Hops & Brewing
Korea grew hops once, then imported nearly all of them. Now a handful of farms are planting again while imports fall by half. What would make a Korean hop something brewers buy twice?
By Eli Navarro
A hop cone comes off the bine wet, at roughly 75 to 80 percent moisture, and extension guidance says it must be dried rapidly to about 10 percent before its oils oxidise and the cone rots. That clock makes hops a processing crop: a farm has to pick, dry, press, pack, and chill them before a brewer will pay.
Korea's breweries almost never buy that crop fresh. Customs records show that in 2025 Korea imported 205 tonnes of processed hops (pellets and powder) and 86 tonnes of hop extract, and just 116 kilograms of whole cones. Nearly every hop in a Korean beer arrives already dried and processed, most of it from the United States or Germany.
It was not always so, and a few farms are trying again. Hops can grow in Korea; they have before. The question is whether Korea can grow, dry, and deliver a hop that a brewer chooses a second time.
Hops came to the peninsula with industrial beer. A 2023 paper in the Korean Journal of Plant Resources dates the first plantings to the 1930s, when Japanese-owned breweries established hops near Hyesan, close to Mt Baekdu in what is now North Korea. RDA records trial plantings in the South at Jangseong in 1957 and Jinbu, in Gangwon, in 1959.
In the 1970s and 1980s the crop settled into the mountain districts of Gangwon, North Gyeongsang, and North Jeolla, and for a time, the same paper says, Korea was self-sufficient. RDA places the Gangwon fields in dry, sunny areas around Pyeongchang, Hoengseong, and Daegwallyeong. Hongcheon grew hops too, until they disappeared in the 1990s.
How large the industry became is disputed. Hankook Ilbo reports 148 tonnes from 134 hectares in 1991 and 12 tonnes from 6 hectares in 1996, without naming a source. The only official figure found is the last: citing the agriculture ministry's special-crop statistics, RDA says the series ended in 1999 at 5 hectares and 20 tonnes. Accounts differ on dates but agree on the cause. Once foreign hops could be imported freely around the end of the 1980s, domestic cones lost on price. By 2017 RDA said too few growers were left to count.
Dates are as reported by RDA, the Korean Journal of Plant Resources, and regional reporting. Where sources disagree, the entry says so.
Gangwon, North Gyeongsang, and North Jeolla; for a time, self-sufficiency.
Three roots found in Naechon in 2015; grown in earnest from 2019.
Commercial hop production, Oregon State University Extension notes, is largely restricted to latitudes between 35 and 55 degrees. Korea's growing sites sit in the southern part of that band, from Buan at about 35.7°N to Hongcheon at about 37.7°N. Hopeden in Uiseong holds its harvest festival in July, earlier than the mid-August to mid-September maturity described for Oregon. Latitude may be one reason, but one farm's calendar does not prove it.
Commercial hops climb trellises of 18 to 20 feet, about 5.5 to 6 metres, and they need dry leaves. Downy mildew, which extension services warn can wipe out a marketable crop, spreads in long wet, humid spells, and Korea's monsoon falls mid-season. Heat matters too. The founder of The Hand and Malt told Arena Homme+ that the brewery's Cheongpyeong planting gave about 70 kilograms in 2015 but only about 140 kilograms in 2016 from four times the area, because the summer was so hot.
Then comes the clock. University of Vermont Extension advises pelleting and storing hops only once they are dried to 8 to 10 percent moisture, and a 2021 German study found that holding fresh cones for 5 or 24 hours before drying changed their oil composition and discoloured them. A hop industry needs dryers near the field and cold storage, not only land.
Public research is thin. A 2023 study compared six imported cultivars, including Cascade and Saaz, at Kongju National University's Yesan campus and at Hop&Hope's farm in Buan, and Gangwon's Agricultural Research and Extension Services analysed the essential oil of dried Hongcheon hops in 2024. Neither is yet the multi-season alpha-acid and oil data a brewer uses to write a recipe.
