Beneath the Bines: The Multicultural Roots of the Pacific Northwest Hop Harvest

“My dad gave me advice 60 years ago: The day that you think you’re any better than the lowest man on the job is the day you start going backwards.”

Bill Coleman represents the fifth of seven generations of the Coleman hop-growing family in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Health concerns may have “retired” him from leadership in Coleman Agriculture, but he’s still active on the farm. Max Coleman, seventh-generation director of farm operations, jokes that Bill is now “the old fart who keeps us in line.”

Family members like Bill aren’t the only venerated elders at Coleman. Several seasonal part-timers for this year’s harvest were first hired (by Bill) as teenagers in the 1970s. “They’ll come 2-3 days a week,” Bill says. “And they’re just part of the crew, and I enjoy that. … This becomes their home, and so they’ve always been welcome, no matter who they were.”

In both Willamette and Washington’s Yakima Valley, many seasonal workers return to hop farms every year, often joined by their children and grandchildren. So to call Coleman Agriculture a multigenerational farm is not to speak of the Colemans alone. Friendships, respect, and shared pride often transcend the original employer/employee relationship.

“All of our workers are a part of the farm. And it takes that to be able to make the farm work smoothly,” says Gayle Goschie,  president of Willamette Valley’s Goschie Farms and fourth-generation farmer. Like Coleman Agriculture, some at Goschie Farms have worked there for decades, investing in each field as personally as Goschie. Experienced crews work faster and make fewer costly mistakes — two critical benefits for growing hops.

“You can ruin a whole crop of hops in 30 minutes if you don’t know what you’re doing. Get ’em too dry or too wet and you’re in a tight spot,” says Max Coleman. “We’re very aware that we’re not doing this by ourselves.”

Hop growers never have. In roughly 150 years of commercial hop cultivation in the Pacific Northwest, people from many different backgrounds have sustained the harvest. They’ve shaped the industry while struggling to integrate, negotiate, and survive in an American society of both opportunity and oppression. Modern harvests rely so much on what’s behind us — the experience, the relationships, collective histories both great and terrible — that we must occasionally stop and consider.

All Hands on Deck

Pacific Northwest hop farming began in earnest in the 1870s. Pioneers like Ezra Meeker built empires by seeding hop farms west of the Cascade Mountains and linking them to transportation hubs like San Francisco. The difficulty of this coordination explains why Meeker’s home in Puyallup, Wash., is now a museum and national historic site. But most of the actual harvesting wasn’t done by Meeker, nor by the trickle of European-descended settlers coming from the East. Native Americans, and later Asian immigrants, picked the hops.

Even today, farmers like Goschie remind us that “for hops … there’s a fair amount of hand labor that has to happen.” Before mechanization, however, harvesting took roughly 20 times more labor — thousands of workers. In 1873, the non-Native American population of Pierce County, Wash. (containing both Puyallup and Tacoma) was about 1,700. As historian Peter Kopp outlines in his book, “Hoptopia,” early PNW hop harvests would have been impossible without Native American participation.

Farmers dispatched agents around the region to recruit Native pickers, then watched for flotillas of canoes from as far as British Columbia and Alaska to wind their way through Puget Sound and make the harvest possible. Growers like Meeker weren’t the only ones interlocking the regional economy.

While the U.S. government inflicted war and genocide against Native populations elsewhere, the economics of the hop industry kept the harvest relatively friendly. Oregon farmers agreed (some reluctantly) as early as 1876 that Native Americans were “the best of pickers” — some Native cultures were well practiced foraging local plant life. Native migrant pickers set up camps beside the fields, bringing food, family life, religious observances, dances, and even horse races. The harvest wasn’t a mere transaction, but a meeting of cultures.

Desperate for yet more labor, hop growers turned to Asian immigrants. The majority were Chinese, though some came from Japan and others from the Philippines.

Farmers reaped huge profits, and local merchants welcomed Native pickers’ wages. Yet discrimination persisted — growers paid Native Americans at least 10 percent less than white pickers and segregated their camps. Locals often raged against Native employment even though white labor alone couldn’t get the job done.

For their part, Native Americans joined hop harvests because, compared with fishing, other farm work, or logging, it paid the best — usually amplifying their annual income 10 or even hundredfold. They also profited from “Indian watching,” selling crafts and posing in photographs for white tourists seeking so-called authentic Native American life.

