Mac Hops in Motueka celebrated 125 years of growing hops with a bumper harvest, but it was also a harvest that summed up the tough nature of hop-growing — both now and historically.
“We had some great yields come through but unfortunately it’s not a great year to have good yields,” says Brent McGlashan, the latest in a long line of hop-growing McGlashans — fifth generation in fact.
“The market’s pretty average to poor out there.”
The global downturn in demand for hops is having a massive impact on the industry, particularly in the United States, but McGlashan said the pain is being felt everywhere.
“What we’re seeing here is exactly what’s happening overseas. It’s just all the same incremental problem. Worldwide there needs to be about 10,000 hectares of hops taken out. There’s far too much in the system to sustain what’s going on now, let alone the roughly two years’ worth of stocks that have built up.
“So that’s a significant global oversupply of hops and there’s probably just too many people in the hop game now to satisfy the smaller number of brewers.”
The stall in demand coupled with a backlog of stocks has forced farms in the US to close. The issue in the US is driven by a lack of demand what are known as Plant Variety Rights (PVR) hops — the likes of Citra, Mosaic, Strata and many more patented varieties. PVR gives breeders exclusive commercial rights to propagate and sell new plant varieties for 20 years. In the past these hops generated higher prices but are now the ones dominating the market saturation.
At the same time, farmers of public domain hops are not getting paid as much for what they grow.
“You might find more of these bigger farms in the US are going to tip up because they do have a certain amount of exposure to the PVR varieties.
“If they get pulled, and if you’re not a contracted grower for them, they can get pulled from under you quite quickly.
“And we all know the public variety stuff, especially in the States, sells for a lower price than what the likes of Citra and Mosaic are selling for.”
It’s a rock and hard place, I note. You grow something you can’t make much money off or you have something that can make money but it gets taken away.
“That’s farming, unfortunately,” says McGlashan, matter-of-factly. “But it’s a particularly tough cycle this time around.
Boom Bust cycles were more frequent
“We used to have hop cycles. They used to be every two or three years — you’d have a boom, then a bust, boom-bust, and you just had to hold on.
“But from 2012 onwards, we had that continual growth with brewers saying ‘Yes, we need more hops. Yes, keep growing them. Yes, we’ll pay more.’
“I think this downturn could have happened back in Covid times. If we hadn’t had Covid, the downturn should have happened in 2020 or 2021, and I don’t think it would be as significant as what it is now.”
Obviously at Mac Hops and other long-standing farms, this boom-bust cycle means they’re familiar with coping mechanisms.
“When dad came back onto the farm in the early 70s, times were pretty desperate back then,” McGlashan recalls. “He gone to university, then he did farm advising down in Otago — and he came back because granddad took a bit ill.
“And when he came back, they were actually growing fodder down the hop rows to sell to local cattle farmers, just to keep the farm going.
“When you are a family farm and you’re determined to keep things going, you’ll do anything to keep the pennies ticking over in the bank.
“In the boom-bust cycle, you had to smooth out that money from the boom, hold it until the bust happened, and then hope that you had enough to grit your teeth and hold on.”
In the current climate, the same attitude prevails.
“We’re now looking at alternative crops and things that we could do around the hop structures — potentially having to pull down those structures.”
By that he means the tall posts and wires that hops are trained to grow up.
This season at Mac Hops — and the story is the same elsewhere across the Tasman region — they didn’t plant on roughly 30% of the farm.
“Potentially there could be more hops that have to come out next year. You take that out of the system and it’s quite a significant hit.
“So it’s a real tightening of the purse strings, for sure.
“Some of that land is being rested and put into regenerative cover crops just to keep the ground nice and healthy. That’s cereals, sunflowers and a few other seed crops and that’ll all just be mulched back into the soil.
“We can do a little bit of short-term vegetable production or seed crops or something like that that and we can still keep the wirework going over top.
Other rows of hops were left in the ground but not strung up.
“We can rest the plants for a year and still keep things just sitting on the ground and then bring them back into production the following year.
“You just let them grow away just like they normally would with no strings and no supporting structure for them to climb or grow up onto they stay low and then you just chuck the sheep in there and they just happily keep it grazed.
