Empire Hops & Harvest Festival Returns This Weekend after Six Year Hiatus

A beloved Leelanau County event that was just starting to hit its stride before the pandemic will make its return this weekend.

Civic leaders launched the Empire Hops and Harvest Festival in 2014 to serve as a bookend of sorts to an Empire tourist season that largely begins with the popular Asparagus Festival in the spring.

As it did to countless thousands of events across the country, the COVID-19 pandemic put what was intended to be a temporary pause on the hops festival, which due to a variety of factors never returned – until now.

The event runs from noon until 6 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 20 in downtown Empire. In addition to several local and Michigan beers on tap, the event will feature live music from three bands, food vendors and more. More information can be found on the festival's Facebook page.

Empire Chamber of Commerce president and lead organizer Paul Skinner said there is a lot of good vibes surrounding the festival’s return.

“All of the businesses have said to me that they’re really behind this, they’re all very excited about this coming back,” he tells The Ticker. “They’re happy to push it into the future so it can grow back to what it was before.”

This resurrection would likely not have happened without assistance from the Cedar Polka Fest Foundation, which leveraged its connection with H. Cox and Son (a local beer supplier) to make sure the hops festival had plenty of beer. The foundation will also help with operations by providing volunteer manpower.

“It fits our mission statement. We’re supporting our local community by helping another chamber be successful and bring some money into their economy,” foundation Executive Director Lisa Rossi tells The Ticker. “If all of our little organizations work together, we can all benefit.”

In the past, several local breweries came and served their beer, Skinner said, many with local hops, but they had an increasingly hard time staffing the festival while maintaining their brick-and-mortar operations. Festival organizers eventually ran around and gathered local beer to serve themselves, something that proved quite stressful and time consuming.

Organizers are relieved to have H. Cox and Son, which will provide Right Brain, Storm Cloud and North Peak beers along with other Michigan favorites like Bell’s, New Holland and Upper Hand.

“This is a way more sustainable solution,” Rossi said.

Fesitvals like these are of critical importance to small communities like Empire, Skinner says. 

“What it does is it gives you that little bit of a boost going into the shoulder season,” he says. “There's nothing better from a financial aspect than to have an injection of cash. Plus also it filled the motels and kept the gas stations and everybody else pretty busy.”

Unfortunately, local hops won’t play much of a role, as that industry has almost entirely vanished in recent times. For the first several years, the festival focused on local hops, with breweries featuring special suds made from them.

Hops are grown en masse in the Pacific Northwest, but a sustained drought there about 15 years ago drove production to other areas, Skinner says, including Michigan.

“When we first started out, there were several hundred acres planted around here, so we hung our hats on that with their blessing, and MI Local Hops (which once had hundreds of acres in Acme) became the key sponsor,” Skinner says.

Long story short, Skinner says, the northwestern weather and production eventually recovered while a corn beetle devastated local crops, a one-two punch that killed the local industry.

“(The pacific northwest producers) not only put the knife in but they twisted it, because they then started selling hops at incredibly cheap prices, so then it wasn't cost-effective to replant,” he says.