Even with their help, American demand for hops was insatiable. U.S. beer consumption almost doubled between 1880 and 1890. International exports also ballooned — in 1905 every 10th beer in the world contained Oregon hops. Desperate for yet more labor, hop growers turned to Asian immigrants. The majority were Chinese, though some came from Japan and others from the Philippines.

According to Kopp, Asian pickers, like Native Americans, signed on for the money. They used wages to build farms, businesses, and other livelihoods. Despite proving themselves quick and efficient, they were paid even less than Native Americans. Unlike Native Americans who returned to reservations or their homelands each season, many Asians settled locally — sparking extreme racist aggression.

Some hop farmers welcomed Asian immigrants, if only out of self-interest. One grower commented in 1880 on the “many” newspapers decrying the employment of Asian pickers. They’d change their tune, he said, once they saw that “after all the help available — whites, Chinese, and Indians — has been mustered … still a considerable part of the crop must spoil this season for want of pickers.”

Anti-Asian racism was one of the loudest national sins of the 1880s, embodied in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited most Chinese immigration for 10 years. Some went further. In 1885, white supremacists in several Washington towns attempted to drive their Asian neighbors out.

White residents fired shots into Chinese picker camps in Puyallup. On Sept. 7, 1885, a white mob attacked a Chinese camp in Issaquah, Wash., killing three workers and wounding four more. In November, mobs in Tacoma rounded up hundreds of Chinese residents and forced them onto trains bound for Portland, Ore.

Hop growers tried to play both sides. Ezra Meeker defended Chinese hop pickers, but also publicly supported the Exclusion Act. Puyallup avoided Tacoma’s lawlessness partly because growers and business owners — including Meeker — volunteered as a deputy police force to guard against mob violence.

The “Camping Experience”

The next phase of hop harvesting still resides in living memory.

“I remember, during my dad’s time, that he … would bring occasional laborers down for harvest, from Portland,” Goschie recalls, adding that other farms did the same. “There was a bus that would transport them down.”

Bill Coleman remembers the same happening on his farms in the 1940s. Scores of families, often white, traveled from nearby cities to pick hops. “There’s something about [the harvest],” he says. “It’s a lot of work, but a lot of people enjoy it, I guess.”

This shift was not entirely organic.

Some early hop farmers always prioritized white laborers. In 1888, some Oregon growers tried to use anti-vagrancy laws to coerce unemployed locals into hop fields or delay the school year so children could pick hops — both to avoid hiring non-white labor. Farms still needed seasonal workers by the tens of thousands, but the white populations of Oregon and Washington were growing as well. Latent racism and shifting political winds — from labor reforms to the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence — pushed recruitment toward white, middle-class candidates. Nonwhite pickers were not excluded during these decades, but their numbers dwindled.

To attract new pickers, farmers made harvest work more appealing and, frankly, fun. They built cleaner camps; provided amenities like grocery stores, religious services, transportation, childcare and playgrounds; and even scheduled activities like dances and campfire meetings. All this in addition to the pay.

“[They’re] all working to provide for their families and their loved ones. Their tireless work makes hop harvest, and subsequently beer produced around the world, possible.”

In doing so, growers replaced the cultural exchanges of Native American and Asian pickers with a “camping experience” (Max Coleman’s words) curated for white middle-class sensibilities. This monochromatic image of the harvest season proved both real and fictitious. White pickers flocked to the fields, but it still wasn’t enough to meet demand. Growers again relied on Native American, Asian, Black, and Latino pickers, who (according to Kopp) comprised roughly half the seasonal workforce in the late 1930s.

Technology upended everything. Machines for cutting bines, stripping off hop cones, and filtering debris replaced sprawling camps with centralized facilities. Hops remained hands-on compared to other crops, but demand for seasonal labor shrank dramatically. Demographics shifted, too.

Soon after the Coleman farms mechanized, Bill recalls his father hiring a contractor to arrange seasonal labor. They brought a crew from Texas — Latino workers with families who migrated north for the harvest, then returned for the winter. Over time, many workers opted to put down roots. Now, operations like Coleman Agriculture rely on a combination of local and migrant employees, many Latino.

‘Overlooked’

The proliferation of Latino workers was part of a larger shift in U.S. agriculture. Guest worker initiatives like the Bracero program (forerunner of modern H-2A visas) brought millions of Mexicans on temporary visas. They offered farmers desperately needed employees but also fueled political controversies about worker exploitation, undocumented immigration, and racialized stereotypes about which demographics were suited for manual labor.