“Sheep love the hops — the leaves have got a high nutritional value and the sheep will eat the hops before they’ll eat the grass on the ground, so they get a real taste for it.”
Most of the alternative crops are all short-term measures, because the likes of apples, pears or grapes take too long to mature so by the time they are ready the hop cycle might have ticked up. They do have one hectare planted in gold kiwifruit versus 30 hectares of hops.
The McGlashan farm at Motueka has been fluid over time, and in 2017 the family added another farm in Moutere and it also leases some land.
“Our great-granddad, he gifted some of that land to the local council for sports grounds and things like that.
“Another part of the original farm is now the Motueka High School fields. The Motueka Bowling Club is on one part as well.
“We were once on the outskirts of Motueka township but now we have houses that nudge right up to our lands now.”
Back in 1900 hops, while established in the area, were still considered an alternative crop.
“Hops were just a different crop at that time. My great-great grandfather also had a thrashing mill and a flax mill which made ropes and twine.
“But I think hops, back in the day, would have been an interesting crop as opposed to your vegetable crops back then.”
The farm today is still a family affair, with Brent’s mother Gertrude doing the farm accounts, his wife Ria looking after health, safety, compliance and HR, his sister Michelle handling wages and his brother-in-law Owen Johnstone also running the farms alongside Brent and his dad Kim.
Until the 1962, hops were all hand-picked with up to 50 or 60 seasonal pickers coming from local families and also from the cities.
“In the post-war period through the 50s, 60s and 70s, the Motueka community used to absolutely hum in summer. You used to go from, say, 3500 to 10,000. People from all around New Zealand, from all walks of life, from city jobs, would come down to this area for a month or six weeks to do seasonal work. It was a huge part of New Zealand society.
“And, you know, a lot of people have come through our farm and all the farms around here and they said, `oh, I met my husband on this farm’ or `I met my wife here’.
“That’s lost from society, that sort of thing, which is a real shame because it was a huge community and people looked forward to coming back and having the parties in the evening, social events … it’s a shame that the clock can’t be wound back.”
McGlashan also recalls the story of how one of the hop gardens collapsed one day, “so they shut the local high school for two days and the whole school came to pick hops.”
Harvest 2025
The 2025 harvest was an unusually good one, McGlashan said, with an unusual weather pattern playing a part.
“This year we had a lot of dull days, a very dull, grey summer around that Christmas-New Year period right through until the end of January,” McGlashan explained.
“That’s not really expected here in the sunny old Motueka but it seemed to help out the older varieties. Wakatu, Pacific Jade, Green Bullet, Southern Cross … those were some of the best yielding varieties we’ve had for the last several years.
“Before this year, we were getting to a point thinking, ‘are these older varieties not handling the current weather and conditions or are we growing them differently compared to how we used’.
“But obviously it’s weather related. We’ve proven that this year.”
That weather pattern also resulted in a more consistent crop among new varieties and also a very high quality. Usually, aroma and flavour can change depending on which block of land a crop is grown on, and when precisely it’s picked, but this year there’s more evenness.
“In terms of aroma, I think it’s a lot more balanced this year. There’s not as many extremes on either end. I think that’s a good thing.
“And the quality is really, really up there. We’ve had plenty of top end brewers who are saying that.”
McGlashan said the Superdelic crop was one of the best yielding and across the board oil levels were higher than normal (which is good for drinkers who love those resiny, oily characters).
The bitter irony is that even with having 30% of the farm un-hopped, there was still too much too harvest.
“So we’ve harvested what we needed to and the rest will get cut down and put into compost. So, yeah, unfortunately the good year hasn’t been rewarded, let’s put it that way.”
Generations XPA
To celebrate their 125th birthday, Mac Hops teamed up with Motueka brewery Hop Federation to produce a special beer, Generations XPA.
Hopped with Taiheke, Motueka and Nelson Sauvin, all grown by Mac Hops, it’s punchy but delicate and super-enjoyable, which is what Brent was after.
“We wanted to make it an easy drinker — something that after a day’s work on the harvest you would go in and crush a few jugs and have really a good time with your mates but wake up in morning and still be able to do a day’s work.
“We wanted to have a beer that people could have one and go, ‘oh, I like that, let’s have another couple more’.”
