Joe Sixpack: Small hops farms are springing up all over America

NOTHING on the planet smells like freshly picked hops.

The small flower cones grow on vines (or, more accurately, bines, like string beans), and their sticky, oily resins provide the essential bitterness that balances the sweetness of malt. Without hops, beer would taste like something you might drink through a straw. When you are 14.

Bitterness aside, though, it's aroma that makes hops such a wonderful specimen of nature.

Freshly plucked and crushed between your fingers, they explode with a complex bouquet that may be fruity or spicy or gardenlike, depending on variety. Chinook hops are reminiscent of pine needles baking under noon sun. Saaz are earthy, like the aroma of hard-earned sweat after a day of kneading your garden. Hallertau are at once floral and citrusy, like fresh dew on the leaves of a lemon tree.

And Cascades hops - the most popular variety among American craft brewers?

The lovely bunch I picked last week smelled like . . . your doctor's office just after he snaps on those rubber gloves and tells you, "This won't hurt a bit."

The culprit on this morning was the latex gloves that Phil Markowski, the brewer at Southampton Publick House on Long Island, N.Y., thoughtfully passed out to a dozen or so friends and beer lovers who'd volunteered to help him pick hops for a batch of ale. Hop stems feel like 120-grit sandpaper that, after an hour of labor, would turn the unprotected fingers of a city boy into raw meat digits.

Normally, hops are picked by giant machines that can strip an acre in 90 minutes. They're then either processed for their extract oils, or dried, baled and shipped around the world for later use. In America, almost all hops are grown in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Lately, however, small hops farms have sprouted across America, including New York and Pennsylvania where the crop was common in the 19th century. Most of the farms - or, in truth, gardens - are experimental and lack any mechanized planting or picking equipment. The yield may be less than 100 pounds.

Some of the do-it-yourself movement was driven by the 2007 worldwide hops shortage that saw prices leap by as much as 500 percent. Some varieties were simply unavailable at any price.

Though the crisis passed, breweries and their customers see the small hops farms as part of the growing "local food" movement.

With the hop vines perhaps just minutes away, breweries can easily produce a once-a-year variety known as fresh- or wet-hop beer.