Founders and Employees Testing Portland Brewing's First Brew, 1985 Courtesy of Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives, Oregon State University

Established in 2013 in Corvallis, OR, the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive (OHBA) at Oregon State University (OSU) aims to collect and preserve books, periodicals, ephemera, and artifacts about brewing and hops farming in the Pacific Northwest. According to the OHBA website, it is the “first archive in the United States dedicated to preserving and sharing this intertwined story of hops and beer, documenting all facets of the industries and uniting the social and cultural aspects of brewing with the science being done at OSU.”

The university has a department dedicated to food science and technology under its College of Agricultural Sciences, as well as its own Research Brewery, and since 1995 has offered one of the few Fermentation Science programs in the country. But it would take a department merger and a wedding to spark the creation of the archive.

Tiah Edmunson-Morton, Oregon hops and brewing archivist, began working at the OSU archives department’s reference desk in 2006, learning about OSU’s legacy of food science and food history on the job. When the university’s archives and special collections merged in 2011–12, she began thinking about how to reframe her position moving forward. She had been teaching and conducting outreach but wanted to get back to processing material.

In 2013 Edmunson-Morton attended a wedding at the Rogue Farms Chatoe, managed by Rogue Ales Brewery (it closed in 2021), and took a tour of the hops yard. Hops—small green flowers from the Humulus lupulus plant—are used in beer-making to provide bitterness and other flavors; they can also help preserve beer’s freshness. Walking through the tall plants, Edmunson-Morton was “enchanted,” she recalled. “I’m a seventh-generation Oregonian. My family grew hops.”

She eventually decided to approach her then-boss Larry Landis, director of OSU’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center, who retired in 2020, with the idea of building a hops and brewing archive at the OSU library. With his approval she created a proposal, and it was approved by University Librarian Faye Chadwell.

BREWING THE CONCEPT

Getting approval to proceed with the archive was one thing, but creating it was another. “I had no idea how to start an archive,” Edmunson-Morton said. “I’m not a huge beer drinker at all. I wasn't part of the community. My family grew hops, but it’s not like I was part of the grower community, either.”

However, hops farming and brewing are economically and culturally important to Oregon, she explained; the relevance of an archive at OSU was a “no-brainer.” She knew that OSU had collections related to hops farming and brewing, but wanted to build on what the university already had. Since she had spent time working in outreach and instruction, she decided to start talking to everyone who might help build the archive with materials outside of OSU. She went to every event to which she was invited, tabled at beer festivals, gave walking tours, and spoke at retirement homes.

During that first year Edmunson-Morton began visiting other Oregon repositories that had relevant collections, but quickly found that no one had declared hops or brewing as an official collection area. “We were the first beer archive in the country,” she said. “Nobody was collecting around beer.” What did it mean to have an archive about beer and hops? The idea was confusing for people in both the brewing and library worlds. Initially, people donated periodicals and coasters.

During her outreach circuit, she met Peter Kopp, a historian at the University of Colorado–Denver, who had just turned his dissertation on hops into the award-winning book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (2016). He helped her make critical connections with Oregon-based hops growers.

Edmunson-Morton also began collecting oral histories. At the time, the industry was still growing and the main players in Oregon’s brewing scene were alive. Many were even still working, and their records had not yet been archived. Rather than ask people directly for their materials, she explained, she decided to record their stories.

Thanks to that work, Edmunson-Morton began to meet key figures in the industry, including Fred Eckhardt, described as “one of the true pioneers of America’s homebrewing and craft brewing community” in his obituary. When he died in 2015, his collection—including self-published newsletters like Amateur Brewer (1977–85) and Talk to Your Beer (1982–83)—was given to the archive.

Her connection to Fred Eckhardt opened the floodgates for donations. Edmunson-Morton continued collecting oral histories, making contacts, growing the archive, talking and listening to people, and building trust.

In addition to oral histories and ephemera, the archive holds meeting minutes and reports from brewers’ associations, collections from journalists and authors who wrote about beer and hops, research files, popular beer periodicals like Draft Magazine, and even beer bottles. Other materials include promotional records such as labels, design files, and press packets, as well as brew sheets, which are not recipes but rather brew logs that record which hops were used, how long they were boiled, and other brewing data. The collection also has materials related to fermented beverages such as cider and mead.

Since Edmunson-Morton created the archive, she has added 36 collections in addition to the 40 collections already at OSU from the university’s own research and development in food science. Items date from the late 1800s, but most of the archive covers the 1970s to the present day.

