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Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them
Not yet published
Expected 20 Oct 26The little-known story of the young women who played a vital role in the rise of America’s great breweries.
Water, malt, yeast, and 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.
Water, malt, yeast, and 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.
- GenresHistory
Kindle Edition
Expected publication October 20, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I am giving Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grow Them by Jennifer A. Jordan a 5-star review. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Though this is not my typical read, something about the cover and the premise completely caught my attention! I asked for this eARC, and I was absolutely not disappointed by it.
ARC Disclosure: A huge thank you to NetGalley, the author Jennifer A. Jordan, and the publisher for providing an advanced copy of this book. I am so grateful for the opportunity to read and share my honest thoughts!
The Review
Beer Ghosts invites readers to view the complex, multi-billion dollar multinational brewing industry through the door of a simple 19th-century Wisconsin farmhouse. Digging deep into diaries, census records, and newspaper accounts, Jennifer A. Jordan reconstructs a world where women take center stage. From the opening pages, we are drawn into the remarkable, forgotten life of Ella Seymour and the thousands of young women laborers who picked hops and powered agricultural production. The work of these farm families was an essential step without which the iconic beers of Milwaukee and beyond would never have been possible.
The Good
I was completely floored by this impeccably researched book full of untold history, captivating multi-generational stories, and unsurpassed hops knowledge! The pace and rhythm of the book is fast, and the way the author tells these stories about hops, beer, and early breweries just keeps you hooked into the facts and the information shared. With a scholar's mind and a storyteller's eye, Jordan restores visibility to the humble women who laid the foundation for America's favorite beverage. It is a very interesting read indeed, told as a deeply personal local story set within a fascinating global context. I’ll never look at a glass of beer in quite the same way again!
The Not So Good
The only difficult part is keeping track of the massive wealth of totally new historical data thrown at you! Because it is so rich with new information and secrets shared by the past, you'll want to take your time soaking in every single detail so you don't miss a thing
Though this is not my typical read, something about the cover and the premise completely caught my attention! I asked for this eARC, and I was absolutely not disappointed by it.
ARC Disclosure: A huge thank you to NetGalley, the author Jennifer A. Jordan, and the publisher for providing an advanced copy of this book. I am so grateful for the opportunity to read and share my honest thoughts!
The Review
Beer Ghosts invites readers to view the complex, multi-billion dollar multinational brewing industry through the door of a simple 19th-century Wisconsin farmhouse. Digging deep into diaries, census records, and newspaper accounts, Jennifer A. Jordan reconstructs a world where women take center stage. From the opening pages, we are drawn into the remarkable, forgotten life of Ella Seymour and the thousands of young women laborers who picked hops and powered agricultural production. The work of these farm families was an essential step without which the iconic beers of Milwaukee and beyond would never have been possible.
The Good
I was completely floored by this impeccably researched book full of untold history, captivating multi-generational stories, and unsurpassed hops knowledge! The pace and rhythm of the book is fast, and the way the author tells these stories about hops, beer, and early breweries just keeps you hooked into the facts and the information shared. With a scholar's mind and a storyteller's eye, Jordan restores visibility to the humble women who laid the foundation for America's favorite beverage. It is a very interesting read indeed, told as a deeply personal local story set within a fascinating global context. I’ll never look at a glass of beer in quite the same way again!
The Not So Good
The only difficult part is keeping track of the massive wealth of totally new historical data thrown at you! Because it is so rich with new information and secrets shared by the past, you'll want to take your time soaking in every single detail so you don't miss a thing
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August 12, 2026Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them is a fascinating recovery of a largely forgotten chapter in American history one that begins with beer but ultimately becomes a story about labor, women, migration, memory, and the hidden human foundations of an industry.
Jennifer A. Jordan’s focus on nineteenth century Wisconsin’s hop boom provides an unusually vivid lens through which to understand the development of American brewing. Before mechanization transformed hop harvesting, thousands of women and girls traveled to Wisconsin’s hop farms each season, performing the demanding work of picking hops by hand. Their labor helped sustain an emerging beer industry, yet their presence has largely disappeared from the broader historical narrative.
