Making Citra: Branding, Breeding, and the Co-production of New Aroma Hops in the Yakima Valley

Abstract

Using farmer-owned breeding programs operated by vertically integrated US Northwest hop growers, this article examines the novel hops produced by these programs with market applications for craft beer. Drawing on data collected through hybrid qualitative methods, I explore Yakima farmers’ understandings of the hop material they breed, grow, buy, and/or sell, alongside this model’s resulting value chain. I demonstrate that growers, alongside other materials in the hop-growing assemblage, co-produce material technologies (new hop genetics) and discursive technologies (new hop brands). This study provides insights into alternative places, where agricultural plant science and innovation may be possible and the social ramifications of knowledge-making. The case study of craft hops demonstrates how embedded plant science has the capacity to reconfigure neoliberal tendencies in modernist agriculture but that without intervention, these tendencies are reinstated through the deployment of discursive technologies in the form of branded intellectual property.