Shaun Hill’s abiding love of New Zealand hops dates back to Spring 2007, when he first tasted Nelson Sauvin in an IPA made by Sly Fox Brewing Company. When he eventually opened Hill Farmstead, Shaun was quick to incorporate the punchy aromas and complex tropical flavors of New Zealand hops in the brewery’s ales. Among the beers released in Hill Farmstead’s first year were single-hop Nelson Pale Ale and Riwaka Pale Ale. Soon after, Shaun crafted Susan, an IPA whose bright pithiness and floral fragrance owe everything to the dominance of Riwaka in its hop profile. From the beginning, Hill Farmstead was all in on New Zealand hops. The only problem was that the brewery couldn’t get enough of them.

For six years, Shaun struggled to find a reliable source for Nelson and Riwaka, acquiring them only rarely and in small quantities. As he looked for answers, his inquiries were punted between employees at various hop distribution companies. As a result, Hill Farmstead was able to release just a few batches of ales annually featuring New Zealand hops. “If you look at my email from that time, there’s just email after email to different suppliers and different breweries,” he recalls. “I was reaching out to everybody I possibly could to figure out how to get more of these hops.”

Shaun wasn’t alone. At the time, New Zealand hops were exploding in popularity, and brewers across the country, looking for more, were running into a wall. Nelson and Riwaka were available at odd intervals, and they were often unreasonably pricey and of inconsistent quality. The problem was that just a handful of large distribution companies were creating a bottleneck in a long, convoluted supply chain that stretched from New Zealand hop farmers to American breweries. Somewhere along the way, wires were getting crossed, and suppliers weren’t responding to the growing demand.

By 2016, with the situation showing no signs of improving, Shaun began toying with the idea of partnering with someone to begin a hop farm in New Zealand, visiting the nation in April of that year to meet with potential business partners and scope out properties. It was during one of those trips that he auspiciously discovered Freestyle Hops, a new hop farm in Upper Moutere, co-founded only weeks prior by Dave Dunbar.

An American with a background in biochemistry and deep family ties to New Zealand, Dunbar had recently started Freestyle with his business partner, Sean Riley, after hearing about the peculiar plight of several friends in the American brewing industry then unable to acquire Nelson and Riwaka hops. Their goal was simple: a farm that sold New Zealand varietals directly to breweries, hearing from brewers themselves about what they wanted from the product, while cutting out the burdensome chain of middlemen

“Shaun visited, and we got to talking and kind of realized that I was trying to do exactly what he wanted done,” Dunbar says.

Over the next decade, Freestyle and Hill Farmstead grew side-by-side in close collaboration, with the farm serving as the brewery’s main source of New Zealand hops. After that initial encounter, Shaun returned to the farm in New Zealand every year for over half a decade—including a nearly two-month visit in 2021, when Hill Farmstead temporarily closed its doors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Touring the fields, following the progress of the hops and evaluating their aromas, Shaun hand-selected the hop lots that would make their way into Hill Farmstead’s beer while helping Freestyle adjust its farming practices to perfect the aromas and flavor of its crops.

“It was a very iterative process,” Dunbar says. “There was a continuous conversation of like, ‘What do you think of this? How did it end up tasting in the beer? Ok, next year maybe we’ll try to shift in this direction a bit.’”

In addition to producing quintessential New Zealand hops like Nelson Sauvin and Riwaka, Freestyle is also a main partner of Hāpi (pronounced “Hoppy”), a government-sponsored experimental hop breeding program through which the farm regularly develops new varietals with the help of select breweries, including Hill Farmstead. During his visits to Freestyle, Shaun has helped evaluate experimental hop varieties and select the strongest contenders that have since found their way into wider production at Freestyle and later into Hill Farmstead’s beers, like Manilita and Lilikoi.

Although the visits to New Zealand have slowed in recent years, Hill Farmstead continues to rely exclusively on Freestyle for its New Zealand hops, and Shaun personally continues to hand-pick the hops used in Hill Farmstead’s beer. Usually, Freestyle will send samples of specific varietals—ten different lots of Nelson Sauvin, for example—to the brewery, and Shaun will conduct a sensory analysis, often with the help of the brewery’s production staff, before making a decision.

“We try to maintain about a 50-50 diversity of New Zealand hopped and American hopped beers,” Shaun says. “But without that journey and without putting in that much effort to arrive at that outcome, not only would that not be the case for Hill Farmstead, but it’s quite possible that it wouldn’t be the case in American craft beer to some extent as well.