She originally thought that pre-Prohibition brewing papers and ephemera were already being collected by regional archives or historical societies, so she focused her efforts elsewhere. But as she worked on her forthcoming book Wives and Widows: The Story of Oregon’s 19th Century Brewing Families, and helped researchers use the archive, she discovered that not much material from that time exists. “I found that there were pockets of documentation for that early beer era, but not anything terribly deep,” she said. “Part of the reason is that those records simply weren’t kept.”

However, the archive does have materials going back to the 19th century related to the hops research already beginning to be conducted at OSU. The oldest item from Oregon is most likely a printing plate of a band in front of the Corvallis brewery that dates to around 1870–80.

DEVELOPING THE RECIPE

Workers Sacking Hops, c. 1920–30 Courtesy of Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives, Oregon State University.

As Edmunson-Morton began pulling together the archive and conducting oral histories, she became interested in how gender played a role in the world of brewing. The field has long been associated with men, despite the fact that women were often co-owners of breweries and/or covered the business side of breweries while men handled the brewing of beer, as outlined in Tara Nurin’s A Woman’s Place Is in the Brewhouse: A Forgotten History of Alewives, Brewsters, Witches and CEOs (2021), which used the OHBA archive for research.

Edmunson-Morton has done about 130 to 140 oral history interviews with people throughout the industry, making it a point to interview women engaged in the hops and brewing business in Oregon. One of her first interviews was with Teri Fahrendorf, a veteran brewer who founded the Pink Boots Society, which works to facilitate and promote women and nonbinary people in the world of fermented beverages. In addition to the oral histories, the archive has the Pink Boots Society's institutional records, which include marketing materials, legal and financial records, membership and scholarship program information, agendas, and more.

One of the most regularly used parts of the archive is the Hops Research Report collection. In 1931, shortly before Prohibition was repealed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and OSU created a research project to study hop varieties in the Pacific Northwest. The reports feature new research and findings on hops through 1995, when Al Haunold, plant breeder and director from the USDA-OSU hop breeding program, retired.

Edmunson-Morton found that it was easy to hook people with the “sexiness of beer history or pop history” as a way to frame larger subjects, such as labor and funding science, that are contained in the story of Oregon’s history of hops and brewing. “It allows people to feel like they can engage with these deeper topics, and at the same time it’s just a really fun history. There’s a lot of joy, celebration, and community,” she said.

A GROWING ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

Journalists were active users of the collection during its earliest days, and several media outlets, such as Draft Magazine and a United Kingdom Travel show, Olly Smith Ale Trails, interviewed Edmunson-Morton and Landis about the archive itself. Some users were curious about starting hops farms, using archival records to provide background information, such as how to lay out yards to grow hops. Kopps used the Oregon Hop Commission records for Hoptopia.

It would take several years for researchers to begin using the collection for more academic studies. By the end of the 2010s, PhD students were being approved to write theses and dissertations on beer-related topics.

OSU instructor Kendall Staggs advocated for a beer history class, which was finally approved in winter 2020 and has now grown to two or three sections per term. The class was originally called “Mesopotamia to Microbrews,” although the archive did not have many materials related to Mesopotamia. Edmunson-Morton taught one session of the class after Staggs died in 2023 and had to learn about the history and culture of brewing beyond the scope of the archive.

Now the class is “History of Beer and Brewing”; students have written on topics including the impact of television advertising on midsize and small breweries, music in beer commercials, the relationship of religion and beer, and women and home brewing in Colonial America.

The archive has also been used in museum exhibitions. In 2018, the Oregon Historical Society presented a joint exhibition with OHBA called “Barley, Barrels, Bottles, and Brews: 200 Years of Oregon Beer.” It featured 100 items, including the actual pink boots that inspired the Pink Boots Society.

Edmunson-Morton is keen on growing the archive’s materials on post–World War II industrial era brewing in the 1950s and 1960s. Most people concentrate on pre-prohibition and prohibition eras, and craft brewing in the late 1960s, passing over the middle period. She also pointed out gaps in information about hops pickers in Oregon. “The hops industry required a huge number of people to pick,” she said—a population that was diverse in racial, ethnic, gender, and class demographics. A history of Chinese hops growers and pickers is being researched, and in 2017, Edmunson-Morton worked with filmmaker Ivy C. Lin and writer Putsata Reang on the documentary film Bitter Harvest: Chinese Hop Farmers in the Willamette Valley in the Early 1900s.

An unexpected area of omission, she added, is pre-Prohibition brewing recipes. People have asked for recipes to recreate those beers and, so far, she has not been able to find records.

The OHBA is currently digitizing items in the collection and welcomes both in-person and remote researchers. Anyone interested in accessing the archives can contact Edmunson-Morton directly; the main department public services email is scarc@oregonstate.edu.