Al Haunold Oral History Interview #1, November 18, 2014

ALFRED HAUNOLD: Okay, my name is Alfred Haunold, H-A-U-N-O-L-D, and the date is November 18th, 2014 and we're in the Crop Science Building on the second floor in Shaun Townsend's office with [unintelligible].

SHAUN TOWNSEND: And the heater.

AH: And now we're going to talk about what? We could start with some of the varieties that are in one thing, most of which was Willamette, Cascade, the first one, Willamette, and then Tahoma after that one. So Cascade, the USDA accession was 56013. It was really selected by my predecessor, Dr. Stan Brooks who just recently passed away in January of 2014, age of ninety-two. He was the hop research leader. At that time it was called Hop Investigation, but it 00:01:00included hops and mint and he was the [unclear] breeder. His background was really more in autonomy, fieldwork, and not so much in breeding. He got a masters at Kansas State and then got his PhD at Oregon State after he was already working full time as the hop research leader here, which he joined this program state in 1954, coming from Montana there. His predecessor Ken Keller, left in 1955, and at that time people were just selected from within without too much background check, and just how somebody would fit in nicely, and Stan I guess he was appointed. I mean he never even had to apply.

So anyhow, he came in 1955 and like I did when I came in 1965, I didn't know 00:02:00anything about hops, and neither did he, but it's on the job training. And he did okay, except he had problems with vertigo; he couldn't get up on a ladder, so a lot of work is required, people climbing up on the ladder and collecting cones, and so he had a technician do that. And, this lady at that time, they didn't really know how to handle those male hops, so a lot of breeding was left on the pedigree and their experiences and evaluation of female hops. Hops, of course, are male and female plants now. And so, they collected open pollenated seed, that is pollen that drifts by wind and fertilizer, so receptive female flowers, and then you collect the seed about six or eight weeks afterwards, out of which came a seedling that was, it was in 1956 when the seed was-no, 1955 when the seed was collected and 1956 when it was germinated, and the seedling, 00:03:00among hundreds of them were selected and had allegedly became number 56013. That's a USDA accession number.

So when I came onboard in 1965, what later became Cascade was still a seedling out in the field and about ten hills, separate hills; they had cloned it out and tested it and thought it had a lot of promise because the ration of alpha to beta was similar to a European choice import hops such as Hallertau Mittelfruh and Tettnanger that were considered noble hops. So Stan thought well, that's very similar to it. And so we were trying to expand that and maybe get domestic brewers interested in this hop, since they always complained that they could get enough noble aroma hops imported from Germany at any price. But the brewers 00:04:00really were not that interested in it, so Stan left in 1967 actually, he-I came onboard in 1965 to specifically take care of breeding and, as a response to a book that was written by Rachel Carson, The Silent Spring, where she pointed out the problems with over-extensive use of pesticides, and I was supposed to breed resistance to some of the diseases, including downy mildew.

And so that was my position, was created new, and Stan was still the agronomist in charge of the field work. So I was spending most of my time in the lab and in the greenhouse there, and I really wasn't out in the field all that much, until in the spring of 1967 there was a vacancy at the US Department of Agriculture in Washington D.C. as an assistant branch chief. It is the next higher level up 00:05:00from hop investigation where Stan was. And he applied for the job and got it, so he left in June of 1967 and I had probably no more than half a day with him to talk about all the work that he was involved in. Then he left and I was thrown to the wolves.

And there were all these hops out there which I knew nothing about their locations. At that time hops were identified by accession number, such as the 56013, which later became Cascade, as mentioned before, and the location. Their location was their hill out in the field, which was on a good thing, and their numbers were posted on the poles and we would just have to count off. So if a new hop was planted in the same location, it got the same number, then it was totally confusing, yeah. Well, it took me two years to straighten that out there, but in the meantime we were showing this promising European-type aroma 00:06:00hop to the growers and they'd say "oh yeah, a good boy," and so on and all that, "let's go have some beer after this, we'll get some hops, yeah."

And that's how it went for a year or two, and they finally decided that maybe we're going to plant a 1-acre plot, and something that I would never do again, but I didn't know better at that time, we went out in the commercial yard, took out about 800 hills in the existing Fuggle yard and planted 56013 in these hills. There reason I would never do that again is because you never really know if there's any snippet of the previous hop left in there and you get some mixtures. But we went through and selected and screened out, and we probably didn't get, if anything, didn't get much of a mixture. And that was planted in Kaiser in 1968-

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Whose farm was that on?

AH: Huh?

TE: Whose farm was that on?

AH: It's Weathers, Weathers Farm.

ST: Weathers Farm.

AH: Yeah, Weathers, and Mission Bottom Farm. And so we planted it there and of 00:07:00course the first year we didn't get any crop and we didn't even try to harvest it, but the second year we got about eight bales, and most were commercially harvested and baled and stored, and we would expect that the brewers-at that time they were in an organization called the US Brewers-we had the US Brewers Hop Research Subcommittee, USBA Hop Research Subcommittee, but they said well, we've got to figure out how we do the pilot program. And so that went on for three years and we had an accumulation of thirty or forty or fifty bales sitting in our non-refrigerator warehouse in Yakima, Washington, and nothing happened.

Then about 1970 there was a shortage of European aroma hops, and one of the major brewers, Coors, at that time, just couldn't get enough, and finally Joe 00:08:00Coors had enough and he said "well, we ought to test that hop there. I will pay one dollar a pound to anybody who will want to grow this hop, and then we'll buy unlimited quantities." But at that time you could probably-the choicest hops would probably sell for about sixty-five or seventy cents and he was willing to pay a dollar a pound, so the floodgates were wide open and we propagated and they planted it and Coors grew it-well bought several million pounds. And they didn't realize that there was more to it than just the ratio of alpha to beta. For one thing, we didn't have the instrumentation to analyze the components of alpha acid, which is humulone, cohumulone and adhumulone in the same with lupulone, which is a beta acid which doesn't lend it to brewing.

So years later after we had thart capabilities and well, you know, the humulone, 00:09:00cohumulone in particular, in our Cascade is much higher than a European aroma hop. But we didn't know it at that time. Then Coors thought they would do a hundred percent substitution, which they did, and the beer tasted okay except when the beer drinker will have another bottle of beer and then he burp, something come up through the nose and it's an aroma that he isn't familiar with. We know now this is geraniol, which is one of the off-components there. But again, we didn't know. We didn't have the instrumentation at that time.

And I remember in 1973 I went to the International Hops Congress in Germany and the Germans were just all over me: "how could you say that this is blah blah blah, that this is like an Hallertau Mittelfruh?" And I didn't say that, it's my predecessor said that, and I just simply repeated what he told me, and we didn't have instrumentation. Well, we know better now. So, a long story: for a while 00:10:00Coors tried to use up the hops that they were committed to buying then, of course they had too many of them and finally sold a bunch of them at a packaged rate. Anheuser-Busch never really caught onto that one; that was at the time-well, it was the second largest brewer when I came into the business, and pretty soon they advanced to number one ahead of Schlitz, and they thought well no, we don't like that. We like either the Oregon Fuggle, now you can get enough of that, and then the buy hops from Europe there, and "why'd you name it Cascade?" That's like a dishwashing powder there [laughter].

But anyhow, so Coors continued to cut back and finally it ended up in a blend. Some of the excess that they had bought years before they finally sold to the package trade, and for a while it looked like our Cascade was going to disappear, until the microbrewers came into the picture, and they liked hops with different flavors, and today it Cascade is one of the major hop varieties 00:11:00that many of the American breweries are using there. And we know how to analyze not only the different components, the alpha and beta acid, but also the hop oil and the different components in the hop oil, some of which are very significant in the aroma and hopping rates that the major brewers would never use, but the microbrewers are only happy to use much higher than the major brewers, sometimes ten times as much hopping rate as the major brewers use, which of course is then measured in bittering units. So Cascade is now not usually sold as an aroma hop, which at the time when it was released, that was the only testing we had done, and most of it goes in the form of pellets. So that's Cascade.

ST: When did you get the instrumentation to really do a better analysis on the components?

AH: We always had the spectrum for making analysis. We didn't get the HPLC 00:12:00probably until the late seventies, somewhere around there. Mid to late seventies, yeah.

ST: So Cascade was released officially in seventy...

AH: '71.

ST: '71. So it was after that, that you got a better handle on it.

AH: Much after that, yeah. And we didn't get the capability to do the oil analysis with which high pressure-is it, no.