Ag Digest tracks hop trade through the Korea Customs Service data behind its beverages trade table. From 2016 through 2023, Korea imported 361 to 466 tonnes of processed hops a year; in 2024 it imported 207 tonnes, and in 2025, 205. The fall is not a coding artefact: the whole 1210 tariff heading shows it, and UN Comtrade reports identical totals. January to August 2026 brought 162 tonnes, up 14 percent on the same months of 2025 but 42 percent below 2023.
Hop extract, used mainly for bitterness, fell from 149 tonnes in 2024 to 86 tonnes in 2025, and whole cones barely register. American hops made up half of 2025's processed-hop weight but nearly two-thirds of its value, a gap that reflects a different variety mix rather than a like-for-like price.
The records do not say why imports halved. Lower beer output, stock bought during a global glut being drawn down, or a shift in which hop products brewers buy are all worth testing; none is established. The glut is real: BarthHaas reports that world hop area fell 5.5 percent to 52,660 hectares in 2025, yet the crop still produced about 1,200 tonnes more alpha acid than brewers demand. Germany and the United States grow most of it.
The most distinctive project is in Hongcheon. According to Gangwon's provincial magazine, farmer Yeon Chung-heum found three hop roots on a flood-damaged hillside in Naechon in 2015, in a village where Yeon's father had once managed hop growing, and began growing them properly in 2019. The county made it a local project in 2021; Gangwon Domin Ilbo reported that a Hallym University analysis found no match with foreign varieties. Hankook Ilbo reports that nine farms produced 7.5 tonnes of fresh hops in 2025.
Other growers began with imported varieties. In Buan, North Jeolla, Park Sang-hun bought seed online in 2013; Jeonbuk Ilbo reported in 2023 that Park's company, Hop&Hope, grew 18,900 square metres, which it calls Korea's largest planting. Bank Creek Brewing began growing hops in Jecheon in 2016. Nongmin Shinmun reported in 2024 that Hopeden, in Uiseong, dries its hops at low temperature and presses them into pellets for small craft breweries, producing about 500 kilograms a year. A Pohang grower, A-Hop, planted a test plot in 2022.
None of these figures is audited, reports disagree on which places count as commercial, and some tonnages do not say whether they are fresh or dried. A rough scale is still possible. If Hongcheon's 7.5 tonnes were picked at 75 to 80 percent moisture and dried to 10 percent, they would make roughly 1.7 to 2.1 tonnes of dried hops, about 1 percent of the processed hops Korea imported in 2025. That is Ag Digest's calculation, not a reported figure, and it covers one county.
The beer stories in Ag Digest's news feed this year show where localisation is happening: in grain and fruit. Nongmin Shinmun reported in April that Gyeonggi-do's Agricultural Research and Extension Services had patented a rice-beer method to reduce reliance on imported malt; MimiSour, a sour ale brewed with it by Eight People Brewery using at least 51 percent Chamdream rice, won gold in the Korea International Beer Award's new Korean Free Style category. In August, the Korea Farmers & Fishermen Newspaper reported that OB Beer's Icheon brewers made a beer with local rice, peaches, and cornelian cherries.
Rice and fruit are easy to buy, store, and add at one point in a recipe. Hops are harder to swap: a brewer who builds a recipe around an imported hop's bitterness and aroma needs the same numbers next year. Early impressions of Korean hops are individual and mixed. A Hongcheon brewer told Seoul Shinmun in 2022 that the local hop resembled the American variety Amarillo; The Hand and Malt's founder said in 2016 that the brewery's Korean-grown hops tasted slightly of onion.
“A Korean hop competes with a global surplus, so it has to win on freshness, place, and consistency, not price.”
The public record supports some conclusions. Hops can be grown and harvested at several Korean sites, at least one grower dries and pellets its own crop, and Hongcheon has a local plant with a documented history. The import market those farms face is shrinking and supplied from a global surplus.
The record does not yet show what turns a crop into an industry: several seasons of published yields, alpha-acid and oil results for Korean lots, or contracts committing a brewery to buy a set volume at a set specification. Until those exist, the evidence points to a niche with real uses (fresh-hop seasonal beers, beers that tell the story of a place, and local supply for small breweries) rather than a substitute for imports.
Recent reporting on hops, brewing ingredients, and Korean beer from the Ag Digest news corpus.
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