Travels with Barley (33 page)

The other peculiarity of hops—or hops farms, at least—is that they are female bastions; the 1.6 million individual hops plants here at Elk Mountain are all female. In fact, when I asked, in ignorance, whether male plants were kept around the farm for breeding purposes, Don Kloth looked at me as if I'd pronounced Satan's name.

“The last thing you want is a male plant anywhere around here,” he said.

The reason: males pollinate females. Pollinated females produce seeds in their cones. Brewers consider seeds worthless; they add bulk to hops while reducing production of lupulins—compounds that contain oils and resins that provide aroma and bite to beer. One male plant could potentially wreck an entire harvest by infesting a crop with worthless, seedy cones. Thus, male hops, if they are kept at all, are locked up securely in closed greenhouses. In fact, continental Europeans so fear the havoc they could bring to cultured hops that they have exterminated male plants in the wild.

Hop cones are actually flowers and they begin to reach their peak at the end of July, giving growers a short window to harvest them before they become overripe and too fragile to pick. That's why the hops harvest is traditionally a manic effort carried out in three weeks between early August and early September. At Elk Mountain, for example, Gary Wittgenstein aims to get the entire crop in within twenty days or less, working three shifts round-the-clock, seven days a week.

There are probably 100 commercial varieties of hops worldwide though only half of those have wide commercial appeal. New varieties, based upon aggressive hops-breeding research being carried out mainly in the U.S. and Germany, are being invented all the time. As noted earlier, hops fall into two major categories: bittering hops and aroma or finishing hops (also known as noble hops). In the lager-saturated years before America's craft brewing revolution, bittering hops predominated. These days, aroma hops have made a strong comeback, thanks mostly to the demand of craft brewers. The hops grown at Elk Mountain are exclusively aroma hops—in this case Saaz and Hallertau, Saaz of Bohemian origin, Hallertau of German origin. Both are part of the Budweiser recipe though they aren't used in Michelob—all Michelob hops are imported.

It would be hard to get closer to a hops harvest than I am now, about eighteen feet off the ground in the open air cockpit of a hops combine, a hulking, lumbering, clattering beast moving along at about two miles an hour and towing a top-heavy hops carrier behind it. This machine, one of four like it on the Elk Mountain Farm, costs a quarter of a million dollars and is a BARI-customized hybrid of one type of mechanical harvester used in America's Pacific Northwest hops fields. Until the first mechanical picker came along in 1958, all hops were harvested by hand—a job that through the start of the twentieth century here and abroad was often left to women and children, who flocked into the fields by the thousands.

The combine's job is to cut the vines free from the top of their trellises and strip them of hop cones and leaves, which are then shuttled by conveyor into the hops carrier—a large truck cab saddled with a storage bin so big that it looks like some gigantic Tonka toy ready to tip over. Cones and leaves, once the carrier is full, take a short ride to a processing plant. The vines are passed through and chopped up into mulch that eventually will be returned to the fields. This is all done by an ingenious system of arms, cutters, strippers, and conveyor belts aboard the combine. There is a small amount of hand labor to this: one or two workers with machetes, and wearing chaps, walk ahead of the combine, cutting the vines free from the ground about three feet above the row. (Hops being perennials, this left-behind stalk gives the plants nourishment to feed on and thus a head start for the next year.)

The sensation of riding atop a combine is of being on a noisy amusement park ride with hop chaff flying everywhere and deep hop aromas saturating the air. I love the smell but one drawback of hops work is that a small number of workers develop severe allergies, including chronic headaches, that prevent them from working anywhere near hops again. And for some reason, hop fields attract legions of stinkbugs, which are nuisances but not predators. Hops succumb to the aforementioned mildews, viruses, aphids, and mites, but neither birds nor animals eat them. I count about twenty stinkbugs up in the cockpit but they don't raise a stink: the hop smells are too overpowering. The only tricky part to my four-minute ride is the requirement that I duck down every twenty-eight feet to avoid losing my head to the cables that support the field's wire grids. (It's not a hard thing to remember.)