ST: No, it's gas chromatography.

AH: It's gas chromatography, yeah. And then that came much later, then. So today, yeah, I wouldn't say that, but of course I was just simply repeating what my predecessor had told and what everybody else said "well, this is the way you analyze them," and that's the way the Germans did. As a matter of fact, at the time when hops were imported from Germany-and this happened about in the late 1970s-we had a call, again from Coors, and they said "you know, we get these 00:13:00hops from Europe that are-and from Germany particularly, and they're supposed to be Hallertau hops, and our bittering units are much higher when we do get these hops, so what's happened?" So I said "well"-Bob Foster was a chemist at the time-I said just send us a sample and we'll analyze it, and at that time we had the HPLC already, and the first time I saw the cohumulone Gail Nickerson, my chemist there, I said "Gail, this is Brewers Gold," and sure enough it was Brewers Gold, but the Germans didn't really cheat, because according to German law at the time, any hop that was grown was identified by the regional name there, so any hop that was grown in the Hallertau area was called a Hallertau hop. Now Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, which means middle-early is one subtype there. Well, any hop that came out of the Hallertau area would enter the world markets under the name of Hallertau hops, and it wasn't until they all the problems 00:14:00there and threats of lawsuits that they changed the Germany law and said well, the hops has to be identified by the location and the year and the variety. And that's what they do now, but they didn't do it up until the late 1970s.

ST: Right, so you can get a mix of genotypes, then.

AH: Yeah.

ST: Which will be confusing. Yeah, and hard for the brewers to deal with, yes. So then-go ahead.

AH: No.

ST: So do you remember what the-so you told us the history of Cascade but was there a goal in mind when they collected this open pollenated seed or made these crosses? Was it the European style hop that they were trying for, or?

AH: Well, there were mixed signals were given by the major brewers. Well one thing, they said we don't want to have a lot of alpha acid there. The lower the better was at one time, and they wanted to commercial testing, and with the hop there's one third [unintelligible], there was a location, a designation, and I 00:15:00don't know, I would look it up and see if it had an accession number, and about one percent off and about five or six beta there, and they trial proved with that, and of course they pretty soon threw it out there that just it did not have enough alpha there. But the major-there were two major problems the way I saw it when I came. The one was that there were a lot of European aroma hops were being imported, and sometimes there were mixtures there, but despite the price that was being paid, many times it was double what they would have to pay for domestically grown hops there. They couldn't get enough.

And the second problem was-and that was even more significant-was Anheuser-Busch. Anheuser-Busch years ago had had one of their brewmasters, Frank Schwaiger who had been here since the 1930s there and was probably mostly responsible for bringing Anheuser-Busch from a distant second to number one in 00:16:00the world by the late 1960s there and he said "we want a hop like an Oregon Fuggle there. That's the one that he really liked. So Fuggle was grown primarily in Oregon, and it fit in very well because it was an early maturing hop. Typically harvest started about mid-August and was completed by about the 20th there, so there was nothing else that they would grow that could quickly harvest it at that time, and if you have equipment sitting around that costs you probably around a million dollars in investment type of thing and you can only use it for maybe two, two and a half or three weeks a year and then it stands there empty. If you can squeeze in another week of use, it's pretty nice.

However, Fuggle, for a number of reason, is a low producer. One of the major 00:17:00reasons is when it was developed in the 1870s in England there, at that time they would hand-pick, and they wouldn't cut the hops there, so you wouldn't really weaken the rootstock because you just pluck the cones off and just let the vines hang there, and there were reserves being translocated down there to the roots stock for the next year until the frost hit that. Well, here and commercially, now hops, and even at that time in the 1950s or the 1940s when machine-picking came in there, they would cut them there, and that weakened their crown for the next year. So typically yields of Fuggle were about ten to fifteen, sometimes twenty percent below what growers would consider a production cost there. But they would grow them anyhow because it would fit in nicely, but they would reluctantly grow on their own, grow something else that had higher yields such as Bullion or Brewers Gold, which was taken to Oregon in the 1940s 00:18:00by Ray Kerr, an Oregon hop grower in the Kaiser area near Salem. So, and then of course they also grow Clusters there, until downy mildew went to Oregon, then we'll have a downy.

So Anheuser-Busch tried everything that they could to entice the growers to grow more and more hops, and it didn't really work until the 1960s, about 1966, '67 when they finally got another marketing order. That is a marketing order that would limit the amount of hops that would be planted legally and sold by any grower who was growing hops in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Californian there. And that marketing order would limit the total production to sixty million pounds and they would vote every year how much of that sixty million pounds they would open up for production. Sometimes it'd a hundred percent, sixty million pounds, sometimes it'd be eighty percent, be a lot less than sixty million pounds, and so on there. And Fuggle was also under the marketing order -well now 00:19:00of course Anheuser-Busch immediately yelled foul and said that can't be, we need more Oregon-grown Fuggle. So they got a special one million pound Fuggle allotment there, and despite that extra allotment that Oregon growers could grow, it would never fill that one million pounds. So the pressure was on; you got to do something to improve it.

And when I came on what Stan Brooks told me, I mean he was still in charge after 56013, Cascade, said "you go and you develop a Fuggle type," and I had done mutation breeding in Nebraska with wheat, so I said "well, one of the things we can do is go with [unintelligible] polyploidy breeding, which has double chromosomes Fuggle, and then make crosses with Fuggle-related males there." "Well," Stan said, "well, that's already been done," because he had a visiting 00:20:00scientist from England in 1963 by the name of Dr. Ray Neve who was the head of the Hop Research Center at Wye College, the University of London subsidiary in the Kent area, and he started hop cultures in treatment, which is an alkaloid in the mitotic poison, which allows the chromosomes to travel to metaphase, and then don't separate, so end up with cells that have twice the number of chromosomes, except he didn't really follow it through.

It took more than a year, and then after one year sabbatical he left, and I was given these parts that were sitting in metal cans in the greenhouse, actually in the cold frames outside, in the spring of 1966, in rusty cans there and I looked at him and I said "you know, I tried to grow some of them, I did some cytology and there was a mixture, which I expected." Then I said "you know, I'm just 00:21:00going to start all over again." So, I started in the spring of 1966, did the cultures work, and it took me the whole year to get some cuttings that were pure tetraploid cells, all ourselves, and then examined them, this particular cutting, which was the first cycle already that year, that they had all tetraploid cells in there. That was in September, and of course I knew at that time that I would have to have two node cuttings in order to really be able to see something through, because when the winter cold temperatures come, hops go dormant and then anything above the soil surface would die. And of course with single node cuttings the nodes were above the soil surface there. I was like oh god, you know, what am I going to do now?

So I counted up as much as I could and I had a walk-in cooler in the old farm 00:22:00crops building there; it was just across from Cordley Hall there, and they had an old prune drier which was converted to a cooler, and I moved these hops in there in the fall of, let's see, it must have been, yeah, must have been in fall of '66. I guess so. And it got me through the winter and I had an eight hour day and the temperatures near freezing, I mean not really freezing. I got them through and in the spring of '67 I moved them in the greenhouse and I strung them up, and sure enough they grew. But Chuck Zimmerman, who was plant physiologist at that time, was here and he said "well," and you know when I was looking for some male hops and we couldn't really handle this, we had no capability of analyzing males at that time, and he said, "well there's a hill out there in the field and in one year it has male flowers and other years it's all female flowers there, and the females are fertile there, but I don't know 00:23:00about the male." I said "hmm, you know, that sounds interesting."

So I collected pollen from that hill there and used it to hand-pollinate in the greenhouse there. It was 1967. And I thought well, in the fall we're going to dig that up, because I said well you know, all that I'd read was that hops are really separate male and female plants. We don't have any monecious, that is where both sexes are on the same plant, we've never had any reports of that except one of our polyploids, and then of course that's a different story there. So I made the cross and rooted seedlings out in the spring of 1968, yeah, and but in the fall of 1967 we dug up that hill, and sure enough, there were two plants there. There were two plants, there were two plants, and what probably happened there, there was a Fuggle plant and seedlings had -seeds have dropped 00:24:00down - and the seedling had grown up there, and at pruning time you remove part of it, but a portion of that cone was there, and in training in the spring it's just a matter of luck, whoever trained the shoots there, and some years got only females and some years got a mixture of male and females from the two different crowns there. So I was just disgusted and threw the thing out. I wish I hadn't, but that's just the way it was.