That disappearance is precisely what makes Jordan’s investigation so compelling. The “ghosts” of the title are not simply lost hops or vanished farms, but the people whose work made an economic transformation possible and whose stories were rarely preserved on the scale they deserved. Through agricultural census records, local archives, and especially the diary of Ella, a young hop picker, Jordan reconstructs a world that might otherwise remain almost invisible.
The book’s greatest strength is its ability to transform seemingly ordinary historical details into something deeply human. The harvest camps, meals, parties, dances, exhausting labor, and seasonal movement of workers reveal an entire social world surrounding the production of a crop that would influence American beer culture.
There is also a powerful contemporary resonance here. Beer Ghosts asks readers to consider whose labor becomes celebrated when an industry succeeds and whose contributions disappear from the story.
That makes the book appealing far beyond traditional beer enthusiasts. Readers of women’s history, labor history, food history, agricultural history, American social history, and narrative nonfiction all have a natural entry point into Jordan’s work. Most importantly, it gives readers the opportunity to remember the women who helped build an industry that history too often remembers without them.
Jennifer A. Jordan’s focus on nineteenth century Wisconsin’s hop boom provides an unusually vivid lens through which to understand the development of American brewing. Before mechanization transformed hop harvesting, thousands of women and girls traveled to Wisconsin’s hop farms each season, performing the demanding work of picking hops by hand. Their labor helped sustain an emerging beer industry, yet their presence has largely disappeared from the broader historical narrative.
That disappearance is precisely what makes Jordan’s investigation so compelling. The “ghosts” of the title are not simply lost hops or vanished farms, but the people whose work made an economic transformation possible and whose stories were rarely preserved on the scale they deserved. Through agricultural census records, local archives, and especially the diary of Ella, a young hop picker, Jordan reconstructs a world that might otherwise remain almost invisible.
The book’s greatest strength is its ability to transform seemingly ordinary historical details into something deeply human. The harvest camps, meals, parties, dances, exhausting labor, and seasonal movement of workers reveal an entire social world surrounding the production of a crop that would influence American beer culture.
There is also a powerful contemporary resonance here. Beer Ghosts asks readers to consider whose labor becomes celebrated when an industry succeeds and whose contributions disappear from the story.
That makes the book appealing far beyond traditional beer enthusiasts. Readers of women’s history, labor history, food history, agricultural history, American social history, and narrative nonfiction all have a natural entry point into Jordan’s work. Most importantly, it gives readers the opportunity to remember the women who helped build an industry that history too often remembers without them.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This is a hard one to give a numeric rating to. I'm not really sure why this was put up on NetGalley for ARCs, because it reads much more like an academic text than a "popular" nonfiction book. I also think that the marketing/subtitle/blurb is a little off on this, because although Jordan does try to bring women into this story with some regularity, ultimately this book is not about women. It would be more accurately described as a deep dive into the Wisconsin hop industry. Even the chapter ostensibly focused on women was not entirely about women. I get it, there's only such information out there, and less about women than about their farmer husbands/fathers, but still. It's clearly well-written and researched, and Jordan does include a number of personal anecdotes about her research time and her own hop growing, but ultimately I did feel a bit misled. There was also a fair amount of repetition of certain facts and information in different chapters—again, not so uncommon when bringing this information together in an academic analysis, but it doesn't work as well for a more casual nonfiction book. I cannot count the number of times she managed to bring up the harvesting of hop poles and its effects on the tamarack swamps. Like, yes! I remember! You talked about that in several chapters previously. Enough about the hop poles!
Although I definitely learned a decent amount about the Wisconsin hop industry and tangential topics (farming, brewing), I ultimately wouldn't recommend this book to someone interested in women in the beer industry. But if you're really interesting in the minutae of Wisconsin hop farming, then this book is for you.
Thank you to NetGalley and University of Chicago Press for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Although I definitely learned a decent amount about the Wisconsin hop industry and tangential topics (farming, brewing), I ultimately wouldn't recommend this book to someone interested in women in the beer industry. But if you're really interesting in the minutae of Wisconsin hop farming, then this book is for you.
Thank you to NetGalley and University of Chicago Press for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews