Ralph Olson: Yakima's Head of Hops
When many craft brewers think of hops they think of Ralph
August, 1999© 1998 by Alan Moen
The first time I met Ralph Olson was in a brewery - Bert Grant's in Yakima, to be exact. A number of us homebrewers had descended on the Yakima Valley that year during the hop harvest, and later the local homebrew club organized an annual tour and get-together called "Yakimania." We began the festivities with a tour of Grant's, led by Bert Grant himself, and Ralph joined us there and followed up by conducting a tour on his own of the nearby HopUnion USA hop warehouses and processing facility. Ralph was an excellent host, happy to endure the sometimes inane questions of homebrewers encountering a large scale hop business for the first time. Ralph clearly loved his job, and he liked talking about it, too.
Born and raised in Eastern Washington, Olson grew up working in the fruit industry and in the personnel department of a local nursing home. Ralph graduated from Central Washington University in nearby Ellensburg in 1969 with degrees in Psychology and Sociology and a minor in Biology and Anthropology. His first graduate job was seasonal work as an agricultural worker, picking cherries in Yakima with three friends. He later got into local construction work, married and began to raise a family.
Ralph's breakthrough came in 1978 when he met the manager of the Von Horst hop company at a bar and listened to him talk about the international hop business. "This is an industry I wanted to try," Ralph says. "I basically made a pest of myself until he hired me." Ralph knew immediately that he had found the right career for himself.
Olson began at the warehouse end of the company as traffic manager, doing the receiving and inspecting of hops that came in from the growers. He liked working closely with the growers then, and still does some 20 years later. "At first we had to help bring in the hops," Ralph says. "Now the growers haul their own."
In the fall of 1983, the company was purchased by a group of local hop growers and re-named the Western Hop Company. Three years later, it was sold again to HopUnion, a firm based in NŸrnburg, Germany. Ralph stayed on through these management changes and eventually worked up in the company to become hop buyer, then vice president and sales manager for craft breweries (he also sells hops to the megabreweries.) "I've had every title you can name in all three companies," Ralph claims. (Ralph's co-worker, Ralph Woodall, has also been a traffic manager and now sells hops for HopUnion as well, leading many brewers to refer to the company as "Ralph and Ralph".)
In those days, nearly all the exotic beers available were imported. "I used to buy import beers, but many of them were skunky," Ralph says. "But if I got a bad beer, I didn't judge the brewery by it. I'd order three or four different brands with my friends, and we'd try them all. If we found one we liked, we'd order a full round of it." Ralph became aware that the beer world was not limited to light American lagers. "This gave me the idea that there were a lot of different styles," he says.
And some of those different styles were beginning to change the American beer business. In the early 1980's, Ken Grossman, a homebrewer turned pro from Chico, California, brought some of his beers up to HopUnion. Grossman was looking for hops, and his ales were the hoppiest Ralph had ever tasted. "I made up my mind that this (craft beer) movement was going to take off," Ralph says. Olson took on Sierra Nevada as a small scale project, selling them a couple of 200 lb. bales. In time, Grossman's venture would become a major brewery. Now typical sales to Sierra, the fourth largest specialty brewer in the country, and hundreds of other craft breweries range from 100 to as much 300,000 pounds.
The microbrewery movement started small, but quickly gathered momentum. Northwest breweries followed Sierra's lead: Grant's, Red Hook, Hale's, BridgePort, Widmer, and many more. Ralph developed a specialty trade with the new brewers, who were not as easy to please as the brewery giants had been. "The selection was not as deep in those days," Ralph says. " In fact, they (the big breweries) would all basically be buying the same hop - Cluster was 80% of the business in Washington." Before the micros came on the scene, Ralph had learned who wanted what variation of that hop, and found that it was "an art in how to select to make everybody happy."