So I grew the seedlings out, and again in metal cans, and that was an interesting story. We had the cannery here on 9th street there and the cannery, every once in a while they had something went wrong in the production there, so there was a guy on 9th street, right about where Grant Street is now, a little past Grant, and he would collect-and this was all open area, you know, just wasteland there, and just some little mom and pop shops in there-and he would 00:25:00collect these cans from the cannery there, and sometimes they had some residual food residues in there, and Stan Brooks in '67 said "you know, we get the cheapest one, you get the ones that cost two cents a can instead of three cents a can when they're washed cans. You get those." Fine, didn't really matter. I planted them in there and had these seedlings growing in there, about a thousand of them, and of course I didn't know which were males and which were females, but whatever. And after one year the roots were growing into that metal there, and in the spring of 1968 when I wanted to transplant them out in the field, turned the can upside down, I'd try to shake it out; it won't come out now. A thousand cans I had to cut open with metal tinsnips.

ST: To get the plants out.

AH: Yeah, to get the plants out. And I did. And out of which then came two selections, which one is Willamette 21041, and Columbia, which was 21040. We 00:26:00planted them at two locations at-one at Coleman's, the 21041, and the 21040, the Columbia, was planted at Goschie's there. And Frank Schwaiger was the head brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch and we had six selections there that we showed them, among what later became Columbia and Willamette. There were four others there, and his taste panel preferred that [unintelligible] and Frank Schwaiger said "no, this is the one that I like, the one that-that Oregon Fuggle. I chose the Oregon Fuggle, that's the one we're going to go for." And that became Willamette there.

ST: So the panel liked Columbia but he chose Willamette?

AH: No, he didn't even like that they did, he liked another one, you understand.

ST: No, I know, but the taste panel there preferred the Columbia selection, right?

AH: No, the taste panel preferred one that was even different from-

ST: Oh, so they didn't, okay.

AH: Yeah, because one of the things that the taste panel-they were always so concerned, they didn't want anything with a very high alpha - so then somewhere in the three or four percent, five percent at the most there. Well Columbia was higher than that, so they didn't want that. Frank Schwaiger liked the 21401...

ST: Willamette?

AH: The Willamette there, and the taste men liked another one, and it was 9202, the selection number there. It didn't get an accession number there. They liked that one better. It was a good yielding one. It was maybe a little bit even later maturity than the Willamette, but anyhow, but he overruled them and that became Willamette then. And then the interesting thing about Willamette is Chuck Zimmerman, who was a plant physiologist, he had left us because the USDA was under constant criticism that most of the hops are grown in Yakima Valley and we 00:28:00don't have any hop research person up there. We put a certain amount of money up there every year, and we put a lot of seedlings and selections up there, and then a plant agronomist actually, not a plant pathologist, by the name of Nelson there, and he would pant in Autumn and, I don't know, not usually follow up.

So other than lip service we really do all that much. I mean we'd go up there and we'd go out in the field and look at things, but nothing really happened that could satisfy the Washington growers. So they finally pushed it through Congress that the hop position was authorized in Yakima, at Prosser in the Yakima Valley there. And it was open for people to apply and Chuck Zimmerman, who was a plant physiologist here and had done all his research to get his PhD but his major professor was killed in a car accident, he got a new fresh PhD 00:29:00that just came out and he and Chuck just didn't get along, and Chuck quit and never got his PhD, although he really knew a lot about hops and had a lot of good ideas. And he was a person that as long as he would throw something on it was great, and he'd lose interest then and turn it over to somebody else.

So he applied and he got the job. And it must have been about '79 that he moved up there, and we were still testing how Willamette and the other selections there, and he for whatever reason thought that that Fuggle is not suited for the Yakima Valley, despite the fact that he worked with a grower up there by the name of Johnny Segal who had a hop farm in the Yakima Valley and was a fairly good size hop grower, in addition to being a dealer there. And they grew Fuggle up there. But Chuck finally succeeded, we finally convinced him that he should grow Willamette up there. He tested and low and behold, it did pretty well in 00:30:00the Yakima Valley as well. Then the Washington growers were interested, although reluctantly so because to them there was no hop better than the Cluster in terms of ease of growing there and reliability of production and good yields there. And it wasn't until the alpha acid on Clusters was insufficient for the hop extractors, who then wanted the more alpha the better, because they could more economically produce hop extracts, and then the Clusters lost favor then. But that was many years later than there.

ST: So that then kind of leads us into Nugget then, once the-

AH: Well, after that's done with Willamette, and of course Cascade was well on its way there. And actually on Cascade I should say Jack Horner was a plant pathologist, and I, we probably did all the work in order to make Cascade to 00:31:00grow there. Stan Brooks was long gone but his name is still associated, and he still thought he was the father of Cascade, but he gave us hills that nobody knew much about except that-Jack Horner and I, we did the mildew analysis and we knew and thought and were convinced that it was resistant to downy mildew, which it was in the crown but not in the cone stage there. In the cone stage it was susceptible, but in the crown, it's always that it's resistant to downy mildew. Whatever.

So yeah, coming back to Nugget than. Well I remember, and that must have been in the late 1970s there, that I was in the office of Dr. Lloyd Rigby, who was the vice president of John I. Haas, who was the world's largest hop grower at the time, in Yakima Valley. I mean they had hops in California, hop yards in California, two of them; four in Oregon; and quite a lot of them in Yakima 00:32:00there. And he said-and at that time they were experimenting with making hop extract there. That had been done in the 1940s by a German guy by the name of Von Horst, and he did alcohol extraction, and it worked pretty well except the product was a tar-like, molasses-like running compound with a green color, because the alcohol extracted chlorophyll there. And that never really caught on there.

So in the 1970s they, not only John I Haas, but there was another hop extract corporation of America, and it was a third one, I can't remember the name of that one though; they experimented with different solvents. One of them was methylene chloride. Well, that's not all that great a compound there, and they knew that it was sort of a-for health reasons. And hexane, and hexane is okay 00:33:00except it's very volatile and it's very, well it could lead to explosions, yeah. But Lloyd Rigby succeeded in getting a hexane plant going there without any big problems. But the major concern of his was we only have a certain amount of high alpha hops that we can use for extraction. Fuggle of course was out, Cascade was out, the alpha wasn't high enough; Bullion and Brewers Gold were typically somewhere around nine, ten, and very rarely eleven percent alpha. Most of the time nine, nine and a half of ten percent.

And there was a hop that released in Australia in the nineteen-the late 1950s, early 1960s called Pride of Ringwood, and another one which is a selection of Ringwood special there that a breeder by the name of Bill Nash who was a native 00:34:00of New Zealand, but he worked for a big hop growing company down in Australia, and he released these hops. The experiment station was near Melbourne and it was called Ringwood, and so it was Pride of Ringwood, a suburb of Melbourne, and Ringwood Special. And we tried to them here but they were so late they would not mature until late October, early November, which is way too late for the Oregon conditions. And they would reliability produce an eleven percent alpha, but the yields were lower than Bullion and Brewers Gold, so nobody was going to be interested. There were too late there. And occasionally there was a Cluster and a Late Cluster, the Late which was really a Cluster seedling there grown up Prosser, the Prosser experiment station there, and it had a reliable eight, eight and a half percent alpha, and it would sort of work alright, but not all that great.

And Lloyd Rigby had told me, he said "well, if somebody will come up with a hop 00:35:00that had one percent more alpha than a Bullion and Brewers Gold, say eleven reliably that will be worth millions to the industry." I said "that can't be, I mean how can"-oh yeah, and he gave me figures that just that many pounds, just one percent there would-it would be dollars there. And I kept thinking about that, that's really interesting now. So I came back and I went through-at that time we already could do the analysis a little more reliably there, and I talked to Gail, who was actually a technician, Gail Nickerson. The chemist was Sam Likens, but he had advanced to be a project leader there, an investigations leader, and he sort of did some chemistry, but not all that much. His major contribution was the working with chemists to do work on the fractions of alpha acid, which was done by [unintelligible] distribution which was a very laborious 00:36:00procedure in the 1960s, and it was really done on a massive scale.

But anyhow, so Gail could-we could analyze, and there was one hop that they had out there, 6509, a female hop there, which had a reliable eleven percent, sometimes twelve percent alpha, and nine percent beta, and I thought actually, that's really something there, nine percent beta. We didn't need the beta but eleven or twelve percent alpha. So I made a cross on that, it probably, it must have been well I'd have to go back -must have been in late seventies that made that cross, and the first year of course we moved the seedlings out in the field. There were other crosses there also there, and I must have had-

ST: So why did you make the cross on that female instead of use that female directly as the new variety?