Back on the ground, Gary Wittgenstein, who has run the farm since 1991, catches me up on where the harvest stands. It began on August 12; this is the eighth day and Wittgenstein hopes to be done in another twelve days, barring some hiccups or an outright disaster. The hiccups usually involve mechanical failure of one or more of the combines or any of the other ninety-nine vehicles deployed to get the crop in. Disaster would be heavy rains that would bog down the combines and carriers in the fields. The Kootenai River runs right through this property, providing the farm's irrigation water, but rain can turn the farm's river bottom soils to mush. Rain, if too heavy, could even down trellises. By one estimate, a mere inch of rain falling on Elk Mountain's fully matured and cone-laden vines adds 100 tons of weight to the trellis system. The weather thus far, though, has been flawless.

It's clear that for Wittgenstein, a career Anheuser-Busch employee who worked his way up from office boy by going to accounting school at night, this isn't exactly a job—it's a calling, and the way he speaks about the farm he might as well be talking about his own spread. Also a Midwesterner, he's a personable man with a selfdeprecating sense of humor who shows flashes of disarming candor. When I ask him how long it takes to learn to drive one of the combines, he laughs and says, “Well, you pretty much learn to drive it in the first five minutes or we yank you right off of there. It's not rocket science—when you've driven through your first row, you're pretty much a pro. But you know how much these things cost. The real skill isn't in driving the machine but it's in the ear—the ability to tell right away from the sound of things that something's about to go wrong.”

The farm operates year round but in July before harvest starts Elk Mountain runs with only a core of about twenty or thirty employees. That swells to 280 at harvest time, the bulk of them Mexican migrant workers who return year after year to harvest, clean, and process the crops, and then return again in the spring to begin rebuilding the rope trellises. The latter is a particularly labor-intensive and unique job, one usually passed on from generation to generation in migrant families. Called “twiners,” these workers stand on tall wooden platforms that put them within arm's reach of the guide wires from which the trellises are strung. Lengths of rope lay at their feet. The platforms are pulled slowly by tractors and, with the tractor in constant motion—“we never stop,” Wittgenstein tells me—the workers, with ropes in each hand, loop them over the wires, tie loop knots with half-hitches pulled through them, and draw the ropes tight. An average twiner will tie about 13,000 knots a day; by the time all the trellises at Elk Mountain are restrung, they will have looped in place 13,000
miles
of hemp rope.

“It's something to see,” says Wittgenstein. “Every time they pull one rope tight they have to be ready to tie another one. And mind you, they do this one-handed. I can tie the knots but I have to use two hands. Some people can't do it at all. Some people can do it all day. It's really one of the great issues we face out here—in the future will we be able to find people who can still do this?”

We leave the hops fields for a look at the processing plant, for a short while following one of the truck carriers as it bounces precariously across rows to deliver its load. “It looks like those things will tip over at any moment but we've never had one do that,” says Wittgenstein.

The first stop is a cleaning shed—like the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis, a model of clattering innovative machinery and impeccable order. Here, leaves, stems, and cones are dumped onto a conveyor that, with the help of a series of screens, drums, and dribble belts, separates out the hop cones and eventually lets them drop onto yet another belt for a trip to a vast kiln. There, they are raked level to a depth of about three feet.

The kiln is actually a series of large bins with vented floors through which gas-heated air is forced up through the hops. They are dried at an average temperature of 150 F. for about nine hours, a process that removes all but about 10 percent of their moisture, then sent to a cooling room for another twelve to twenty-four hours. They are then conveyed to a hydraulic baling device and pressed into rectangular 200-pound blocks, then sewn by workers using stitching machines into cloth bails that measure 20 × 30 × 55 inches. By this time, the cones have flaked into fluffy green-gold particles loosely resembling dried oregano (or marijuana). The bales are then shipped to Anheuser-Busch's breweries, where they are stored at 26 F. until they are used.

