BALTIMORE — Maryland is widely recognized for its blue crabs and Old Bay seasoning, but if research into a local plant yields promising results, the state could become known for its spin on another classic: beer.
The University of Maryland Extension, with help from farm brewers in the state, is testing whether a native Maryland hop plant discovered on a Frederick County farm can be grown at commercial scale. If successful, the project could be a game changer for Maryland craft brewers and other breweries up and down the East Coast, industry experts say.
“We want this whole thing to grow,” said Bryan Butler, who is spearheading the research as director for the University of Maryland Extension in Carroll County. “My dream is that there will be a beer that people refer to, one day, as ‘the’ Maryland beer.”
Hops, the cone-shaped flowers that give beer its flavor, have long been a challenge to grow in Maryland’s hot, humid climate. The plant fares much better in the Pacific Northwest, where temperatures are milder and where a majority of the country’s commercial hops are harvested.
The state’s native hop, however, is an outlier: It thrives in Maryland’s heat and is more tolerant of regional pests and diseases. Exactly how old the hop is or where it came from remains a mystery, but Butler said it’s clear the plant has evolved to withstand the region’s harsher conditions.
“One hundred years ago, there might have been 100 [hop] plants here in Maryland,” Butler said. “Ninety-nine died and that one lived. Through this project, we’re taking advantage of natural selection.”
The discovery of the Maryland hop, now named Monocacy, came through something of a stroke of serendipity. The hop was growing at Dr. Raymond Ediger’s farm in Utica — a tiny village just north of Frederick — when he moved there in the 1970s. Another landowner might have considered the fast-growing plant nothing more than an irritating weed, but Ediger, a native of the Pacific Northwest, knew better. As a boy growing up in Oregon, he worked summer gigs picking hops for farmers, and could tell that he was dealing with a similar plant.
The hop grew for decades, resisting containment efforts. By the time Ediger, a retired veterinarian, invited some farmer friends onto his property to take a look at the plant in 2013, it had already overtaken a chicken coop and a fence.
One of the people Ediger invited to his farm was Tom Barse, the owner of Milkhouse Brewery at Stillpoint Farm in Mount Airy. Barse was already something of a local expert on hops, growing his own to use in beer and serving as president of the Northeast Hop Alliance’s Mid-Atlantic chapter.
He was “flabbergasted” by the size of Ediger’s hop plant, and took some cuttings for propagation. He assumed it was a cluster hop, one of the oldest and most common hop varieties in the U.S. that was widely cultivated by Maryland farmers in the 19th century to make beer.
“I thought it was nothing special, other than it was cool that it was growing in this guy’s yard for who knows how long,” Barse said.
That all changed a few years later when he told Butler about the “monster” hop. As part of his work with the agriculture extension, Butler was growing different varieties of hop plants at the Western Maryland Research & Education Center in Washington County’s Keedysville, and he took some clippings from Ediger’s farm to add to the hop yard.
He didn’t know it then, but it would be the start of a promising new project. Over several years, Butler’s work had experienced some disappointing setbacks: In 2020, a storm destroyed a year’s worth of hops — and research — in the span of 10 minutes, and a hop plant that he thought might have been native to the state turned out to be a variety that is already in common use.
But after he sent some samples of Ediger’s hop for genetic testing at the National Clonal Germplasm Repository, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s gene bank of plant species in Corvallis, Oregon, Butler received some exciting news: The plant was a North American wild hop.
“It is completely unique, it’s completely different, there’s nothing like it,” a USDA researcher told Butler by phone.
Inspired by the discovery, Butler decided to look for ways to learn more about the hop plant, which he and his team named as a nod to its origins: the Monocacy River watershed incorporates both Frederick and Carroll counties.
He approached Grow & Fortify, an organization that supports agricultural businesses, and the group helped secure a two-year grant for more research at the Keedysville farm. The grant funds come from the USDA and are administered by the Maryland Department of Agriculture.
Butler’s team planted half the Monocacy crop in the fall of 2021 and the other half in the spring of 2022 — a slightly unorthodox approach to hops planting, which typically happens only in the spring. But the experiment worked, with both crops taking root and producing hops. The team learned that the plant is a late-ripening one, with a September harvest rather than an August harvest like other nonnative hops grown in the state.
That’s the kind of information Butler is interested in collecting through his research. The Monocacy hop flourished on Ediger’s farm and in Keedysville, but it remains to be seen whether it can be a reliable crop suitable for commercial growing.
Researchers want to know whether the plant’s disease tolerance holds up through repeated harvests, whether the hops will retain the same qualities over time or whether they will change.
“You’re putting it in a growth habit it’s never had before, then you’re pushing it to try to make these yields, and we’re trying to manipulate the plant so we can get it through the harvester,” Butler said.
He’s hoping to collect three to five years of data and field work on the Monocacy hop before making any firm conclusions about its commercial viability.
The taste of the hop is also key. It doesn’t impart a very bitter flavor like many U.S. hops. Barse likened it to old-fashioned European noble hops used in Pilseners and German-style lagers. That’s why he and his team at Milkhouse Brewery used the latest harvest of Monocacy hops to brew three beers: two lagers and a pale ale. An analysis of the hop’s oil and acidity content helped determine that it would be more suitable for light beers like lagers, sours and Belgian-style ales rather than heavier ones such as stouts, porters and IPAs, Barse said.
Earlier this month, brewers, beer fans and local officials gathered at the Mount Airy brewery to celebrate the release of the new beers. The response generated interest among other local breweries, Butler said.
“Every brewer that was here … wanted to know how and where can we get this hop?” he said.
They’ll have to wait a little while longer. Hops from a second year of production at the Keedysville farm already are committed to Halethorpe-based Heavy Seas Beer. But if the harvest is large enough, “we’re going to try to share the wealth with some other brewers,” Butler said.
He wants to scale up slowly and methodically, partnering with local nurseries on propagation and breweries for processing. Researchers wanted to offer the first harvest to a small brewery like Milkhouse and then move on to a larger brewery that would have more demand.
“We want to grow our base, but grow in a controlled way,” Butler said. “You never want to direct people into something that could have too much risk associated with it. So with this project … we’re trying to reduce the risk by learning as much as we can, and making those mistakes in advance.”
If all goes well, the outcome could be a boon for Maryland brewers and growers. The Monocacy hop also could be well-suited for harvesting in other East Coast states, from New York to North Carolina.
Jim Bauckman, the communications director for the Brewers Association of Maryland, said a native hop would give Maryland farm breweries, which already must use at least one farm-grown element in their beer recipe, a key locally grown ingredient.
“That gives the brewers who use it some interesting marketability and also a competitive advantage when it comes to access to the hop,” he said.
Butler and Barse hope to find more funds to keep research going once their current two-year grant runs out this November.
“We want this whole thing to grow. We want to support Maryland agriculture as a whole,” Butler said. “It’s such a unique opportunity. … People go their whole careers, their whole lives, and they never have something like this pop up.”