AH: Why I didn't use the female directly, well for one thing I had lousy storage here.

ST: Okay.

AH: They had very poor storage. And the other thing was that the eleven percent, but it had that much beta there and I thought well, for some reason it had a nice cone type there, it had a good maturity, but at that time we already knew how to assess the storage, and that one had probably a storage-was some of the worst hops that they had after six months in storage; over half of the alpha was gone then.

ST: Okay. So-

AH: Whereas Bullion and Brewers Gold had a little better storage. Not great storage, but after six months we have about maybe seventy percent of the alpha there. So that's why I did that. And also I liked the cone type of 6509, very compact cone like little egg type thing, yeah. It didn't fluff up like a Bullion or Brewers Gold did, and I thought that's better. We had made crosses on Bullion 00:38:00and Brewers Gold and nothing came out of it there. And as a matter of fact, at that time the Australian large brewer there, can't even think of the name right now-Foster's Ale. They had a breeding program that they tried to advance the alpha acid potential for Bullion and Brewers Gold beyond the nine or ten percent there, and they had a person, a PhD, carrying on there who would do mass selection within seedlings, [unintelligible] seedlings, and they would have I think three or four thousand a year, and the common wisdom at that time was alpha acid is a multigenic trait. It takes years of selections with little steps at a time there. It's not a single gain in a year can make a cross and you all the sudden get the quantum increase there.

So I thought well, I was the new kid on the block and so why not. And I selected some males, at that time we could already analyze the males already there, and there was a male that they had out there called 63015 and 63015M, and that was an interesting one. It had gland basis and analysis about fifty-five percent of the gland of that was alpha there. And it had also good storage. There was what they call the safe period, which Gail had developed that method there, and it had one of the longest safe periods, almost as good as a Cluster, and that's a really interesting male, and I used that one there. And out of that I planted about three hundred seedlings out in the field and the second year, when we had them on the string, I brought them in there and Gail did the analysis and showed it to Sam, who was her boss at that time. They kind of said "no, that Al pulled a trick on you. He put some extra lupulin glands in there, and then you're 00:40:00analyzing and you think you're getting fourteen percent alpha there." "No," I said "Sam, let's go out there and we select some more cones and analyze them."

And he and I did that and they analyzed it and went next day and said "oh wow," and said "that can't be. There was something wrong there, that can't be, we gotta wait for another year," Well, they went up to Lloyd Rigby there and Lloyd Rigby said "whoa, you've got these hops there? Why can't we grow them in Yakima?" "Well," I said "we've got a two-state agreement; everything has to go through the Washington Hop Commission." So the Washington Hop Commission was asked, sent out a questionnaire to Washington growers and said what do you think about these hops down in Oregon that they would like to test here in Washington? And supposedly they were at fourteen percent alpha there. Well, at that time the highest we have up there was like their Late Cluster there, Late with about eight, eight and a half there, and ninety percent of all hops in Yakima were 00:41:00Clusters there. And of course out of ten high alpha hops was number nine in that choice, there. They didn't want those up there.

But Lloyd Rigby wasn't going to take that lying down. He was working for a hop grower as well as a dealer and he said "well, they don't want this to be tested up here, and so we're just going to see if we can get the permission from the USDA to plant these selections," of which I had thirty-seven of them. They were in that category there. I'll plant them up there. And so we worked it out through the channels. I wasn't involved in that there, that's the higher ups did that, and they got the okay and we put-bring it legally into the state of Washington for experimental purposes.

And we did and Lloyd Rigby was suspicious, said "well, we can't really move them out in the field there. Why don't we-we've got five acres right next to the extraction plant there, can we put a chain link fence around there and we'll 00:42:00plant them there?" And we did, and the next thing legal action was starting to ensue just like that, they were going to force to take them out, pull them out there. Went to court there and in fact our court challenge was thrown out there and we would go out up there, and three years later we released one of them that Lloyd thought there was a good one, and that became noted 210-something.

TE: Who sued, who was suing?

AH: The Washington Hop Commission.

TE: Oh.

AH: Because they felt that a hop with fourteen percent alpha would be a direct threat to the acreage there, because with that much more alpha per acre, it would reduce the acreage there. Yeah, and that's money, yeah, you know. And it took a long time until it finally caught on. But the interesting that happened there is what really pushed, pushed us to speed up the release of Nugget 00:43:00there-of course I was ready to have that released in '86, I was ready to go there-well, Washington and Oregon were the two major hop producers. California was on their way out there. They grew clusters down and they tried all sorts of things to establish other hops as a backbone for their clusters, which they got at premium price because the California cluster was supposed to be somewhat more mellow there. And boys like Schlitz really liked that, the California-grown cluster, but they mentioned they wouldn't pay premium anymore. And the hop production in California went from five growers to four growers to three growers, and finally one, George Signorortti in Sloughhouse, twenty miles east of Sacramento was the only one left there.

But Idaho had a plant pathologist that was hired in the 950s, mid-1950s, 00:44:00probably a medical doctor(?). He got his PhD at Louisiana State, he's a native of Connecticut there. And he took a job up at Palmer experiment station, and supposedly he was working on diseases for agriculture crops, not hops. Alpha alpha, potatoes and so on. But for some reason, he got to be good friends with someone who was a hop grower on the 506 at the time there, and he did some work, and he made mass selections there. And I remember it was in the '60s that he wanted some male hops over there in order to pollinate some of the cluster out fields that he had there, and they also grew a little bit of rose gold over there. So I sent those males over there, and I had to go back and see which ones we sent at that time there. Seems like I remember three of them. And he planted 00:45:00those in a small rose gold yard, and they collected something like thirty or forty or fifty thousand seeds, which he grew up, and then treated with a suspension of downy mildew spores in order to select the more resistant ones. And out of which he selected about ten thousand, and then he whittled it down, and eventually they maybe had about a few hundred that they could move out into growers' fields. And there was one in there that he thought, "that one had about thirteen or fourteen percent alpha there," which became the galena there.

And that was then grown on a commercial plot in Treasure Valley, west of Boise, near Palmer there, and the expect, you didn't really hear about it that much until 1980. There was a shortage of hops there, and the price of hops went from 00:46:00maybe about a dollar, dollar and a half a pound to ten or eleven dollars a pound there. And Bob Jamenko(?) had galena at that time. He already had a name there, galena there. And the Washington(?) growers knew, and the Idaho growers knew that, so they immediately expanded. And he released it there, and it immediately expanded. Now, Washington had a quarantine. They couldn't import legally there, but there was a guy there by the name of- can't think of his name, and Pete something- Pete... Can't think of the name now- who made a deal with one of the Idaho propagators who had had the hop yard, and had it held up, and had lots of extra rhizomes there. And... Pete Simensky, Simensky was his name. And Pete Simensky bought these hops in the fall of 1980, planted them out in rows in near 00:47:00Brasser(?) in the spring of 1981, and by the end of 1981 had cup-loads of rhizomes, yeah [laughs]. And galena was on its way there. And he was with nugget. We had a three-acre plot at Paul Sears near Woodburn there, and the boys had already tested it, and they liked it there. And- who was that- MillerCoors company came to us and said can't be in preset because they wanted to go on and released it.

AH: And we went from three acres to thirty acres in one season, and we did propagation up near Aurora. There was a commercial grower, not hop grower, but commercial- that they potted plants-

ST: Nursery, yeah.

AH: Yeah, nursery. And they did the increase, and we went to thirty acres. And 00:48:00Miller offered to, they offered Paul Sears a contract. And they were gonna pay three dollars a pound, plus twenty-five cents a pound for every percent of alpha above nine. And Paul Sears expanded, and so did other growers there. And two years later, they came back with a four-year contract there. [chuckles] Two years later, they came back and said "we've got so much alphas in here already, yeah. Can we buy back your contract?" And I remember Paul Sears saying we had just finished stringing these forty or fifty acres there. And on a Friday afternoon, and on a Monday morning, I told the crew we were gonna go out there and take all the strings down, and that's it, because we're not gonna grow hops. They paid him fifty percent of the contract what he was gonna get if he would grow the hops. He said "well, [I will never need?] labor. I still got about a buck two-seventy-five for not growing hops there." Cause all of a sudden, and 00:49:00everyone went in there. And yeah, it was just exploding there.

