(Petaluma, CA) – Lagunitas Brewing‘s Tony Magee has been tweeting up a storm this morning…

 

After that tweet, I sent Magee an email to get more context on what happened four years ago. Here is the story in Magee’s words…

When the fake shortage started, one hop farmer (John Segal- His father planted the very first Cascade Hops!) was in a pub near his home in upstate NY and the brewer showed him a price list from Hop Union. The Willamette Hops that John Segal had just sold Ralph Olsen for a low contract price were listed there at $18/lb. John was furious and the next morning he called his one long-time craft brew customer- Anchor Brewing- (35 years a long-time customer! In fact, Fritz performed the eulogy at John’s father’s funeral) and spoke to Mark Carpenter there asking if there was another craft brewer that he would recommend a direct buying relationship with. Mark told him to call Lagunitas, which John did.

John is a cool renegade guy and I dug talking with him- he told me that he still had $250,000 worth of Willamette unsold and on the spot I agreed to buy them- even though I didn’t have either the money or the need- but I found the money right away because I thought that offer might never come again and I wanted to be John’s new customer right then and there. Since I didn’t have the need (it was right after we had set up all our contracts) I had the Willamette made into extract so that it would remain fresh to use for a few years.

Within the next couple of weeks we made arrangements to buy even more from him and also set up future contracts to buy even more as we worked our way out of the usurious pricing imposed on us be a couple of dealers. John Segal’s farm (+-400 acres in Grandville WA in the Yakima Valley) doesn’t grow all of the varieties that we need so I asked John if he would, as a trusted member of the growing community in Yakima, make some introductions for us, which he did. John also asked me about some other brewers who would be good for him to work with.

I suggested a few brewers names and contact info and those same brewers later formed something they called the ‘Hop Quality’ group… but they didn’t invite us! That doesn’t matter to me, what does matter is that I know and trust our relationships up there and even better; they now know and trust us. Today there are a lot of brewers swarming the farms in the valley and the doors, once closed, have swung wide open!

We will be taking the fair-trade type barley agreement (we and the farmers and Rahr Malting are calling it ChinookArch Malt, named after a good-news weather phenomenon that flows off of the Canadian Rockies to the west of the growing region) to the hop farmers as well.

More tweets followed from Magee about Barley Day…