Bells Bend Hop Harvest

On the long drive to Beaman Park’s secluded ridgetops, we passed the leafy vines at Sulphur Creek Farm regularly. From the road, it was hard to miss the hop vines wrapped around the tall trellises.

Instead of proceeding to Beaman, this time Nancy and I pulled into the farm. We had work to do - volunteer work, but work nonetheless. Thousands of bitter little buds needed to be separated from their mother plant.

Minutes after we arrived, the vines came down. Yazoo Brewing founder Linus Hall did the chopping from atop a backhoe, cutting the vines and the rope.

Hall told us the hop strain was a mystery; even a lab test proved inconclusive. I prefer the mystery. As craft beer awareness grows and more people pay attention to specific hops, a touch of the unknown is a good pace-changer. 

Once the vines came down, the brewery must act quickly. Hops grow dry and start rotting quickly. Fresh-hop beer requires speed. With 40-50 volunteers and the top brewery staff picking the fragrant cones, Yazoo only needed only a few hours to clean the vines. 

The day after harvest, Yazoo uses all the hops in its annual batch of Bells Bend Preservation Ale, a brew bottled to benefit the farmers of Bells Bend, a rustic patch of Metro Nashville (also called Scottsboro) and threatened by development. The threats have subsided and Scottsboro’s profile as an agricultural area has blossomed. 

As a bonus, hop pickers got free pours from a keg of fresh Cascade hope pale ale worthy of Sierra Nevada’s annual harvest ale. A couple of cups went down easily throughout the evening. During the picking, the farm hosts brought by slices of watermelon and cantaloupe. Everything consumed had ties to that farm. 

Yazoo’s third harvest of the Sulphur Creek Farms offered a mighty mountain of hops. The rain and mild temperatures of Nashville’s summer produced a crop three times what the farm produced in 2012, a drought year with record streaks of triple-digit temperatures.   

Nancy and I cleaned vine after vine, plucking all but the brownest hop cones and feeling our hands grow increasingly sticky as the resin rubbed into our palms. By twilight, we filled three boxes.

The hills of northeast Nashville soon hid the sun’s rays and led to an early dusk. By pickup truck headlights, we handled the last of the harvest, bid goodnight to our tablemates and headed out under a blue moon stained blood red by a thick cloud blanket.

The next day, even after showers and multiple washings, our hands still smelled rich with leafy citrus resin. A scent that bitter could not have smelled sweeter.