And then everybody said, "you know, we always thought there was a multigenic thing." And I said that's what I thought too. And we didn't know until several years later. Well for one thing, we found out really quickly that there was a good storing hop. Yeah, it had not quite as good as cluster, which was the best storage stability. But about ninety percent of cluster, and there was no other hop that had that storage. Galena was good, but not quite as good there, but it almost had fairly decent storage.

So these two were the two major high alpha hops there. Well, we had a hop congress here somewhere in the '80s there, and I remember the German, the head of the German hop growers' association, Alfred Cassler there, was here, and we went to a hop yard at Crosby's, it's up at Butteville road there, and there was 00:50:00a crop sitting in there. And in looking at it, it was probably about maybe twelve-bale there. And he went up there, the German guy, and he said "oh my god." He said, "there's just no way we can compete with this, and there's just nothing we can grow like that. fourteen percent alpha, two-bale- twelve bales per acre there." I was like, "well, just give it time. You'll catch up there." And they did. So they've got now hops that are sixteen percent alpha. I heard, supposedly, one's that's twenty percent there.

So, what we always thought, and Sam Likens and I published a paper, and it was mostly Sam's idea, said "well, you know, you take a lupulin, which is a resin gland there. And there's only so much room in a resin gland there. There's the soft resin, which is there from the beta that's from the hard resins, there are the waxes, the oils and a certain amount of water there. Maximum potential of 00:51:00alpha in the gland would probably be maybe twenty-five percent there." And that's probably still holding there, because there's only about twenty-five percent in the lupulin. That's quite a bit, quite a bit of alpha there.

ST: And then multiply that times a large yield, and then suddenly per acre, you have a lot of alpha, so... Can we [adjusts microphone]

TEM: Okay, now we're rolling.

AH: This almost looks like the eyepieces from a microscope there. [Tiah laughs]

ST: It does, yeah. That's why first time I saw it, it was the same thing, yeah.

AH: Well after nugget, and then of course galena also, I think that's when all the floodgates opened there. And there's enough potential. And of course, the extract they really loved it there. An interesting thing happened with galena when it was extracted. Now, that's what these nugget and galena were designed 00:52:00for is extract hops there. And at that time, the major hop processors, which was Steiner hops extract corporation of America subsidiaries, Steiner SS Steiner, and John I. Hass, And now, of course, with Yakima chief, which was originally a large hop grower in the Yakima Valley, but they were bought out by a hop grower [brobiniac?], and now they called them Yakima chief. They bought the name from the cannon hop growing family in Yakima there. They all use liquid supercritical CO2 for extraction, and the hexane plant was discontinued because it was just a little bit too risky. It's a solvent that could lead to explosions there. So that was one on its way there.

The interesting thing, as mentioned before that galena- it's not quite that good a keeper as nugget, but even nugget would have had a problem. Typically, what they do, they would powder- they would grind the hops down, run it through the 00:53:00hailmill(?), make pellets and then use the pellets to get it into the extraction chamber because they could get more hops in there than they could with just leaf hops there. So what happened on a Friday afternoon at Hopsteiner Hop extract corporation subsidiaries, they had fifteen-hundred pounds of galena that they extracted- they were gonna extract there. So what they typically do, they run 'em through the mill and have the powder sitting there so that on Monday morning, when they start out the extraction there, they can make the pellets and directly feed 'em into the extraction chamber there. On Monday morning, they had turned black because they were sitting there, common storage there, room temperature- I don't what the temperature outside was there- so that's when they found out that this is something you can't do. You gotta, you make the pellets and you extract them. Don't let them sit around there, they'll turn black. And 00:54:00we then found out also that nugget had above average storage stability there. What we didn't know was that it was resistant to powdery mildew there because we didn't have powdery mildew. That wasn't introduced until the year after I had retired in 1996.

ST: Right.

AH: And you have these papers there that show clearly- Oh, have I given them to you, copies of that? Oh yeah. It clearly shows how they were introduced. And initially, they said "no, no, no, they couldn't have been because we have this plant pathology from England here." Peter Glendennen, who would testify that it would take two meeting types in order this hop, in order to really take hold, it was not [unintelligible] there, they finally said "oh yeah, well there are two mating types, were there anyhow." There was this history of powdery mildews here, which we never had before- was introduced by plant pathologist by the name of Bob Klein who no longer is working hops. [laughter] Anyhow, so I thought that 00:55:00we could tackle the problem of aroma hops there, which was still being imported- not at the same quantities anymore, and also with a little bit more mixture because the Germans had gone ahead and taken a similar selection and they came up with something like Hallertau Gold, which was very similar to Hallertau Mittelfrüh, but not quite the same. They had a Tettnanger which was still grown in the Tettnang area, and they got premium prices for that. And so I thought, well, it was worthwhile, and again, I was gonna go- they were out of polyploid breeding. I had good connections with the hop breeding program in Wye College, England. Peter Darby at that time, his predecessor's Ray Neve, under whom he had gotten his PhD there, Peter Darby had gotten his PhD in there. Ray Neve, Ray 00:56:00Neve had retired, and then Peter Darby had taken over the club(?).

AH: I mean, he had a polyploid Hallertau Mittelfrüh, so we exchanged it had symptoms of high alpha breeding material. And I got the tetraploid Hallertau Mittelfrüh, which I hope is still here. I don't know if John still has it or not.

ST: I have it.

AH: Yeah, you have it. And I met Carleson(?) there. And I selected four of them that after a number of years of testing there, we released as Mount Hood, which had the highest alpha potential- around seven percent there; Liberty, around four to five; Crystal, about three, and Ultra at about four to five- actually four of them there. And we released these initially, Anheuser-Busch was very interested. They thought that there was potential for them growing, and I think Miller liked it there. But I don't know what happened there, but the major 00:57:00brewers today who are all owned by foreign companies, who want to make beer as cheaply as possible, probably using pellets and extract there don't want to use these type of aroma hops, which are now a given to the microbrewers there. So that was the Hallertau Mittelfrüh pedigree, out of which came four, which apparently are still grown on small quantities, but mostly for the craft brewers and the microbrewers there. And the other one that I paid attention to, it was Tettnanger, and I didn't have that one, Tettnanger, but I had some male hops that were monoecious, that is, they also had the female flowers there. And I used one of them that had the analysis, uh, similarity to Tettnanger. And I used a male on that one, and out of that came one selection, which I released as 00:58:00Santiam. And I don't know if that is grown anymore or not there. At one time, they tried it, but I am not aware that there's anybody growing it.

ST: I'm not aware of it either at this point.

AH: And the next one that I did was actually a cross on the German, on the Czech Meridian Saaz, which was probably in terms of hierarchy number one aroma hop ranking there followed closely by Hallertau Mittelfrüh and then Tettnanger there. And out of that, we selected a diploid called Sterling, which we- I had started the commercial production acreage out there at Bolshezev, and when I retired in 1995, it had not been released. I handed it over to my successor, 00:59:00John Henning, and I said "you can put your name on there." First off, the release of the Sterling, I suggested the name and John thought that was great there. And I think Sterling is still going-

ST: It's doing well. Yeah, there's a lot of interest with it in the craft industry, and so we're working on proving some of the agronomics of it, but yeah.

AH: So, and another thing that was interesting- we, I never really paid much attention to ornamental hops except I did get one from Europe in the 1970s, which had a typically reddish, dark reddish-brownish foliage here. And that came from Belgium, and that was, it wasn't a plant pathology, it was an agronomist that I exchanged germ plasm, and I got that from him, and he called it blue muller brewer. It was similar to northern brewer there, but it was really heavily infected with viruses there. And I sent them up to Washington at the time that the plant pathologist there had a program to clean up viruses. And I 01:00:00remember Bob Klein, I must have sent him twenty potted plants up there. I have no idea what happened. He never did anything with them there. And I finally made some crosses on that Northern Brewer, and selected- there were about fifty or sixty seedlings there in the greenhouse at once, the seedlings had dark foliage there. And some of these are still out in the field, and one of them supposedly now is being released as velvet, uh-

ST: Scarlet.

AH: -Scarlet there. There was a male there also that I hope is still in the program there. So you say yes, and that's great there. It's a single typify, a single gene, it was segregating three to one in favor of three marine-

ST: The color.

AH: -and one reddish color there. So a single recessive there.

AH: And another thing that I had collected open farming a seed on a female hop 01:01:00that had sort-of lemon-colored leaves early in the spring, and toward the end of the season would turn a little bit darker there. And that came from an English hop called Sunshine there. And that was a Sunshine seedling that was grown up as well- thirty-five I and another one with I (eye) because Stan Brooks at that time used the I's as introduction. And he had gotten his Sunshine from England there as a seedling. He couldn't get the Sunshine that Professor Salmon had developed in the 1930s there because for some reason, there was a law that they didn't allow. But he could get seedlings, and he selected these seedlings there. And they were out in the field, and I crossed- no, there were some males that had that color gene also in there that were in the germ plasm collection that I inherited from Stan Brooks, and on what I thought was the Saazer- I'd have to go 01:02:00back on that one there- but anyhow, there were some seedlings that I selected there that grew really well, better than the original Sunshine seedling from England there.

And I released two of them, one of them as seedlings, and one was Sunbeam and the other one was Bianca there. Well, that's now available and there's some growers who are growing it. My daughter down in California's saying "Oh, dad, can't I get them?" And I guess I gave her some rhizomes there. And the latest thing was she said there was a, there was a home brewer down, a microbrewer down in the Sacramento area that she gave a few pounds of that to him. And he brewed with that, and he turned the hop, the beer in at a craft show that they have down there and won first prize [laughter].

ST: It was Bianca or-

AH: Bianca.

ST: Bianca.

AH: Yeah, it has eight percent alpha there, you know. And it came, it's got a 01:03:00strong, it's got a strong Saazer background. I'd have to go back and see the pedigree, where they came from.

ST: Uh, Sunbeam, Bianca, Bianca came out of Saazer thirty-eight. It must be open-pollinated.

AH: Okay, that's where it came from, yeah. Woah, you've got that really, yeah [laughs]

ST: That's what I was pointing at.

TEM: That's handy [laughs]

ST: That's what I was pointing at earlier.

AH: That's it, Saazer. And the Saazer thirty-eight, that's right. That was the one I got from Steve Kennen(?) there because he made selections, and he gave me different numbers there. I think there was supposed to be Saazer, Saazer [galls?]

ST: [galls?], yeah [galls?]

AH: And I got that when I must have collected that seed on that Saazer there. Yeah, so that's it. And I guess the micropores were just really happy there that [laughs].

ST: Yeah, well Comet too, so... Comet, uh.

AH: Comet, is that one?

ST: No, but it looks like- you know, we have this new race of Powdery Mildew, and there might be some evidence that Comet has some resistance to it.

AH: Oh, really? Yeah, well Comet was a hop that Chuck Zimmerman had, was really involved in when he was still here, and he grew it out here- it had a number there, and I'd have to, is thirteen at the end there-

ST: I see, Comet's on there.

TEM: Yeah, sixty-two, zero, thirteen, yeah.

AH: Oh, thirteen. Yeah, yeah, okay, I remember thirteen [Tiah laughs]. Haven't thought about that one in a decade [laughter]. I knew there was a thirteen.

ST: Where is it?

TEM: On the left.

AH: And, and what happened-

ST: Oh, there it is!

TEM: Yeah.

AH: Chuck had a buddy that worked for- there was a hop extract facility. It was owned by some other high tech company or something out in the Chicago area there, and there were in Port Washington something there near Chicago. And this guy came out here in the summer usually, and he and Chuck were good buddies, and 01:05:00they'd go out there. No, he worked for Miller. And Miller Brewing company wanted to get a high alpha hop, and Comet had typically twelve or thirteen percent alpha there, but it had an aroma that was not all that great in terms of hand rubbing them and sulfide little hoops in there.

AH: Well they expanded- Chuck released it under the- it was his name there, and my name was on there too I think, and Jack Horner and Sam [Blackensen?], maybe Gail. And it released, and it got the name from Comet, Halley's Comet, that that that came through here, and it shot up to about nine-hundred acres, which was about covered in thistle [laughter] because it had very strong, almost offensive aroma in a while, aroma component there. It was great in extraction there, yeah.

But then, you know, when Galena and Nugget came along there, the thirteen 01:06:00percent alpha didn't look that great anymore there. And it was looking more difficult to grow, it was a latent-dewing hop also typically here in the valley. And it was susceptive to Downy Mildew. But in the valley, it would not until middle September around the fifteenth to twentieth, which was quite late there.

ST: That's pretty late, yeah.

AH: And in Yakima, it was even later there, so it never really went anywhere there. But at one time, it grew fairly rich there, and they used up the extract they had made with it. And Comet has sort of yellowish leaves there, but they turn dark at the end of the season there.

ST: So of all the hops that you've developed, do you have any that are, you're particularly fond of or that you're really proud of?

AH: I always liked, I always liked Nugget the best because I thought- not because of the alpha there- but it had a very compact cone there. We knew, when you see that rolling off the dribble belts all by its own, the picking machine- you know what that looks like. Oh boy, you look at it, it's so clean, it's just 01:07:00amazing there. And easy picking there, and clean-up there. It's- I'm sort of surprised that it didn't really catch on more than it did. It did catch on- well, they grew it in, in Europe and they may still grow it in Romania, Bulgaria, somewhere there. I heard of several thousand acres being grown, but I don't know. And in Germany, for some strange reason, they like Galena quite a bit, which was great. And then we had a German exchange- I mean, we got material from them, they got material from us there. They always complained they were too late over there, and Galena was earlier. So they crossed on Galena, and they came up with a hop named Magnum, which has a little bit more than Galena, probably around fourteen, fifteen percent. Then they have one they call Herkules, which supposedly is like seventeen or eighteen percent alpha.

ST: Right. Way up there.

AH: They had one that they called Taurus, which had- I think it was Taurus- had about sixteen or so percent, but it was very difficult to grow. It didn't have the production there that make- instead of what we call bales, instead of having maybe eight or nine bales, there were six bales, and that was not good enough anymore there.

ST: Not enough, yeah.

AH: But the Herkules, apparently, has good production and uh, sixteen or seventeen percent alpha, they say eighteen percent alpha.

ST: That's all that I had to hear.

TEM: Well, I'm curious about, um, the sensory panels and how, how much they, what they [laughs] like who composed them, and then how much sway did they have or influence did they have on the research on your end? Or is it funding?

AH: Well, let's start with the big brewers there. How much influence, how much 01:09:00effectiveness, how much attention is being paid to sensory panels? Zilch, nothing.

TEM: Oh.

AH: Why? They all use extract, and extracts don't have oil, the oils. You throw away. It's that the oil isn't enough, it's a matter of fact. The problem was when Lloyd Rigby got big into [launching the?] hops at that time with the hexane extraction there and then later on with the supercritical CO2, the main problem with hops that were grown in Oregon was that they partially seeded there, semi-seeded there. Yakima hops were mostly seedless there, and Lloyd told me, he said, "well, the big problem we have is that when we extract, we get the oils also there. And we can put the extract with the can to fit a certain brew kettle, whether that's pound or half-kilo or whatever there." So he was the- 01:10:00he's a very ingenious man there. Uh, he devised a method to de-seed before they would pelletize them for extraction there, so they got the seeds out of there.

AH: And that worked fine. Otherwise they would have trouble to put enough weight into a given either half-pound or pound can, or half-kilo or kilo or kilo extract because all they do is just put the can into the [kettle?] and boil it and that's it there. And that's the easy thing. They didn't have to do any dosage, that's all. So that was, that was the one thing there.

And now at the craft brewer level, or the microbrewer level or mini-brewer level, like Sierra Nevada or the ones up in Portland which are now approaching a million barrels, and maybe even exceeding a million barrels a year production there- yeah, they must have people there with a very keen nose that they pick 01:11:00out some that they like better than others there. I don't know.

ST: They do, yeah.

AH: Yeah, but then, they also use other aroma components besides hops. There was one beer that was made by a company, a brewing company that doesn't exist anymore except at one time when there were at Northwestern, I think or something, yeah. Remember that?

TEM: Mhm.

AH: They were up in the Portland area, and they had about a thirty-thousand-barrel capacity there. And a guy by the name of Bernau, last name or something-

TEM: Oh, was it Jim? Jim?

AH: Jim Bernau, and he's in, heavily in with the wine up there.

TEM: Yeah, yeah.

