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Hop flowers ripen in the warm Yakima Valley air. Photo by Chris Anderson.

A lush pocket of Washington, the Yakima Valley is a really a back yard for our state. No fancy landscaping. It's our garden on the east side of the Cascades, filled with pear trees, cherries, mint, and acres of hop yards—strange and beautiful jungles of green where vines twine their way up trellises to wire canopies 18 feet above the ground.

The youngest son of a local farm family, Jason Perrault, 36, is walking us into a hop yard and explaining the challenges of growing hops nowadays, the issues of oversupply and low prices. It's early afternoon, and a dry August wind is blowing through the farm. Things around here don't start jumping until after sunset, says Jason. "Then the hops come off the vine better. The cones are less prone to shatter."

The fragile cones, which are made up of hop flowers, are almost lighter than air, but they are prized for their potency. Their acids are what influence the character of beer. Early in the brewing process, they preserve the beer and make it bitter. At the end, they provide the flavor and aroma.

As Jason walks into the yard, he reaches up and snaps off a few cones. He pulls one apart, crushing the gold-green bloom into his palm. Then he bends his head and inhales. He offers me one and I do the same. I can almost taste the beer it will make.

Jason Perrault '97 breathes in the aroma of drying hops at his family's farm near Toppenish in the Yakima Valley. Photo by Chris Anderson.

We climb into Jason's truck and speed across the landscape around the town of Toppenish, as Jason points out the now-empty fields where hops used to grow. In the past 20 years many of the valley's yards have disappeared, he explains. "Now there are only about 50 or 60 families left," he says, attributing the decline to overproduction in the late '90s and early 2000s. The number of farms may be dwindling, but this quiet valley produces about 75 percent of the hops grown in the United States. Much of it feeds the big industrial brewers as well as beer makers in Europe and Asia.

A fourth-generation heir to a hops-farming legacy, Jason started working in the hops vines at the age of five, when his father paid him 50 cents an hour to help wind twine for the trellises. A few years later he had his first real job, arching the vines, which meant training the shoots from one plant in two directions to form a Y as they reach upward, a miserable task, as the plants are covered with sharp hairs.

When he enrolled as an agricultural economics student at Washington State University, he knew he wanted to go back to the valley and farm with his family. But by the time he graduated in 1997, there wasn't enough work for him to join the family business full time. Instead, he returned to school to learn the science of hops breeding, earning a master's degree in crop science in 2001. Now he runs a breeding program for a group of hops farmers, including his family. "I'm kind of a step away from the farm," says Jason. "I want to do work that will not only impact us, but will benefit the whole industry. If the others go away, we're going to go away, too."

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Continued