NEW SCOTLAND — Laura Ten Eyck and her husband, Dietrich Gehring, have taken their fascination with growing hops and turned it into a book; Chelsea Green Publishing is accepting pre-orders for Ten Eyck and Gehring’s “The Hop Grower's Handbook: The Essential Guide for Sustainable, Small-Scale Production for Home and Market,” due out this fall.

“We were approached by Chelsea Green to write the book,” Gehring told The Enterprise. “They found us on social media.”

A century ago, hops was a big market in New York State, but disease destroyed both crops and sales, and the market moved to the Pacific Northwest on a smaller scale.

Gehring, a beer hobbiest, started a small hops crop that grew to 60 acres at Indian Ladder Farms.

“It’s a beautiful plant,” he said. “You kind of get the hop bug. It’s an incredible plant. You can hear them growing. They’ll grow six to eight inches a day.”

Travelers along Altamont Road can see the climbing vines across the road from the farm’s apple trees.

The hop flowers sway in the wind — “It’s pretty cool,” Gehring said.

While there are several current books on the market about the revived hops industry and how hobbyists can grow their own hops and make their own beers, a majority of the materials address growing conditions in the Northwest.

Gehring said that Ten Eyck did the bulk of the writing, while the majority of the photography in the book is his.

Research for the book helped them on their farm, he said.

“There wasn’t a lot of information readily available,” Gehring said. “Cornell University had good information. The University of Vermont had good information. It can be difficult to find and put together.”

Some information they found was not pertinent, while other information was lacking, he said; books about hops in the Pacific Northwest did not address what to do about Japanese beetles.

“They don’t have them,” Gehring said.

“What the book does is put all of that in one place. We’re hoping that will be helpful to others,” he said. “They can sort of use the book as a resource.”

Hops uses

“I’m kind of an Indian Pale Ale-style of beer guy,” Gehring said. Ten Eyck and Gehring provide barley and hops to a brewery in Brooklyn, which enables them to both sell and use their own crop.

This year, Gehring is hoping to open a small brewery at Indian Ladder Farms.

“We are going to keep 75 percent of our crop this year,” he said.

The first harvest allows enthusiasts a “wet hop” beer, which is a specialty seasonal beer used with fresh hops. Most uses are from dried hops, Gehring said.

“Hops need to be stabilized for storage,” he said.

The moisture content of hops can drop from 20 percent to 10 percent within an 18-hour period, he said. The resin-like lupaline flavoring becomes stabilized in the hop, allowing the resin to lend bittering and aroma to the beer, Gehring said.

Northeast precautions

Once Ten Eyck and Gehring’s crop grew beyond 250 plants, the couple worried about downy mildew affecting the hops.

“It’s what wiped out hops the last time in New York,” he said of the plague a century ago. “That has to be kept in check. It’s best to be ahead of the game, rather than use a Band-Aid later.”

If you see it the second year, then by the third year, “it’s established in your yard,” Gehring said. “It’s attacking your hops.”

Both downy mildew and powdery mildew are fungal diseases, he said. Gehrig and Ten Eyck use no insecticides, but do use fungicides on their crop, he said.

“We only spray insecticides as a last resort — they’re indiscriminate — they kill other crops,” he said.

Gehring explained a farmer’s reasoning on insecticide use:

“Is your damage that bad? Can you weather the storm?”

If a farmer removes one pest with insecticide, another bug population may explode because a predator insect was removed from the area, he said.

“Spraying in the hop yard…is the hardest thing you’ll have to do,” Gehring said. “It’s heavy management. Sometimes your plants look terrible. You just have to let them go.”

Some fungicides are OK for use in New York, but may not be available, he said. As the hops crop and related industries grow, regulations and availability may become easier, Gehring said.

“Most people want to use the organic spray, if possible,” he said. “Downy [mildew] can mutate and get adjusted. You have to rotate different fungicide brands or you’d encourage the fungus to mutate and get use to that.”

Hops school

Gehring and Ten Eyck led a talk and a tour of their farm this month, and they also offer hops school to local beer distributors’ sales teams, Gehring said, to teach them the “ground-up” approach to beer making.

“They wanted their reps to know where the beer comes from,” he said.

The sales members are given seeds, which grow into seedlings on the farm. The reps visit and watch their crops grow.

“They get to make a beer from their crop,” Gehring said.

As educators and as farmers, Gehring and Ten Eyck expect their book to have a wide appeal to hops and craft beer enthusiasts, he said.

“It gives people an idea of how we do it,” he said. “The way Laurie has written the book… it’s kind of funny, at times, the things we’ve done to create beer.”