AH: Well he started, he was a graduate of U of O, and he started at Northwestern brewery up in the Portland area. As a matter of fact, a brewer with the [name of Marion, something bridge there?]. And then he expanded and started a brewery out somewhere in the east coast there. And before that, they donated half a million 01:12:00shares of Northwestern to food science over there, and food science sold that at nine dollars a share there, and half a million shares and they started that program there with that money there. And then old Northwestern went bankrupt there, but they had a beer that was heavily flavored with lemon there. And that was for summer beer, it drank like a beer, didn't taste like beer. But ladies liked that real well there, pretty good, and Jim Bernau, he lost it. He went bankrupt on that thing there.

ST: That did prompt another question for me, but she had one. So, uh, working with the brewers, I guess in your case mostly the macrobrewers, the large brewers, did you get a lot of meaningful feedback to help guide the breeding program, or did you sometimes feel like you were shooting in the dark a little bit as to what direction you should go?

AH: I don't want to be quoted on that [laughter].

ST: You don't want to be- okay, alright.

TEM: That means it's a good answer.

AH: I mean, I did get some, but nothing very meaningful. Nothing really-

ST: Helpful.

AH: Yeah, yeah. We got more meaningful things from beer drinkers there, yeah.

ST: Okay.

AH: But, it was almost where we would have to go ahead regardless. Now, French Shwiger(?), yes, his was, I never met the man in person there. He did not come to the hop research school-

ST: Meetings.

AH: - association, hop research subcommittee meeting, he didn't come to that, he was the vice president up there, yeah. And the one that I met was his, was his brother Joe, Joe Shwiger there. He was on a taste panel in St. Louis. And I remember one time we went in there and we watched them doing that, and they sniffed and they drank and they spit out there. And he had them color lights there and all that sort of thing. But they were tasting beer then that came from 01:14:00a pilot plant as well as the ones that went into production there- that is, into bottling there. They would test that there, but-

ST: So did you have opportunities to have any of your test, experimental hops test-brewed with, pilot systems-

AH: Yeah, right, yeah, we did. And the funny thing was- there's an interesting story. I made a cross in 1970, the same year I crossed with, for Nugget there, and because I had worked with- in Nebraska, I had worked with corn for about four-and-a-half years, and then before that, I worked with wheat. But in corn, there's a very classical study about the, called divergent selection of the corn there. One went high, one went another-

ST: Illinois?

AH: Uh, I don't know. And, uh, and they were always, I've always thought about it. You know, it's interesting there, and the brewers- and at that time, when they got the extraction, they said "well, you know, maybe, maybe you can go to where it's a hundred percent alpha." And I said, "why not?"

AH: So I started to make a cross on a hop that had a very low alpha, about one percent alpha, about nine or ten percent beta there. And I used a male, and I think it was 19-0-46N, but I'd have to go back again there on that cross. And [laughs] I selected about ten of them, gave them to Gail, and Gail said "wow." She said, "there's no alpha. Just trace, trace alpha." Well, I released one as a germplasm thing, just as a novelty there 'cause I thought well, why not there? And that was 21, 21-0-13 was that there, then it became Teamaker there. But-

TEM: 21-1-2-0?

AH: 1-20? It might have been the 20-1-20, yeah.

ST: Yeah, Teamaker's 20-1-20, yeah.

AH: And, uh, but there was much later release there.

ST: Males were much-

AH: Now, it's [common to have?] that one there. And one time, it was Miller Brewing Company that got me out with Larry Brady- no, no, not Larry Brady. He was the chemist there. Pete Rubacher(?), Rubacher or something like that, yeah. He was a chemist there, and he worked for Miller, and he and Sam Blackenwood(?) are good buddies there. And Sam said "well, what do you do with that hop? And see, it has no alpha in there. Maybe you get a beer that has no bitterness there." So we grow about, expanded to five acres up at the hop farm of John Hauser at that time, at, uh, Independence there. It's on the in to St. Paul, you go back there down near the railroad. He grew five acres there, worked like five or six years for Miller there. And they brewed with it, and sure enough, they 01:17:00found out that about 90 IBUs is what they could get brewing with that hop along there.

Well, at that time, my technicians always used that one, and a couple other selections that are no longer here, and make tea, you know. They said, "well, some guy had a guy named Bill to cure them there." And he was actually a pretty interesting guy, but sometimes wild there, especially when it comes to work, working hours there. He'd take his, make his own decision when to go on vacation, I remember. Well, anyhow, so they'd brew, they'd put a handful of hops into a jar and set it out in the sun, and then they'd drink that hop tea. And I mentioned that to the- and they also brewed with it at one time there, and at home there, and really good captain and so on. And we brought some of this home brew to one of the meetings, and they tasted it and then said "oh yeah, that's 01:18:00nice and very tangy, bubbles, and when you pour it out and all that sort of thing, and the bubbles stayed long there." And they brewed with a hop that had almost no alpha in it there, and that's how Miller got interested in it. And for about five years, they brewed with it, and they were gonna use it to supplement the aroma because apparently there wasn't enough oils there with the aroma there that they could put these hops into the brew kettle, maybe even do some dry-hopping with it-

ST: Right.

AH: -and get some more aroma [words after?]. After about five or six years, they lost interest and we pulled up the hops, and nothing happened there. Well, it wasn't until about 2000 and-maybe 2002, 2003- Lloyd Rigby had long been retired from John I. Haas there. And then he did a little bit on the side, much to the chagrin of the people that were the honchos, head honchos of John I. Haas, which 01:19:00then had been bought out by Barth Company, yeah.

ST: Right, right.

AH: So they didn't like that Lloyd still worked, and he said "well, I'm retired now. I can do what I want there." So he called me, he said "do you still have that hop there, down there, that 21-120 there?" I said, "well, yeah. It was released as a germplasm, so anybody can have it there." "Is there any chance we can get some of that thing?" I said, "yeah." There's a guy, a hop grower up in Washington who a lot had it there, and Steve Kinney had it there. And I said, "well, you can get it there. If you can't get enough, you can get it from us here." For some reason, he worked with Johnny Segal there, a hop grower-

ST: Segal.

AH: -and also a hop dealer there. And they established a one or two-acre plot there up in Yakima. And at that time, John was already here, and we talked about it.

AH: And that's when John had first, uh, submitted it- It must have been about 01:20:002003 or 2004- for registration there as Teamaker there. And I said- he asked me, he said, "how about Teamaker there. Can we release it?" And I said, "yeah, why not there? So put your name on first and mine on second, that's fine." So he sent it in to the USDA. Well, uh, about 2006 or 2007, there's a paper being published by- you've got a copy of that?

ST: Mhm.

AH: -by the University of Arkansas, and it was sponsored partially by- um, who are they?- Tyson Foods there.

ST: Yeah, it was one of the poultry dealers.

AH: And they, they used those Teamaker hops to [stutters] as an antibiotic in poultry rations there. And not only did they find out that they could use the equivalent of a quarter pound per ton of feed, and the same thing as streptomycin-

ST: Penicillin.

AH: in the poultry rations there, they could eliminate the use of antibiotics there. And they did a quick-set calculation, and I've still got the copy of the letter that Lloyd Rigby wrote to me. He said "well, Tyson Foods has a quarter pound per ton, it would take the equivalent of two larger hop acreages to satisfy that demand there." Well, then we found out that it had never been released because USDA sat on it there [gasp of surprise]. And it had never gone anywhere! And oh, God, you know, the paper was out and they wanted to get the Teamaker hop, Tyson Foods there. So I talked to Dan Bannewitz(?), I called John and John never answered. I said, "I sent it in there, and I'm not gonna do anything there." I talked to Dan Bannewitz, I said, "you know, that's in a publication now and they said it's listed as released there, and it had not been released." And so Gary said "we're going to fast track that." And he 01:22:00fast-tracked it regardless of John's involvement there. And within six weeks it was released, but it was after the paper had been published.

ST: Yeah.

AH: So. And then what happened there; Lloyd Rigby and Johnny Segal were gonna go ahead and patent that hop for use. And then what Haas and Barth, the one company, had had a patent received the year before for the use of hops in animal feeds, any kind of hops. Well, the new patent that Segal Hops had submitted was the use of zero-alpha hops and Teamaker in poultry rations. And the lawyers just came out of the woodworks there.

ST: Yeah.

AH: And it's still tied up. It's still tied up in there.

ST: So, Barth actually owns the patent on using it?

AH: Of hops, yeah. And it was a patent that should have never been granted.

ST: Well, oh, yeah.

