Hop House Farm was inspired by one of the last remaining outbuildings on the original Farmstead: an 1800’s hop house
Our Story
My great-grandmother Louise arrived in New York from Germany in 1934 as a young widow with a small son—my grandfather. She later remarried, and in 1959 she and her second husband purchased the Hogan dairy farm on Warner Hill Road in Schoharie. The rolling landscape reminded her of the homeland she’d left behind. Dairy farming, though, turned out to be a punishing way to “retire,” so in 1967 my grandparents, Frank and Annemarie Thome, bought the neighboring George Ward farmstead and its surrounding acreage. Louise and her husband moved down the hill to the old farmhouse for a true retirement, and that house became the heart of countless family memories over the decades.
My grandparents kept the farm through their own retirement years, and as a kid I spent endless summers there, falling in love with the place the way so many in our family have. But time moved on. I headed west for college in Colorado, visits grew rarer, fewer relatives remained nearby, and the risk of the land being subdivided loomed. In 2014 I made the move back East to reinvigorate the farm and bring it back into productivity; with the intention of growing hops and brewing beer. New York was just then introducing new legislation to bring the hop industry back to the state, an industry that Schoharie was once well known for a hundred years prior. Upon arriving to the old farmhouse, planting some test hop varieties, and getting a job at Hager Hops in Cooperstown, eventually, the idea of growing hops for profit fell flat. However, during that time I had also begun dabbling in other farm ventures; beekeeping being one of them - and so Hop House Honey Farm was born! With a heavy focus now on beekeeping, the name Hop House Farm was inspired by one of the last remaining outbuildings on the old Ward Farmstead; an 1800’s hop house. At one time, hops were grown here on the farm and some of those hop bines are still climbing in our hedgerows to this day.
Fast forward to 2018, my good friends from Colorado were searching with difficulty for a place to locate their soon-to-be brewery. I sent them a list of promising reasons why settling in Schoharie would be an ideal move for them. After only one visit, they saw the potential and fell in love with the lush, rolling hills of the Schoharie Valley just as I had. After 3 years of careful restoration, we opened Wayward Lane Brewing in 2021 inside that beautifully reborn hop house. Now a farm and brewery working in tandem to create a lively space where we can tinker with new ways of producing, consuming, growing, and building community. We have since added a permaculture orchard, where we intend to use the numerous varieties of fruits in our spontaneously fermented wild ales. We have expanded the beekeeping operations further plus other products from the hive (frequently used in the brewing process), and there are many ideas yet to come to fruition! We are growing and learning more every single day, and we hope to share our experiences with everyone that we meet.
Meet Andrew Rowles
THE FARMER ‘ROUND THESE PARTS
