be Strata available.
“We have a lot of people asking for 2022 [crop] right now,” he says.
To convince brewers to overcome the common bias against older crops, Indie is giving them the opportunity to make selections from inventory. “There’s a stigma among many brewers that says previous crops are bad quality,” Solberg says. “For many years, this was true because the only lots remaining 18 months after harvest tended to be less desirable lots. Everything else went into beer during the rapid growth of craft beer.”
“It’s a very different situation now, with some of the very best versions of a given hop variety being from previous crops,” he says. “And suppliers are willing to sell them for less.”
Indie has created one-ounce foils filled with Strata for brewers to sample. “Cut it open and smell the head space,” Solberg says. Brewers also can order a mixed 44-pound box with 11-pound foils from different lots.
Indie also commissioned Tom Shellhammer’s lab at Oregon State University to assess Strata from crop years 2022, 2023, and 2024. The lab found that when packaged oxygen remains low during storage, they observed no clear aging effects. The 2022 samples looked as good as 2024, in terms of oil and thiol composition.
“One interesting note is that the initial data on our study suggests that there is more year-to-year and field variation than there is age-related variation,” Solberg says.
Degrees of “Say So”
Few breweries select all the hops with which they brew. They choose the others, perhaps from the European continent or the Southern Hemisphere. They may still have a certain amount of what the Yakima Chief sales staff call “say so.”
During the 2025 harvest, about 58 percent of selections at Yakima Chief headquarters were what would be considered traditional, and 42 percent were Public Open Door selections. YCH initiated its Public Open Door program in 2022, lowering the threshold per variety to 220 pounds for brewers selecting Citra, Simcoe, or Mosaic.
Customers whose contracts don’t include the opportunity for selection in Yakima still have “say so.” For instance, radar charts, survivables data, and sensory data for finished goods allow YCH to make courtesy allocations based on customer “say so.”
“We have as much data as you want,” says Spencer Tielkemeier, VP of sales. The same service is available for spot orders.
Like Justus and Pecoraro, Tielkeimeier points to the importance of customers establishing the attributes they seek. “What brewers struggle with is having a lexicon to describe what they want,” he says.
During the CBC presentation, Pecoraro told a story about how what one brewery prefers from a particular hop variety might be completely different from what another brewery is targeting. “This is a good example: I asked our friends down at Ghost Town to give me their target sensory profile for a hop, and it was blackberry, blueberry, armpit,” he says. “At Von Ebert, for the exact same hop, we use blueberry, raspberry, resin.”
Resin or armpit? Selection in the Northwest or at the brewery? Raw hops or pellets?
“Brewers have more selection options than ever before,” says McCarter at Crosby, “so they can work with their various merchants to see who has a program that best fits their needs.”