I have always enjoyed making things with my own hands and sharing them for other people to enjoy, and beer is no exception.
Rich Jospeh | Belleville, WI
I grew up in a beer-loving family, so beer has always been a passion of mine. But before we started the Wisconsin Hop Exchange Co-op, I mostly worked in the dairy industry. And before that, as a kid I spent a lot of time working on my grandparents, parents, and uncle’s farm. My love for making things and sharing them with others probably comes from them. We used to help my Grandparents tap several hundred maple trees on their farm every year for maple syrup. We’d have to carry the buckets of sap down these steep hillsides and boil them down, but in the end, I’d get to hand somebody a pint jar of maple syrup, and I loved that.
My childhood home is halfway between Sun Prairie and Marshall, but my mom’s family was from Vernon County where my grandparents lived. They milked about forty cows and grew around 10 acres of tobacco, along with corn and hay for the cattle. I’m the youngest of five, and all of us kids grew up going to the town of Valley to work on the farm almost every weekend. We’d jump in the car on Friday night and work up there every weekend on repeat until the snow came. Then eventually, we moved to a little farmette in Sun Prairie where my dad grew about two acres of tobacco.
Tobacco is a very labor-intensive crop. Between sowing the seeds in the beds, pulling the plants, re-planting the ones that don’t make it, spraying them, cutting the plants down, spearing them, getting them into the wagon, hanging them to dry, taking them down and baling them, there are at least twenty touch points that you have to do by hand. And they can’t be dried any other way, which is why my grandparents needed so much help.
At that time, tobacco was pretty big in Wisconsin. Vernon County had a co-op, and everybody would bring their tobacco there. As I got older, the demand for tobacco started going down. The co-op started having quotas because there was just too much in the market. If you had ten acres, the next year they might cut you down to eight or nine, then six or seven. It got to the point where grandma and grandpa only had a couple of acres. When Grampa passed away, that was the end of working in tobacco
Still, I had a lot of fun, working with people I liked. I’d be bailing hay, stacking it, and working my butt off in barns that were sometimes as hot as 120 degrees, but at the end, I’d get to sit down with family. In high school, I joined the Future Farmers of America and was the Vice President of our local FFA chapter. So it’s not that I always dreamed of being a farmer, but that was really all I knew.
After high school, I went to UW-Madison and graduated with a degree in Dairy Science Business. During that time, the dairy industry really started changing the same way the tobacco industry had. We went from somewhere between forty-thousand to fifty-thousand dairy farms in Wisconsin when I started college to maybe twenty-four-thousand when I graduated.
It really all boils down to the price of milk. It just wasn’t that profitable to run a small dairy farm. The investments you have to make to buy tractors and equipment is just too high for small farms to make it. We could see that guys were working seven days a week, fourteen-hour days, and never getting ahead. So even though I always thought I’d work on my uncle’s dairy farm after school, it didn’t make sense for me with the way the industry was going, so I needed to figure out something else.
After college I got a job with a agricultural co-op out of Illinois. My first job was doing nutrition work for dairy farms. I worked with veterinarians, and different companies for about eighteen years developing new products and strategizing about how to market them. My favorite part about that job was bringing new technologies out to the farms and showing the farmers how it could help them make the cows happier.
Cows today are much more comfortable than they were ten or fifteen years ago because of new technologies. But it’s a common misconception that cows on small farms are happier. There are farms with a thousand very happy cows, small family farms with cows that are not doing well, and a whole range in between. So I never knew what I was going to get with each new driveway I pulled into, which kept it interesting.
Having happy cows should really be the goal of every farmer because happier cows produce more milk. We always used to tell the dairyman he’s got to treat cows like Olympic athletes. They should be at their top performance almost every day. They are high-performance animals and need to be treated as such.
Whatever product we were working with, most of the time we would adjust the cattle feed formula, offer suggestions on feeding practices, look at water availability and cow comfort in stalls, or figure out how to keep the cows in the right temperature range for milk production since cows have a certain temperature range where they produce the most milk.
But we just keep losing more and more dairy farms. When I first started working, I worked in a fifty-mile radius. But by the time I finished, I was traveling half the country trying to get to enough different farms. I was traveling four or five days most weeks and missing a lot of important moments with my four kids. After several years, it just got really old, so I switched jobs.
We moved to Belleville, and I was able to be more involved with coaching my kids’ sports. I started doing a little bit of home beer brewing out of our garage. That was my escape from everyday life. At the time, my father-in-law was battling with Alzheimer’s, so we started spending a lot of time at his eighty-acre farm down by Oconomowoc. That’s when I had the idea to try to grow some hops down there, and maybe start a hop farm.
I did some research and ended up putting about twenty plants in a test plot in 2009. Then I found a group over by Cottage Grove who were interested in growing hops as well. I even knew one of the guys, John Blaska, who was the President of Landmark Co-op at the time, which is now the ALCIVIA Agricultural Co-op.
In the beginning, there were probably eight or nine of us who worked to figure out how to grow hops, what equipment we needed, and what we could afford to do. We realized that we needed to start a co-op where we could share labor, build harvesting equipment, packaging equipment, sales, and marketing so we could get out to the breweries.
My role was in sales and marketing. Whenever I was out and about on my travels, I would swing into smaller breweries and let them know what we were trying to do. The interest from them was pretty high, but they always had the same questions: ‘Can you get the quality up? What’s your price range going to be?’ So we really had a lot to figure out.