As we move on to other parts of the farm, Wittgenstein begins to tell me about his goals for this harvest. It looks like a good year; the farm in the past few years has produced somewhere between 1.8 million to 2 million pounds annually. Weather is the main ingredient; cool, 50 degree nights and 80 degree days are optimal and that's been pretty much the story of the summer so far. Under those conditions, hop bines have been known to grow a foot, even two feet, a day. One barometer of progress is how far the vines have climbed up the trellises by the end of June. By that time they should be close to the top; in fact, “If they're not there by the Fourth of July, we're calling St. Louis and begging for forgiveness,” Wittgenstein says.

This year, they made it with time to spare, so he's hoping the harvest will be on the two-million-pound side. But late rains could spoil things.

I ask him whether there's no way to predict the harvest by averaging the number of cones on a vine. He laughs and says, “we drive ourselves nuts every year trying to figure out how many cones are on a bine. We'll know that when they're in the bale.”

We spend the rest of the morning looking at Elk Mountain innovations—a test plot of hops being nurtured by a new drip irrigation system that promises to increase yields while cutting water use. But all along the way, Kloth and Wittgenstein are pointing out other things as well.

“See those clear cuts on the mountains?” Kloth tells me. “They're man-made to create huckleberry habitat to feed the grizzly bears.”

Later, when I remark for about the fourth time on the beauty of the farm and its surroundings, Wittgenstein tells me that perhaps the farm's most powerful admirer is his ultimate boss, August Busch III, who comes out to visit at least twice a year. Anheuser-Busch, given its buying power, didn't
have
to be in the hops-farming business. “People say, ‘Why do you farm hops?' Well, it's the romance and passion of the industry,” says Wittgenstein.

I leave Idaho the next day in a rainstorm, finding myself worrying about those rain-soaked trellises and the extra 100 tons of weight they've taken on. But when I phone back later, I learn the rain was short and Wittgenstein's crews pushed on through it, finishing the harvest a day ahead of schedule.

And Gary Wittgenstein had bagged his two million pounds.

Jackson, Miss.
—As tempting as it was to stick to the Great River Road and meander through the Delta at the speed of the Mississippi, I'd found myself driving through the countryside in deep thought about the Beer Goddess and her ubiquitous and salutary role in beer retailing. Jeff at Ground Zero had put her into the Perfect Beer Joint mix, as had probably 75 percent of the other people (admittedly mostly males) that I'd posed my Perfect Beer Joint question to. The Grassers back in St. Louis had merely reconfirmed it with their adoring description of Pam at Gladstone's. And then there was Maria back at Paul's in Dubuque.

Having seen the phenomenon in full bloom along the River of Beer, I wondered if I were missing some larger point?

Then it struck me. America being the entrepreneurial hothouse that it is, the phenomenon hadn't simply become spontaneously institutionalized—it had also been made into a franchise and applied to high corporate purpose.

So I diverted from the Delta and headed east to a place where it might be possible to see real live modern Beer Goddesses in orchestrated action. I was almost certain, based upon a previous drive through, that I could find, tucked just off the Interstate in Jackson, a Hooters restaurant.

My previous Hooters exposure had been limited to a brief visit some years before to a Hooters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where on assignment to write a piece about zydeco music I'd killed time drinking a beer while waiting for an interview. Though it was impossible to miss the assemblage of Beer Goddesses back then, I simply hadn't much thought about it. But I realized now—of course—that Hooters was at its heart a beer joint franchise that had made the Beer Goddess the stylized centerpiece of its business plan.

Now, my ruminations on the Beer Goddess are not meant to denigrate the iconic role of the wise and understanding barman in beer joint lore. The Coach and Sam at Cheer's are still important in the beer-joint retailing world. But let's face it: with 84 percent of all beer in the U.S. consumed by men, the basic concept of using women to successfully sell the stuff is pretty solid. I'm also not suggesting that the association of beer and winsome women is anything new. Those beer-loving Sumerians trained women as servers for their taverns and, as noted earlier, beer making and beer selling were largely the province of women through the Middle Ages. For centuries in the West, the prototype of the modern Beer Goddess was known as the barmaid (a term now considered by many to be not just antiquated but sexist). One of her first appearances in literature comes in 1390 in Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
when, in a modern rendering of the passage, the Miller describes a randy cleric:

