Right now, in a small farming town called Kamifurano near Furano, a handful of families are bringing in Hokkaido's entire commercial hop harvest. It happens fast, usually two weeks between late August and mid-September (although it is a little warmer this year), timed so the hops don't lose quality sitting on the vine. Four farms handle it, contracted with Sapporo Breweries, down from around a hundred in the 1960s. Hop growing here goes back to the 1920s.

That alone would be a nice, quiet local story. What makes it a real find is what happened to a single variety bred there in 1984.

Sapporo's research lab developed a hop in Kamifurano with an unusually loud personality: cedar, lemongrass, dill, nothing like the clean, crisp lagers Japan wanted at the time. They named it Sorachi Ace, after the district. Nobody wanted it. Japanese brewing in the 1980s was chasing a sharp, refreshing finish, and Sorachi Ace was too strange for the job. Sapporo shelved it.

It survived almost by accident. Cuttings ended up in an Oregon State University research planting in the 1990s, sitting in a USDA seed archive. In 2002, a Washington State hop farmer found it there, planted it, and released it commercially in the US in 2006. Craft brewers discovered it during a hop shortage the following year and never let go. Brooklyn Brewery built an entire saison around it, and Brooklyn Sorachi Ace is still the beer most responsible for the hop's cult status, dill and all.

The strange part is, even now, most Sorachi Ace in the world, including the hops in Brooklyn's own beer, is grown in Washington State, not Hokkaido. A hop invented in a Kamifurano field spent twenty years unwanted at home, got picked up on the other side of the Pacific, and became famous under someone else's soil.

Japan is only now catching up to what it once passed on. Sapporo's own tribute beer, SORACHI1984, launched in Hokkaido in 2018 and went national in 2019, built specifically around this hop. Even that beer runs mostly on US-grown Sorachi Ace, blended with a smaller amount actually grown back in Kamifurano. Sapporo has been trying to change that ratio, expanding domestic growing beyond Kamifurano into Tōhoku, new fields in Tago (Aomori) and Karumai (Iwate), and says it's increased domestic Sorachi Ace usage for four years running. Brooklyn Sorachi Ace itself started selling in Japan in 2018, Hokkaido only at first, then nationwide by 2019 once demand caught on.

Hop Kotan Brewing

There's a smaller, more local thread too: one of the Kamifurano growers, Inaba Akira, supplies hops to Sapporo and also to a small Hokkaido craft brewery, Koppukotan Brewing, based right there in town. Whether that particular beer uses Sorachi Ace specifically or one of the area's other varieties isn't something we could confirm, but it means the hop's hometown still has its own small brewery pouring beer made from the same fields.

They also have a phenomenal Tap Room in downtown Sapporo, definitely check them out if you are downtown near Parco (directions here)

Sorachi, the district name itself, comes from the Ainu sōrapuchi, "descending waterfall." Hop cones grow in a cascading, stair-stepped pattern that does resemble one. Whether that's coincidence or just a detail that only becomes visible once you know the word, it's hard to un-see once someone's pointed it out.

The hop farms themselves aren't open for casual walk-up visits, they're private land under contract with Sapporo. But there are real ways in: Sapporo periodically runs a "Special Tour for Beer Fans" that walks the Kamifurano fields alongside a brewery visit, and there's a standing bookable day tour out of Sapporo built around a hop-field lunch of local grilled pork and beer. Worth checking current tour calendars before planning a trip specifically around it, availability isn't constant.