Every year or so, a mainstream media outlet assigns one of its staffers a big, breathy story to inform its readers that California grape farmers are ripping out their vines. Have you heard? Acres plowed under! Horrible! To quote but one example of the sub-genre, a Sonoma-datelined October 2025 dispatch from The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Cooper:

Surrounded by rows of unsold Pinot Noir grapes in late August, Steve Dutton brushed away the hanging leaves to reveal the dark purple grapes. This year, about one-fifth of Dutton Ranch’s grapes are unsold, equating to $2 million to $3 million in lost sales. He has listed grapes for sale on Facebook Marketplace, and sold some at a discount to friends.

“We’re trying whatever we can do,” Dutton said.

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Of the ~1,800 words in Cooper’s thoroughly reported, beautifully photographed enterprise feature, precisely none of them were “hops.” Hops! Those piney, sticky, stanky cones! Much like grapes that grow on vines and form the lifeblood of the American wine industry, hops grow on bines and form the lifeblood of the American beer industry. Yet for reasons beyond the scope of this column, they rarely enjoy the centerfold treatment by the country’s corporate media. (The fact that hop fields of eastern Washington aren’t nearly as chic a destination for press junkets as California’s vineyards might have something to do with it.) That’s a shame, because the United States’ half-a-billion-dollar hop crop is the subject of plenty of high drama in its own right, from a persistently looming glut, to agita about privatization, to the reluctant recognition that lazy brewers’ overreliance on certain designer hops has pushed both the beer market and its lupulin corollary into the danger zone of diminishing returns.

Put another way, the United States’ hops market is teetering on a knife’s edge. Or maybe a high wire is more appropriate. Whether it falls depends on how much beer you drink, as ever. But it also depends on how serious the country’s craft brewers are about innovating their way out of the present malaise — and, of course, how well hop growers can hold the line on planting bines.

Categorically speaking, the wine industry has suffered through the beverage-alcohol industry’s worst post-pandemic hangover. Hence the scramble to draw down acreage in the country’s — and some extent, the world’s — vineyards to meet sluggish, shifting demand. Spirits has done best, or more accurately, least worst, buoyed by the strong performance of liquor-based ready-to-drink products and, until very recently, tequila’s generational heater. Somewhere between the two is the beer category, which is bleeding more slowly than wine, but bleeding nonetheless. Especially relevant to the hop market’s fortune is that of the brewing trade’s hoppiest segment, craft beer. The outlook is fairly grim, per the latest projections from the Brewers Association. The national trade group for small, independent brewers (and Boston Beer Company) in late December 2025 projected “contraction slightly beyond” the 5 percent volume loss it had clocked six months prior, meaning production of craft beer will almost certainly decline more than the overall category when the dust settles on last year’s data. This “contraction” — or, to borrow a clinically devastating phrase from the BA’s then-chief economist, now-president/CEO Bart Watson, “painful period of rationalization” — has already ensured that craft brewery closures will outpace openings nationwide for the second straight year. But the knock-on effects ripple out from there, and they’ll hit America’s hop fields soon enough.

If you’ve been reading Hop Take for the past year, you know they already have. In February 2025, I reported on the state of the business, noting that the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) then most recent National Hop Report showed growers harvested 87.1 million pounds of hops overall in 2024. It was a 16 percent decline from 2023’s take, but with craft beer sales falling and higher-yielding strains and more efficient hopping products on the rise, that drop alone would not balance the sector’s scales. “It would actually be good for the market in general if a bunch of stored hops went up in flames,” Eric Sannerud, president of Sannerud Hop Consulting and publisher of the Hop Notes newsletter, told me at the time. “The joke I made with farmers is that it’s a good year for a bad year, and for the last couple years, that bad year hasn’t come.”

Roughly 12 months later, it still hasn’t. Midway through December 2025, right around the time Anheuser-Busch InBev was announcing plans to close three of its 12 mega-breweries across the country to adjust in part to shifting demands, the USDA published its latest National Hop Report. With respect to the agricultural statisticians who authored the 10-page document, it is not an exhilarating read. But its conclusions were provocative to anybody who pays close attention to the national and global hop markets. The upshot is that U.S. hop supply took another plodding pivot step toward realigning with beer demand last year, without actually closing the gap between the two all that much.

The topline figures are as follows. Total production clocked in around 83.1 million pounds, down another 5-ish percent from last year; total reported area under wire, just over 41,600 acres, down around 7 percent. “Harvested acreage decreased in all states,” the report notes, but yield per acre increased around 2.5 percent. All in, “[t]he 2025 value of production for the United States totaled $447 million, up slightly from the previous [y]ear.” “Up slightly” may sound good, and when you’re dealing in dollars as opposed to harvested pounds, it is. But just half a decade ago, the domestic hop harvest was worth around $619 million — meaning on balance, the business is still down bad. And that’s even as growers actually grew their international shipments by 11 percent in 2025, according to metric tonnage tracked by the trade group Hop Growers of America. With stateside craft beer sales plateauing, export markets had been a bright spot for the hops industry, but with the Trump administration’s economic doctrine (to the extent that one exists) tanking America’s “brand” abroad, it’s hard to forecast against future foreign demand. Especially because much of that volume was contracted before the MAGA trade mayhem began.