Prototypical Beer Goddesses also populate Shakespeare's plays, Manet's paintings, and the literature of James Joyce among many others. And consider this description from a London collection of Victorian essays that sought to capture the lives of those in popular professions of the day. This one was titled “The Barmaid” and, for all its Victorian floridity, lays out very contemporary-sounding insights into the Beer Goddess oeuvre:

Of course, employment of the Beer Goddess isn't confined to the bar. Beer companies since the dawn of beer advertising have used attractive and often buxom women in ads and commercials. Germanic-looking blondes predominated Art Nouveau beer poster advertisements in the 1890s. In 1935, Blatz Beer, another large beer company felled in the Lager Wars, was still giving away colorful promotional statues of a zaftig blond barmaid kicking up her heels, showing a lot of leg and toting four frothy pints of Blatz.

In the 1950s, Carling Brewing Co. rolled out one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history with its ‘'Hey, Mabel, Black Label!” commercials for its Black Label lager. Mabel was a wholesome but sexy blond beer slinger who knew how to make men feel good but didn't threaten women. The spots, and a print campaign, with Mabel played by a succession of comely models, lasted an incredible fifteen years and made Carling, originally a London brewer, a top ten American brewer by 1960. (Carling plummeted downhill in the 1970s. Pabst owns the Black Label rights in America; meanwhile, Coors in 2003 bought Carling Brands' thriving overseas operations from the Belgian brewer Interbrew for $1.7 billion.) Anheuser-Busch's spots of a few years ago featuring the farcical Swedish Bikini Team are but one more contemporary example of the Beer Goddess in advertising, as are the current Miller “catfighting women” commercials in which upwardly nubile young women in bikinis plunge into a swimming pool to fight it out over whether Miller Lite tastes great or is less filling. Still, on the retail front, it seemed to me that Hooters had taken the commercialization of the Beer Goddess to a new high (or low) art, depending on your sensibilities.

I drove into Jackson around the lunch hour and, yes, my memory had served me well, for there was a billboard telling me that Hooters lay just off Exit 100. I took it and spotted the restaurant with its classical diner look and its famous hoot-owl logo—an owl whose huge orange eyes and dilated purple pupils could easily be mistaken for female breasts. This is possible for two reasons: one, “hooters” is indeed both a term for hoot owls and a crude synonym for breasts. The other reason this could be intended is the Hooters credo, which appears on its menus: “Delightfully tacky yet unrefined.”

I also had a journalist's working knowledge of Hooters because it had been in the news for about four years running back in the 1990s when the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission first investigated, then sued the Atlanta-based chain for sex discrimination because it refused to hire men waiters at a Chicago Hooters. Hooters fought back, taking out billboard ads with a large mustachioed guy in a Hooters waitress outfit—owl-emblazoned tank top, orange short-shorts, and flesh-colored stockings—and a caption that said “Washington, Get a Grip!” The EEOC complaint eventually caused so much hooting in the press—one editorial wag suggested that if Hooters fell, men would soon be dancing in the line with the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes—that the red-faced feds dropped the whole thing in 1996. Hooters still gets pilloried about once a year, usually by the National Organization for Women, on the grounds that its uniform and entire concept are demeaning. This is usually rejoined by at least one Hooters Girl (which is what all 15,000 of them nationwide are called) telling some reporter someplace that NOW ought to mind its business, that she adores being a Hooters Girl, and that she can decide for herself whether she is being demeaned. You have to admit it's one of the odder corners of the Culture Wars.

I decided I'd inquire further into the Hooters business model later but for now just wanted to see a Hooters in action. This one was busy and I declined a table, opting instead for a central counter where there were a few empty stools and a good overview of the place. I sat down and a waitress came forward bringing a smile and a menu. She leaned forward, put an elbow on the counter, looked deeply into my eyes, and said, “Hello, my name is Selena and I'll be your girl today.”