AH: It was poorly written there. It was awful there, the way it was written 01:23:00there. But whatever. And Lloyd passed away about, three, four years ago, and the last time I talked to his widow was like two or three years ago. They had then started some feeding rations with the beef cattle there because it would even work better. Cows have got the four-part stomach there, it would go in there and would really render them immune to some of the other diseases there, would kill that. And again, a quarter pound or whatever, and it would be great. It would be great for sheep. They've tried it on Turkeys there, Tyson did there, and it worked fine. And now, we can't get it because it hasn't been- and then it went to the food development(?) specialist up in [describes a location?], and they officially said, "we have to do feeding plots, yeah. It would take like a hundred million dollars and it would right through the whole thing." But those publishers backed off, and nobody's doing anything anymore.

But there's another interesting thing, and I was in [Wafley?] there also there. And again, so innocently there, these people in Port Washington or something- they wanted to, there was some extraction thing near [Jecaboh?] there. And about two chemists, and I would occasionally meet them because they would also come to the hop research-

ST: Hop research meeting.

AH: Hop research meeting, yeah. And I had gotten- I had a friend over in Austria who was a chemist, and he worked for a large company there. Big beach over there, and they make... And they had a big problem there, in August did too here. The way you make sugar, with cane or beet or whatever, you break it up in small parts, smash it, chisel it or whatever and put it in these huge extraction vats and heat them up a little bit and let dilution, let the water seep out the sugar. And then concentrate it from there, that's great. Well, it was like the Bacillus is there, and it develops there, it grows naturally there so what do 01:25:00they do?

AH: Well, they happily dumped in formaldehyde there, formalin there and it controlled it, but the Europeans were the first ones that found out that formalin is really a carcinogen there. Despite the fact that when you have sugar, that's not in there, but just the idea they used a carcinogen to make crystalline sugar with only the crystallized that's pure there. That's one of the purest major compounds you can buy off the shelf, it's almost pure there. There's no formalin in there, but they all thought that there was in Europe there. So [laughs], so what they did do then, and the first thing they tried to raise the temperature to kill the, that Bacillus, and that didn't work all that well there. And they had a chemist by the name of- I've still got the paper there, I can't think the name of it now- and that chemist played around with hop extracts there. And he put fifty parts per million, among other concentrations, 01:26:00into the extraction there, and controlled the [rack of?] Bacillus there. It's a gram-positive organism, and beta acid particularly, but also alpha is but beta acid particularly is a very bacteriostatic for gram-positive bacteria. They wanted to get that going there, over there. And so I talked to, and I had to take that translated from German into English there, and I gave it to these guys and they laughed at it. They said "oh, we've never had any problem. We can still use formalin here." Ah, yeah, later they don't [laughter]. And they called me, and they said "you still have, you still have somebody." There was a mention of them that the hop extractors, Steiner particularly- Bob Smith, is that that chemist down there for Steiner?

ST: Mhm.

AH: Yeah, and I had talked to him. He said "we've got about thirty big barrels, fifty-gallon barrels that they kept dumping to the waste treatment facility out in Yakima because municipal water supply treatment facility can't dump it in, 01:27:00and we don't know what to do with it." So they said, "do you still have the name of this guy?" "Yeah," I said. I guess I gave them the phone number, and I called them about three weeks ago. "We sold it all at five cents a pound!" [laughs] And that's the golden thing now. The sugar industry, they use the beta acid now, the one that's left over, took all the base extract that's left over from the hop extraction there.

TEM: Hmm.

ST: Yeah.

AH: They're happy, they get rid of it, they get a little bit of money. The sugar industry is using it, not much is being said about it if Food and Drug Administration is not involved anymore there, and that's been done. And I asked, uh, Gene Probasco from Haas-

ST: Haas.

AH: -also there. "oh yeah," he said, "we've got a business of that one there. We don't say much about it, it's not a big business there." But they get rid of the base extract because otherwise, whatever. So that's a nice, interesting thing there.

ST: Particularly, yeah, yeah.

AH: But these are the things that you get involved, you just keep your ears to 01:28:00the ground, and hear a bit here, a little bit there and put two of them together. I didn't get anything out of that at all, no publicity or nothing there. The Teamaker hop for use in poultry rations, that would be great there. That would be an additional great outlet for the hop industry.

ST: Unfortunately, it's all tied up in litigation

AH: [mumbles], yeah.

ST: And that's been in litigation for a long time, years.

AH: Well they're just hoping it dies. And I keep asking, and George occasionally- don't have much contact with Helena(?). "Oh," she said, "yeah, we're still working on it." Oh, and that paper- do you have the paper from Lethbridge on the beef cattle?

ST: Beef cattle, yeah.

AH: They did that, and it was great. As expected there, worked fine there.

ST: Yeah, worked fine, yeah.

AH: Yeah. And I don't know if the Canadians have only handled it or not.

ST: I haven't heard.

AH: Maybe the best thing is to not say much about it. It's a natural product; 01:29:00we're not breaking any laws. And Lloyd Rigby, at the time, told me when he wanted to get the beef cattle experimentation going. He said, "we can't do it in the states because we can't use, they can't this crop," he said, "for our feed." But Canada has different laws, and they can do that there. And they have been. It's a large-scale trial, and Carl Rigby told me that, at the time, that the will. He said it was still on hold, and then the paper came out, and I got the copy of the paper there. But not much is being said about it.

ST: Yeah.

AH: So I don't know. If I had known in 1970 what I knew thirty years later, then I would have gone ahead and released it as a variety there. But Lloyd Rigby didn't have these ideas until he was retired already; that's when he called me [Tiah laughs]. He said, "do you still have it?" "oh yeah, sure, I have it, it's released as a germplasm line there." But... interesting. [laughs]

ST: Thanks. That's all I got.

TEM: That's me.

AH: Yeah.

TEM: What, um- is there anything that you want to close with, anything else that you...?

AH: No, I wish that some of the- weren't some of the ornamental hops are still- I think Bianca is being propagated down in California now [chuckles], after my daughter had aimed to grow all of a sudden. She said, "oh, these people that wanted more Bianca there, said it just got released or just [Halley Gopin?] had sent them some rhizomes a dollar a piece. She said, "that's what I did last year, I didn't have enough. It's gotta have more." [chuckling]. And she said Bianca down there- she lives in Elk Grove, it's twenty-five miles south of Sacramento- said it's a huge production, just cones all over the place. She doesn't have it strung up high there, just above the fence-

ST: But it does well, huh?

AH: Yeah She said it just, it just really produced so well.

ST: I like Bianca. It's a pretty plant.

AH: [laughs] Yeah.

ST: It's got kinda the reddish stem and the yellow leaves. It's pretty.

AH: One of my German friends has it over there. He's got a big- he used to give 01:31:00to a hop grower there, but he got out of hops years ago. He's got a Gasthaus there and a hotel there, and he breeds racehorses there, and he has it sitting there in his yard there in a big pot there [chuckling]. But, and I'm sure the people have it too. I know Nichols(?) over there, at one time, had it. Now she has, doesn't have the Scarlet.

ST: Not yet, it's not released. But when it gets released- I've been in touch with them a lot, so-

AH: It's just [unintelligible] there. And you've got the other, the dwarf hop that I threw away there.

ST: Which one?

AH: The dwarf that came out of Cascade seedlings there. The dwarf seedling.

ST: Oh, in my program.

AH: Yeah.

ST: Yeah, yeah. Those are going forward.

AH: Yeah. I've always thrown these out because I didn't want to have hop that's just grown like that [Tiah laughs].

ST: No, uh, I'll tell you about that off-mic [laughter]. When we're done with you-

TEM: That's like people, people will now want to know everything that's off-mic.

ST: Well, we can talk about that later, but we're not there yet.

TEM: No, we're nowhere near there.

ST: I mean, we can go on mic later.

AH: So what did you want to know?

TEM: No, you've told me everything I want to know. I wanted to know the stories of, the back stories.

AH: Alright, I could tell you all sorts of other stories [laughs]. Interesting stories that happened all of a sudden- I think "oh, I never thought about that." Is there anything I can come to mind there? Well, oh, not right off-hand there.

ST: Hmm.

AH: But maybe something.

ST: Well it is noon, so-

AH: Yeah?

ST: It's noon, so that's all I got.

AH: Well, I might go on.

TEM: Okay, then I will say thank you and I will turn off the recorder.

AH: Whatever you can-