Little Fish, Big Tale: How Fast Fashion Caught Its Own Hop

Please welcome Phil Runco back to DC Beer!

John Segal hated the name.

“Why don’t you just call the hop Shit?” the Segal Ranch owner quipped, mildly indignant. “Because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s shit and then the next smelliest thing is an anchovy.”

It was mid-September, the height of harvest season in Washington’s Yakima Valley, the epicenter of North American hop production. Segal and his ranch manager Martin Ramos were standing around a chintzy white picnic table littered with clear plastic bags of freshly picked hops. These hops, experimental varietals bred by Ramos, had been presented for sensory analysis to two guests – the founders of a new, then-unopened brewery called Fast Fashion.

One was Matt Storm, owner of The Masonry, a pizzeria and beer bar with two locations in Seattle. The other was Brian Strumke, the Baltimore native best known for his nomadic beer project Stillwater Artisanal. Segal’s ire fell primarily upon the latter.

Moments earlier, everything had been co

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