That first year, we put two acres in on my father-in-law’s land. We bought rhizomes, a modified plant stem, from a company out west and trained them up strings that we tied to cable hung by Black Locust poles, hops plants need tall poles. The Black Locust trees were brought here from Europe when the settlers first came, and they grow really fast. They were used for fence posts. The DNR wants to get rid of them because they’re invasive, so it wasn’t hard to find patches of trees that farmers wanted to get rid of.
In the beginning, I had my son, who was still in high school, and my stepson helping us. My son’s friends thought it was fun, too. They’d say, ‘Hey, we’re going to grow hops so we can make beer!’ We had a good time experimenting with flavors. Even before I started brewing my own beer, I enjoyed trying all the different craft beers. There’s really something for everybody in the world of beer, which is what made it all so exciting.
Eventually, we started looking for property nearby so we could grow more. By this time, the co-op was up and running. We were selling hops to different breweries and were always working on how to get better.
Hops hadn’t been grown in Wisconsin for a hundred years. In fact, right after the Civil War, hops growing in Wisconsin was a big-time thing, but eventually, the humidity chased the crop out of the state back in the 1800s. If we had a high humidity year, the hops were worthless. That’s why most hops are grown in drier and hotter places. So we went through a lot of trial and error trying to improve our crops.
Eventually, I started looking at farmer’s grants and it all just kind of came together. We found a farm just south of Belleville with ten tillable acres. Before we knew it, we had our own farm and started planting the next year. After a few years, we had about seven and a half acres and were able to buy a harvester.
We sold hops to a lot of local brewers, and then Page Buchanan, who owned House of Brews in Madison asked, ‘You know so much about beer, why don’t you start brewing your own?
We got a Brewery license and started brewing beer in 2012. At first, we sold big bomber bottles, the 22-ounce kind, at local grocery stores, which was going okay. We sold to about fifty retail outlets, but it still wasn’t a whole lot of money. It was a struggle trying to make farm payments for the land where we grew hops.
That’s when some of the brewers I worked with said, ‘Hey, you have got to get a tap room.’
I found a place in Paoli, which was kind of off the beaten path at the time. Even though Paoli is a bit of a tourist destination now, nobody ever drove through there back then. We were on the back side of a mill, so nobody knew we were there. On the day we opened, funds were so low that we had to cash out our change jar just to have enough in the til if a customer came in. There were a lot of days when not one person would walk in, even in the middle of summer. We were probably within a year of losing the farm. And so I knew we needed to do something.
We started getting a couple of local musicians to play, which drew people in, but it wasn’t enough. On top of that, we were still growing seven-and-a-half acres of hops, which was more than our harvester could handle. We didn’t have a good drying system, and we didn’t have the right equipment, but of course we didn’t know that at the time. So we really struggled.
We cut back on the amount we were growing and concentrated on expanding the Paoli business. I talked our neighbor into letting us mow down some of the weeds next to our building so we could have a little more space, which led to us putting a little stage back behind the building. We had a wagon that we used for hops harvesting, so I drove that down there, built some steps, and that’s where the musicians performed for the first three or four years.
It was slow going, but we grew. People loved coming in. I think what kept us going was just that we wanted to keep making something that others could use and enjoy. There aren’t many people who have the kind of life we have, that’s for sure. It used to be that every town had its own butcher, cheese maker, brewer, etc. But now, everything is mass-produced, so making our own product and selling it locally is pretty special.
This year, we’ll probably be hitting about five hundred barrels, our first year we maybe did 50 bbls. We have opened another location in Evansville, WI and are looking to expand into Belleville, Wisconsin.
We just knew that if we wanted our tap room to succeed, we needed food. Our first chef ran with the idea of tacos, and a lot of people really loved that. But now we have moved in the direction of a barbecue theme, which is another one of my personal passions. We kept some of the Mexican-inspired menu with shrimp tacos and street corn, but we have a smoker and do a lot with pork butt and brisket and things like that.
We also grow ingredients for our flavored beers. For instance, we make a pumpkin beer with our own pumpkins. We grow them, slice them open, smoke them, and use the mash for beer. It’s a hell of a lot of work, but it’s really good and always goes quick. I think we’re the only brewery crazy enough to go through all of that work instead of just putting in spices, but that’s where the passion comes in. That’s where the creativity comes in. There’s no end to the flavor combinations you can create, and that’s what keeps me wanting to do it.
We still grow hops, but we’ve scaled back to just two-and-a-half acres because, just like with the dairy industry, the prices just keep coming down. At one time, we had seventy members growing hops in our co-op, but now we’re down to twenty-five. There’s just not enough money for the amount of work it takes, especially when big farms have enough profit margins to keep prices low.
And so for me, it is more about the fact that I love doing this work. I always joke that I turned all of my personal hobbies into work, so now I don’t have any hobbies to escape into. But really, it all comes down to the fact that I really like being outside, being in the garden, working with the land, and making things for people to enjoy.
Alexandria Delcourt produced Rich’s story in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival. You can learn more about The Hop Garden here. Visit wiscifest.org to learn more about the Science Festival.
By blending agricultural knowledge, brewing science, and creative passion, Rich’s work showcases how local expertise can be transformed into an art form that inspires curiosity and brings communities together. This fusion of art, science, and humanity, is precisely what the annual Wisconsin Science Festival aims to showcase throughout the hundreds of events and programs happening in counties across the state October 14-20. Visit wiscifest.org to learn more.
