Beer Ghosts

The little-known story of the young women who played a vital role in the rise of America’s great breweries.

Water, malt, yeast, and hops: these are essential ingredients of beer. Hops, specifically, play an outsized role in determining its flavor and aroma. In Beer Ghosts, Jennifer Jordan takes us back to a brief but pivotal moment in the nineteenth century when Wisconsin produced much of the hops grown in the United States. Yet those long-ago hops are not the only ghosts in Jordan’s story. Haunting the pages of this book are the young women whose work at harvest time was key to the rise of the American beer industry.

Until the early twentieth century, the work of picking hops was a time-consuming process that could only be done by hand, one cone at a time. In nineteenth-century Wisconsin, that work was performed almost exclusively by women and girls, who traveled to hop farms in droves as summer came to a close and the harvest began. At the height of the hop boom in the 1860s, farmers and their families laid out beds and prepared food for tens of thousands of seasonal laborers, and hosted parties and dances well into the night. Despite the scale of Wisconsin’s hop boom (and subsequent crash), the industry left behind little trace aside from local records and archives. And it is that barely discernible trace that lures Jordan to dig deeper. 

Jordan’s vivid prose takes us back to this era by drawing on a rich trove of archival sources, from the thousands of hop farmers in the agricultural census to the extraordinary diary of a single hop picker, a young woman named Ella. The history of beer is incomplete without the history of Ella and the others who labored in the hop fields and in the houses that hosted them. In this book, Jordan gives life and voice to these beer ghosts who call to us from the past, showing the rich connections between a nation’s beer and the lives that made it possible.

 Jennifer A. Jordan is professor of sociology, urban studies, and history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond and Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and other Forgotten Foods, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press. She lives in Milwaukee, where she and her husband grow hops in their backyard.