These trends also seeded the relationships the Colemans and Goschies value today. They’re not alone. Yakima Chief Hops, a grower-owned hop supplier, has recognized seasonal and migrant farm workers. Toni Lynn Adams-Woodward, speaking for Yakima Chief over email, considers them “the backbone of hop production” but also “overlooked.”

Despite reports of added difficulties in H-2A approvals, and uncertainty about whether agents will target farmworkers, the hop farmers interviewed for this article were confident their employees would remain safe and stable this year.

“[They’re] all working to provide for their families and their loved ones,” she adds. “Their tireless work makes hop harvest, and subsequently beer produced around the world, possible.” Yakima Chief reports a 76 percent return rate for seasonal workers, who often help family members obtain visas and positions on the same farms.

At least one has gone further. Leon Loza Sr. began working on hop farms in Wapato, Wash. (near Yakima) as an undocumented Mexican immigrant in the mid-1970s. He later received amnesty under a Reagan-era law, earned his citizenship, and purchased his own hop farm in 2006. Now his son, Leon Jr. (who goes by Junior), oversees Loza Farms.

Loza Farms isn’t large enough for the H-2A program, though Junior would join if he could. He says inflation and economic uncertainty have made everything “a little scary,” but he employs about 10 people (almost) year-round and pays above average. Junior favors seasonal workers who’ve worked with him before, and many return each year. The past echoes across Pacific Northwest hop farms. Locals remain invaluable, but migrants are still critical to the harvest. Those workers simply come from different places now.

Community ties still blossom, too. Sunday is pizza day at Loza Farms, which always throws an end-of-harvest celebration. They also host Mexican Night, an annual party bringing staff together with local and Mexican craft brewers for food, music, shop talk, and camaraderie.

Coleman hosts welcome and farewell barbecues each harvest, though that can get complicated. Some seasonal employees travel the region as different crops reach their respective harvest periods. The rush of it means, regretfully, they miss the barbecue. In recent years, both Coleman Agriculture and Goschie Farms have diversified into hazelnuts, wine grapes, and other crops with complementary growing seasons, allowing them more stable, year-round staff positions.

As before, currents of marginalization remain. Citing crime prevention, federal agencies have launched aggressive campaigns against immigrants, most with no prior criminal conviction. Latinos bear the brunt, including legal residents and U.S. citizens.

Despite reports of added difficulties in H-2A approvals, and uncertainty about whether agents will target farmworkers, the hop farmers interviewed for this article were confident their employees would remain safe and stable this year. But they also noted a growing climate of fear.

“Even though a majority of people in this country were immigrants, a lot of them have forgotten that. It’s something scary to know that I may have friends who could be affected by it.”

Max Coleman describes “rumblings” from employees and the surrounding community, even among legal residents who have lived in the U.S. for decades. There’s uncertainty whether authorities will observe rights like due process. “[I]t makes it pretty hard to prove anything,” Max says, “even if you do have everything [e.g., documentation] you need.” Goschie reminds us that the hop industry “has gone through this before,” and is grateful that organizations like the Oregon Farm Bureau publish guidance on how to prepare for and respond to immigration raids.

Junior, himself a Mexican-American, goes further. “People are scared all the time,” he says, “If you’re a resident of this country — not a citizen, but a resident — there’s always a possibility … of deportation.” Although this year seems stable, Junior says crackdowns still have a chilling effect on prospective employees, regardless of their immigration status. He says prospective workers will choose work closer to home when possible to minimize the chance they get pulled over on the road.

“Even though a majority of people in this country were immigrants, a lot of them have forgotten that,” Junior concludes. “It’s something scary to know that I may have friends who could be affected by it. But on the farm side, there’s not much I can do differently.”

Going Backwards

Twelve miles away from the Ezra Meeker mansion and museum, along Tacoma’s Puget Sound shoreline, sits Chinese Reconciliation Park, a beautiful garden space decorated with culturally Chinese buildings and features. The park is a conscious effort to heal Tacoma’s community after the 1885 expulsion of Chinese residents — a story that’s as much a part of Pacific Northwest hop history as Meeker’s.

Hop harvests yield occasions to celebrate, like Mexican Night and fresh hop ale festivals, myriad fresh hop options in taprooms, and hop field-adjacent beer gardens from coast to coast. But while looking forward to this bounty, it’s important to understand the historical pillars that Pacific Northwest hops stand upon — multicultural cooperation, working for a better life, and facing the fact that we have, as Bill might say, gone backwards far too often.

Wisdom like that could help us avoid new sins to reconcile, so we can instead celebrate hops together — to the last drop.

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