Veronica Paul’s Journey From Insurance To Hop Farming: ‘I Couldn’t Sit In An Office’
MAPLEHUST, N.B. – Ten years ago, Veronica Paul was in Nova Scotia working with her father at his insurance business.
Though business was what she went to school for, she soon realized the insurance industry wasn’t where she wanted to be.
“I couldn’t sit in an office. I did not belong there. My father and I started working from home,” says Paul. “We were running his business and he was doing it from Florida. And I said you know what? I am going to go find where I want to be.”
While attending Acadia University, she’d fallen in love with farmland and made lots of friends who were farmers in the Annapolis Valley. Turns out, where she wanted to be was in an unfinished farmhouse in Maplehurst, New Brunswick.
“The day I bought the house I just went for a walk around the property. There’s a brook down back and as we were checking out the brook we found a wild hop plant. It was in late September so the hops were all in full bloom and we recognized what it was and just started thinking about it,” says Paul.
“Over the next couple of years, I did research on the industry. There were talks of hop shortages and a lack of local supply and the craft beer industry was starting to really pick up.”
Today, the farm has grown one hop plant to 10 acres, along with a pellet mill and packaging facility. Paul’s business, Moose Mountain Hops, is now selling hops to breweries across Atlantic Canada and Main.
“I’m really excited to be a part of this industry,” says Paul. “It’s so fun to wake up in the morning and knowing that you’re selling something that goes into a product that makes people happy, unlike insurance.”
Most of the breweries Moose Mountain Hops are in Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador.
“I have a few small customers in Maine. I tried to break into that market a little more,” says Paul. “I did get my import and export thing figured out, so I can go over and ship domestically to them. But primarily Newfoundland, PEI, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.”
Paul’s Atlantic Canadian customers include breweries both big and small.
“I’ve sold to both Moosehead and [Alexander] Keith’s, which are big names that I grew up seeing on beer bottles around, and all those small craft brewers which have come on in the last 10 years,” she says.
Paul says there are about half a dozen hops farmers in New Brunswick, but only a few of those sell commercially.
“Two of us are more of a commercial-sized growing operation. Even in Nova Scotia, there are quite a few, but they are all half-an-acre, an acre,” she says. “They may just have the one customer that they deal with in their local town. Only a couple of us has really shot for the commercial scale.”
Though Paul has been exploring expanding the businesses into Western Canada, she says there’s still lots of room to grow in the Atlantic Canadian beer market, especially with Covid-19 hitting the industry hard.
“We’re still looking to maximize sales. It’s been up and down sometimes,” she says. “I know Covid seems to have taken a hit on the brewers because a lot of them rely on traffic through their doors and they have live music venus and stuff to bring in customers and having to be closed as definitely hurt my sales as a result of theirs taking a hit.”
Despite there being local suppliers for hops, Paul says many of the region’s brewers still get theirs elsewhere, often western Canada. She says a big reason for this is because bigger providers offer more varieties.
“I find a lot of brewers start out using what they call Hops Connect and these big suppliers out west because they have a menu of hops a mile long. They have proprietary brands that we can’t grow because they have the rights to grow them,” says Paul. “So what we try to do is grow popular varieties.”
Moose Mountain currently grows Cascade, Chinook and Sorachi Ace hops. They are also growing limited quantities of AlphAroma, Mt. Ranier, Newport, and Willamette. Paul says even the more popular varieties they grow are different than if it were grown elsewhere.
“What happens is when we grow them out here, they take on the terroir of our region,” she says.
“Cascade hop is a very popular one in IPA’s and stuff, it has a different flavour when it’s grown out here in the east than it does out west.”
But another challenge local hop farmers face is questions of consistency. Even if they offer a good and unique product, breweries need to know that their supply is stable.
“We have a unique product even though it’s the same type of hop. It can lend a local flavour to their product. But it’s hard at first to get them to try local because you have to build up your consistency and show that you’re able to do this year-over-year and provide a consistent product,” says Paul.
“I’ve been basically trying to let the product speak for itself, showing people what I can do rather than telling them that they should buy from me. It seems to work.”
Breaking through to more regional breweries is Paul’s main goal for the coming years.
“I would like to get more market penetration with the local brewers, to have more people comfortable with using a local product and feel that we are able to offer something different alongside the standards that they’re used to and they all the time,” she says.
She says there’s still lots of room for breweries to support local farmers.
“I think they can always use more local. Use more local and try using some of the new wild varieties,” says Paul. “Even try the ones that you’re used to, grown by a local farmer. You might find it has a different flavour and you might get something out of it that nobody else has.”