But back to the U.S., and the USDA’s latest data. As ever, there’s nuance to these numbers. Being literally and figuratively tied to the land, hop farming is an emphatically local business, and the acreage cuts were unevenly distributed across producing states. (For the second straight year, Idaho growers ripped out the most bines, nearly double that of Washington and more than double Oregon.) Per Sannerud’s latest estimate at Hop Notes, control of the overall market continued to accrue to the Yakima Valley and heavyweight producers Haas and Yakima Chief last year, which complicates pain distribution and nudges the national market further toward private hops (more on those in a moment).

Further threatening the overall drawdown is the fact that hop farmers, brokers, and some brewers were, at last measure, sitting on another 116 million pounds of product — a sort of national hop reserve waiting in the shadows of Pacific Northwest warehouses for a good market in the future while paradoxically threatening to tank the mediocre market in the present, much like the dreaded “wine lake” lurking in subterranean stainless-steel tanks beneath California and continental Europe. That stock is down 15 percent from a year ago, per the USDA’s September 2025 report. “That’s the largest contraction in 15 years and suggests the market is getting closer to being in balance,” wrote Stan Hieronymous, the veteran hop journalist behind Appellation Beer and Hop Queries and the author of several seminal books on hops, in a recent newsletter. “Still, it is a significant amount, and almost 40 percent higher than it was through much of the teens.” So, y’know: Don’t breathe easy just yet.

This plane would be hard enough to land if hops were all the same. But if you’re reading this, you probably know nothing could be further from the truth. There are alpha hops and aroma hops, public hops and private hops, hops that are fashionable and hops that are not. As longtime beer blogger and “Beer Bible” author Jeff Alworth recently noted at Beervana, commenting on a mesmerizing data visualization of different hop acreages over time created by Max Coleman of Coleman Agriculture in Oregon, these distinctions make for a very messy market. “All of this gets pretty convoluted, because prices on hops differ as well, and the grower’s profit is affected by whether the strain is proprietary or not,” he wrote, pointing to the far higher yields of CTZ compared to Citra by way of example. You’ve heard of getting lost in the sauce? Well, you can get lost in the hops that the sauce is made with, too.

To stay zoomed out, though, Coleman’s animation (seriously, it’s really cool, you should watch it) helps illustrate arguably the biggest threat to the U.S. hop business. Namely, the market for aroma hops — which tend to command higher prices than alpha hops, and have helped define the country’s dominant style, India Pale Ale — is concentrated among just a few privately owned varietals. As Sannerud notes, around 35 percent of all the reported acres under wire in the country are strung with either Citra, Mosaic, or Simcoe, aroma hops the underlying intellectual property for which belongs to private companies. “There are more acres of those three varieties than all public acres combined,” he wrote. The era of craft brewers Mad-Libbing these three hops on the labels of “new” IPAs (“CMS,” “MCS,” “SMC,” etc.) are in the rearview, but the sheer volume of the crops gives them tremendous staying power and crowds out the market for newcomers, particularly from the public sector.

“In a market downturn this intense, industry players circle the wagons and focus on their own portfolios of varieties,” explained Sannerud. “Why sell a pound of [public] Cascade or El Dorado® when you could sell a pound of Eric’s Hop Company’s ABC-123 hop?” Innovation — or lack thereof — follows apace. The U.S. hops market may yet tiptoe past this glut without a collapse. But in this era of craft brewers’ tightening research and development budgets, distributors’ SKU rationalization, and the American drinking public’s apparent IPA fatigue, odds are long that all the varietals that inspired the creativity of last decade’s full-flavored beer boom — especially the public ones — will make it to the other side in significant volumes. It’s high drama on the hop wire, with the breadth and depth of the American beer market hanging in the balance. Somebody call the papers.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

Is the popularity of Dry January — that industry scourge — on the wane? Portions of VinePair’s masthead certainly seem to think so. Sentiment polling on the practice of temporary tee-totalling remained fairly consistent this year compared to those past, but sales data correlate more closely with actual customer behavior. On that note, here’s a mid-month marker, first noted by Jess Infante of Brewbound. According to the latest batch of Circana off-premise scans, Athletic Brewing Co., a pioneer of the non-alcoholic beer segment and the darling of mainstream coverage of the same, recorded declines in year-over-year volume (-5.3 percent) and dollars (-1.6 percent) for the week ending Jan. 11. Mind, the brand recorded solid growth the previous two weeks, and does much more direct-to-consumer business than the average craft brewery. Plus, it’s making some inroads in the on-premise. But it’s a rare beer-industry bingo card that had Athletic running red in the first frame of 2026. Portentous? Possibly!

📈 Ups…

At least four craft breweries in the Twin Cities are participating in the citywide strike today to protest ongoing federal violence against residents… The North American Guild of Beer Writers announced a new residency with Yakima Valley Tourism to introduce the hop-growing hotbed to one lucky journalist-member… Former employees of Rogue Ales & Spirits have filed suit against the failed first-wave craft brewer, alleging that its abrupt closure late last year violated federal employment law… Speaking of federal law, last week a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators introduced a bill to legalize hemp-derived THC, following one in the House earlier this month…

📉 …and downs

In a sign of the times, Circle K’s big new beer aisle expansion will be led by wine-based RTDs… “I thought that thing was done,” sneered Anheuser-Busch’s head honcho for North America about hemp-derived THC during Beer Business Daily’s annual conference last week… Otherlands Brewing in Washington shared an invoice for a recent shipment of German malt to show how craft brewers are forced to pay Trump’s disastrous tariffs on European goods…

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