But the craft breweries presented more of a challenge as customers: they wanted different hop varieties with higher alpha acids and more unusual aromas. Ralph aimed to please, and found one experimental variety called CFJ-90 that major brewers had actually rejected for its high alpha content. "Only two or three acres were bring grown," Ralph says, and he stood up at a hop commission meeting where pulling the variety was discussed to announce that he had a few craft brewers who would be interested. He later went to the hop research station in Prosser to have the variety officially registered as Centennial. Fortunately, production of the hop was so small that "no one bothered to follow up to see that they got destroyed," according to Ralph. Even today, in spite of the hop's popularity, only about 50 acres are being grown in Yakima, still by only a few farmers. "Centennial is very small piece of the pie," Ralph says. "But I never worried about the number of acres."
As the industry has grown to over 1,200 breweries and brewpubs in the United States, however, Olson believes that experimentation with similar new hop varieties has tapered off. "There's always room for a new variety, but some others will languish. You don't know how much a new one will take off," he says. Currently, exotic aroma varieties like Crystal and Ultra have attracted interest, and European hops such as Magnum and Spalt Select are more in demand as well. "People want to go back to more traditional varieties now," Ralph believes.
With the strong performance of the dollar in international exchange, imported hops have become much more attractive. "Many breweries still look at alpha acids on a per-dollar basis," Ralph says. Lower prices for European high-alpha hops has boosted sales to U.S. breweries in recent years.
Hops are an agricultural crop, and even in the dry, sunny Yakima Valley - source of over 70 percent of the U.S. supply - yields and alpha acids have varied considerably. Sometimes disease has been a factor. In 1997, a powdery mildew blight, the first ever seen in the area, reduced the overall harvest by some 10 percent. A cool spring and intensely hot, dry summer (which actually retards hop growth) has reduced this year's crop even more, as much as 20 percent. "I haven't seen anything like it in all the years I've been in this business," Ralph says.
Other major changes in the American hop industry have also taken place. "This used to be a seasonal job," Olson says. "Now with all the hop varieties, we have to carry inventory for a year to 18 months." In recent years, this has resulted in something of a glut of hops on the world market, which has made it difficult for many growers to survive. In fact, some are getting out of the business: Another reason for the smaller U.S. crop in 1998 was was a 20% reduction in hop acreage.
But one aspect of the business is likely to remain constant: Olson is convinced that the United States and Germany, rough1y equal producers, will continue to be the main powers in the hop world, regardless of the changing fashions in hop selection. The sheer numbers of hops grown in both countries as compared to other parts of the world support this assertion (in a good year like 1995 for the U.S., this is around 75 to 80 million pounds.) And the fact that the U.S. remains the number one source of high-alpha hops, while Germany excels in traditional aroma varieties, keeps something of a supply balance in terms of brewery demand.
Part of the success of any important businessman is good public realtions, and Ralph has become a fixture at beer festivals and industry trade shows in recent years, sometimes attending events where no other hop companies were present.
At the Vancouver Brewmaster's Festival in 1996, for example, he brought hop samples and information to consumers, many of whom had no idea how hops affected beer. Many attending thought the HopUnion booth was the best part of the festival. Besides rubbing shoulders with the public at these events, Olson also helps share in the success of many craft brewers by participating on the same stage.
The future of the hop industry may be hard to predict, like that of the brewing industry it supports, but like so many other agricultural prodsucts competing globally in an increasingly smaller world, what goes on in the productive desert valley of Yakima affects consumers in Boston or Brazil. Ralph Olson has been a vital part of that. Twenty years after his conversation with a hop manager at a bar, Ralph has made his own mark on the hop business. Like the craft breweries he supports, Ralph Olson has helped give distinction and direction to the renaissance of beer in America, and throughout the world.
Knowing Ralph, I'm sure he would probably shy away from such a laudatory assessment of his impact on the industry. But the truth is, when a lot of craft brewers think of hops, they think of Ralph Olson - and they should. Thanks to him, we have come a long way in our "pursuit of hoppiness" in America.
Note: This article first appeared in American Brewer, Summer 1999.
