The Hop Harvest Was Down Bigly in 2024
On December 20, the USDA released a summary of the final 2024 hop harvest. We’ll get a more granular picture in coming months, but for now here was the grisly upshot:
“Production for the United States in 2024 totaled 87.1 million pounds, down 16 percent from the 2023 crop of 104 million pounds. Area harvested for the United States in 2024 totaled 44,793 acres, down 18 percent from the previous year. Harvested acreage decreased in all states. The United States hop yield, at 1,944 pounds per acre, is up 29 pounds from a year ago. The 2024 value of production for the United States totaled $446 million, down 21 percent from the previous year.”
These numbers are a little confusing to the uninitiated, so here’s a brief primer. There are a couple ways to measure hops: acres under cultivation and pounds grown. The thing is, an acre of one variety of hop will produce a different amount of pounds than another. Some varieties (notably high-alpha ones) can be incredibly vigorous, while some aroma hops are sort of anemic. So an acre of CTZ, a high alpha variety, yielded an astonishing 3,336 pounds per acre, while Citra yielded just 1,579. The average beer fan cares more about how many pounds are produced because that’s what goes into your glass, but acres, yield, and production are all important to understand.
Below, I have some tables and a graph to help make sense of these numbers.
Let’s start with the production and acre figures. We are seeing a notable shift in the kinds of hops farmers are growing. After an explosion of aroma hops to meet the demands of IPA production, trends are driving production back toward alpha varieties. Recall that alpha hops are better yielders, so switching to them requires fewer acres to produce the same pounds of hops. This shift has affected the three states that grow hops differently. Because Oregon predominantly produces aroma hops, its declines were consistent in acres and pounds. Conversely, Idaho has radically scaled back its acreage (by nearly 40%), but its poundage only fell by about half as much. The same phenomenon happened in Washington, but on a smaller scale. That means that Oregon has almost caught Idaho in terms of acres under cultivation, but remains way behind in terms of pounds grown.
Here are the tables:
Now, let’s turn to the varieties. Two years ago, Citra was by far the most-grown American hop in terms of production, and it accounted for even more acreage, 20% of all fields planted. It has declined since, displaced last year by CTZ, which has an even bigger lead now. Mosaic declined even more, losing 40% of its volume. In 2022, it was the second-most grown hop, but by 2024 it had fallen to a distant third. Interestingly, although Simcoe declined by 8% in pounds, it shrank less than the aggregate, thus gaining as a percent of the whole (stats!).
I will have more on this down the line when we get more data. A couple tables and a handy chart for you visual types.
