What do two longtime friends who really appreciate a good craft beer do when they want to go into business together?
They start a hop farm, of course. And not an ordinary hop farm by North Fork standards, where the handful of existing hop farms max out at a couple acres. No — they plant one of the largest hop farms in New York — and an organic one at that — 20 acres on the North Road in Mattituck.
Marcos Ribeiro has farming in his DNA. He’s the fourth generation of a Portuguese farm family. His parents immigrated to the U.S. and, though they are no longer farming, Ribeiro has always had an interest in growing, selling vegetables from his garden at his own farmstand on his block in Holtsville as a kid. Though he’s earned a living in construction and masonry, he’s been an avid backyard gardener and always wanted to do something more.
Pat Libutti’s career has been in real estate development, construction and property management. Fast friends for a dozen years, he and Ribeiro have long wanted to become business partners — in something other than real estate.
“A couple years ago around Easter time, we were talking about what’s going on in the craft brewing business around here,” recalls the bespectacled, soft-spoken Libutti. The growing North Fork craft brewery scene provided a local market for the ingredients that go into beer: hops, barley and yeast. Local brewers were sourcing their hops mostly off-island, so starting a farm to grow hops locally seemed like a natural, he said. They founded Craft Master Hops LLC in September 2014.
At the time, New York had recently adopted the farm brewery law, which provided generous incentives for local brewers to source their hops and barley from New York growers. The law was intended to create a market for locally grown hops, an effort by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to help restore what was once a large agricultural sector in the Empire State, ranking it as the largest hop-producing state in the country. That was until the early part of the 20th century, when the confluence of disease, insect infestation and, finally, Prohibition decimated the state’s hop farms. They never recovered.
Hop-growing began to re-emerge in New York after the craft brew industry put down roots. New York State currently has about 250 acres planted in hops — out of 45,236 acres nationally, according to Hop Growers of America — a growth of 60 percent in just two years. Ninety-seven percent of all commercially cultivated hops in the U.S. today are grown in the Pacific Northwest — principally Washington state.
Put in perspective, the 20 acres of hops that Ribeiro and Libutti are planting on their Mattituck farm represent 8 percent of New York’s hops acreage.
The partners closed on the purchase of the 20.17-acre parcel from the Pollio Trust in January. But they leased it beginning in the fall so they could start cleaning up the site, which had been used for composting landscaping materials.
“We rented very heavy machinery for screening and cleaning,” Libutti said in an interview this week. “It was a gigantic job,” Libutti said.
“I was there running a pay loader and two trommels seven days a week for seven weeks,” Ribeiro says.
In the end, they wound up with 6 million pounds of screened, clean compost, Libutti said. “It was great stuff. We added it back to the field to improve the soil.” There’s still a fairly large pile on site — “nothing compared to what we had” — and Libutti scoops a handful up to show off the dark, rich material. “Look at that,” he says. “It’s beautiful.”
With a goal of getting the starter plants in the group before the very cold weather set in — the mild late fall and early winter was a blessing — Ribeiro and Libutti, with a crew of laborers helping toiled to prep the field and then construct an elaborate trellis sytem. The trellis is built with 25-foot Tamarack Larch logs, each weighing some 600 pounds, trucked from Maine.
As the network of massive logs rose from the field like an unusual modern sculpture it attracted a lot of attention.
“All kinds of people kept stopping by to ask what we were doing,” Libutti said. “Everyone was very nice and very encouraging.” The work was daunting and the encouragement helpful.
“It was almost like building a house,” Ribeiro said. “The infrastructure is massive.”
Once the poles were in, they tied them together with galvanized aircraft cable, Ribeiro said. Coconut core and fiber strings were then dropped from the cables. The hop plants, called bines, climb up the strings.
From the northwest corner of the planted field, the massive and intricate trellis network stretches almost as far as the eye can see. The partners take it all in with obvious pride in what they’ve accomplished.
“The plants overwintered well,” Ribeiro said. The bines, which currently stand only a few inches tall, are planted in long north-south rows.
He’s still working to complete the drip irrigation system that will bring a mixture of water and food to the plants.
Hops — humulus lupulus or “wolf of the woods” — are perennials. They climb to 18 feet tall each year and die back in winter. The plants’root systems grow larger each year after the seedlings are planted, as does the harvest. In the first year after planting, growers can expect a crop of only about 30 percent of the ultimate crop. The second year will yield about 50 percent of the ultimate harvest, which won’t be attained until the fourth year. Hop farmers have to be very patient people.
Each acre will eventually produce an average of about 1,900 pounds of hops. The current going rate for N.Y. hops is $15 to $17 per pound. The partners don’t expect to recoup their startup investment for nearly a decade — if all goes well.
Much work remains to be done, Libutti said. The next phase of major construction will be a large barn on the north end of the easternmost eight acres — which are currently planted in barley. Those eight acres will also be planted with hops, he said. The barn will house a hop picker, a pelletizer, refrigeration equipment and storage.
They will have the only pelletizer on Long Island, enabling them to sell dried pellets in addition to wet, fresh hops. That’s essential, because the pellet form can be stored for later use. It can then be sold to breweries year-round.
Relying on historic data for the best yields, they selected four varieties of hops: Cascade, Centennial, Chinook and CTZ (Columbus, Tomahawk and Zeus).
“They’re commonly known as the American four Cs,” Libutti said.
“We’re taking the best practices of growing hops in the world and putting them to work here,” he said.
“Hops are primarily what gives beer its taste,” Libutti said. “And the way you hop your beer, when you add your hops, gives it different tastes. “The guys brewing are more like chefs,” he observed.
Libutti and Ribeiro expect Long Island and NYC microbreweries will be their “anchor” customers.
“Before we even started, before we finished the business plan, we spoke to a lot of brewers — 60 to 70 in the Long Island – metro area,” Libutti said. He grins. “They all asked if we were serious, if we were going to be real hops growers.”
Libutti said brewers in the region “want a local hops grower that can harvest with a real hops picker, dry them immediately, pelletize them for storage and store them until they’re ready to take delivery — a full-service grower. There’s nothing else like this anywhere in this region.”
There are several small commercial hop growers on the island, according to the hop growers association, which lists them as: North Fork Hops in Southold, Farm to Pint in Peconic, Wesnofske Farms in Peconic, Laurel Creek Nursery in Laurel, Grodski Hops and L.I. Hops both in Riverhead, and Condzella Hops in Wading River.
Rob Carpenter of the Long Island Farm Bureau said it’s exciting to see the hop farms taking root on the East End, “kind of a spinoff” of the expanding brewery industry here. A larger-scale hop farm like Craft Master Hops is a great new development for agriculture on Long Island, he said.
Libutti, who lives in Remsenburg with his wife (a doctor at Eastern Long Island Hospital) and three sons, says he will be committing a large amount of his time to the farm and hopes to someday make it his principal line of work.
“I really enjoy it,” he said. “There’s something about being at the farm…you feel at peace,” he said. “I’m not doing this because I want to make a ton of money. I’m doing it more for the type of life I want to lead.”
Ribeiro, a Shirley resident, said the same thing. For him, it’s a vocation that’s in his blood. Their love of craft beer, which got them started on this journey, keeps them going.
“It’s a great new industry and it’s great to be a part of it,” Ribeiro said.
