First there was the fire. Then there was the drought.

In the fall of 2007, we heard of the hop warehouse fire in Yakima Valley, Washington. Preliminary estimates were that $3.5-4.0 million of hops went up in smoke. (At today's prices in the winter of 2008, those same hops would have been worth around a cool ten million denaros.)

It's estimated that about 4% of the entire U.S. hop crop vaporized that afternoon. Little did we know that the other shoe would soon drop.

Around the same time, hail storms wiped out entire hop fields in Slovenia and Germany. Low rainfall in other parts of Europe yielded poor hop harvests.

Hop farmers in the Pacific Northwest have been slowly selling their land to developers in the past decade. Beautiful hop fields are now gated communities.

First there was fire. Then there was drought. Yet Barley's Firedrought IPA didn't sound right to us. Gotta go... searching for hops.