I looked at Selena and I smiled, too. For though I knew she was just another cog in the Hooters Beer Goddess machinery it was hard not to appreciate her. She was a tall, statuesque African-American woman in her early twenties with limpid eyes, olive skin, and perfect teeth. She exuded good cheer and good health. And as a bonus she was going to be my girl, which as a professional scribe I knew meant that she was actually going to be my
Girl
. For as I looked around, some of the other seven or eight Hooters Girls working tables were greeting guys (who were 95 percent of the customers) and announcing that they would be their Girls, too. Everybody at Hooters got a smiling and attentive Girl dressed as though she were just heading for the gym for a bout of sweaty aerobics (though Hooters describes the get-ups as cheerleading uniforms).

Now, on one level this seemed like silly, mildly naughty Disneyland shuck. And let's face it: Hooters doesn't fare as well in certain jaded big-city environments where women who frequent bars often dress more provocatively than do Hooters Girls, and where the Hooters concept is often considered hopelessly corny. But, as a seasoned and somewhat jaded traveler who had been abused by grumpy or aloof help in places a lot fancier than this, I could also see that it was shtick that many travelers and restaurant-goers—well, male travelers and restaurant-goers, at least—might very well appreciate.

I was soon joined at the counter by Billy Nix, an off-duty Greenwood, Mississippi, police officer who introduced himself when he sat down. Selena announced that she would be his Girl, too, and Nix, who looked to be in his early thirties, seemed as gratified with this development as I had been. As Selena went off to fetch coffee for Nix, he told me that he was delighted by the presence of Hooters in Jackson and tended to drop by whenever he was in town. “It's good clean fun and good service,” he said.

Selena came back to take our orders, then went off to wait on other customers. I tried to snatch micro interviews with her as she moved in and out of our orbit while Nix regaled me with stories of his work, which had been made all the more interesting by a crack epidemic that he said had swept lots of small and middling-sized towns in Mississippi.

In between all that, I was able to get the basics from Selena. She told me that Hooters afforded her great tips and flexible hours and that people who ran the place were nice, as were her sister Hooters Girls. I asked her what she considered the most important qualification for becoming a Hooters Girl.

“Personality,” she said, not missing a beat. Seeing my skepticism she laughed and said, “No, I mean it. It's important. They're looking for girls who know how to get along with people and to put their customers first. You can't be uptight or grumpy and expect to work here.”

But surely, I pressed, there were other qualifications?

“Well, to be hired you have to be able to do the Hula Hoop,” she said.

This one stopped me: the Hula Hoop?

“Yes, because now and then we're required to do the Hula Hoop for our customers,” she said.

Now, at that moment it was hard not to conjure up Selena, at her Hooters job interview or in the middle of the restaurant, doing the Hula Hoop, and let us be candid enough to admit that it was not an unpleasant image. But as a
Wall Street Journal
editor, I've actually sat in on a few job interviews myself and I was trying to think of any scenario in which I could appropriately ask a woman applicant if … she Hula Hooped, much less if she would perform it for me. But I admit that the comparison isn't exactly apples-to-apples; and anyway, I wasn't going to call NOW over this if Selena wasn't.

However, I did find an interesting account by some real-world NOW operatives who had infiltrated a Hooters in Rochester, New York and filed a report for a 1995 newsletter of the Rochester NOW/WAVE (Women Against a Violent Environment) chapter. After discovering that the Hooters menu was making light of the double entendre that was its name, the two NOW sleuths turned to what they considered sexist sloganeering on the walls before observing some Hula Hooping:

Now, I have to say that I did not observe during my Hooters lunch-hour interval any actual Hula Hooping, nor heads spinning round 360 degrees. But did the male customers sometimes look admiringly at the Hooters Girls? You bet. Is that leering or ogling? And if it is, is it harmful? Well, the average male Hooters customer would likely say that men and women have looked at each other admiringly, often harboring pleasant and harmless fantasies, since the dawn of creation. Our feminist sisters see it as appalling when it grows out of a work environment in which women, in their view, are “objectified.”