At the top of Park City’s historic Main Street, the annual Hoppy Hour celebration, hosted by Summit Land Conservancy and Top of Main Brew Pub, returned for its 11th year Thursday evening with a familiar mission: Drink beer and save land.
This year’s event drew a crowd of conservation supporters and beer lovers to the Old Town brewery, where attendees sampled Clothing Hoptional, a limited-edition beer brewed from wild hops harvested on nearby protected land. This year, the freshly brewed beer was made from 73 pounds of hops collected in September by Summit Land Conservancy volunteers.
“We consider this event like a friend-raiser instead of a fundraiser because it’s at an affordable price point,” said Caitlin Willard, vice president of communications for Summit Land Conservancy.
Tickets were $20 in advance or $25 at the door, aiming to keep the event accessible to anyone looking to support open space in a low-key, community-oriented setting. Guests had two drink tickets, appetizers provided by Top of Main, and a chance to win prizes from sponsors including Kuhl, Roark, Momentous, Cotopaxi, Christy Sports, Skullcandy, Stio and Fjallraven.
“These are all businesses up on Main Street or around Park City that are helping contribute to the cause and the event,” said Willard. “When they do that, they’re helping save land.”
Hoppy Hour is the culmination of the nonprofit’s Hops Hunters series — a summer-long effort in which volunteers fan out across Park City’s trails and neighborhoods in search of wild hop vines, Willard said.
This year’s harvest, though smaller than the record-setting 120 pounds from past years, still produced an good yield given the area’s dry season. Once gathered, the hops were handed off to Top of Main’s master brewer, Nils Imboden, who said the annual tradition blends his passion for brewing with his Park City roots.
“I’m born and raised here. I think what Summit Land Conservancy does is so cool. And being able to work with them on my professional side to benefit them is also pretty cool,” he said.
Imboden said he’s been brewing beer from local wild hops long before the partnership with the nonprofit, referencing his Hop Bandit beer of the past, named because he would “steal” hops off people’s fences in town.
“Hops grow wild all over town, like they’re literally everywhere. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them,” he said, explaining their well-debated origin story. “The most qualified miners back in the day were English and German, and so they brought hops with them so they could make beer here. That’s the fun story. Hops are native to North America, so there’s some debate back and forth about were these wild hops or were they actually planted by the mining community?”
Because the hops are collected from the wild, the flavor changes every year depending on weather and growing conditions. Plus, like hops’ cousin plant cannabis, there are thousands of strains with their own flavors.
“We get what we get, and we don’t know how it’s going to taste. It really is wild and we’re at the mercy of the elements throughout the year,” the brewer said. “Every year is slightly different.”
The beer itself, Clothing Hoptional, is made the same day the hops are harvested, Imboden said, a process that takes about six hours, followed by up to two weeks of fermentation.
“From a production side, it’s really cool,” he said. “I don’t know anybody else making a wild hop beer in the nation.”
Imboden also emphasized that every ingredient in the beer is as local as possible, including the barley supplied by Solstice Malt, Utah’s only local malting facility based in Salt Lake City.
This year’s batch, which Imboden described as a golden ale with a medium body, offered subtle fruit and floral notes. He cracks open a fresh can for live tasting notes.
“Right off the bat, maybe some underripe melon and pine … I definitely get almost a honeydew melon, maybe some grapefruit undertones, like a grapefruit pith,” he said, explaining that the goal is to make it a drinkable option for both new and seasoned beer drinkers. “There’s some mango, a little bit of a cracker malt backbone with a little bit of toasted bread.”
Imboden admitted that making a beer like Clothing Hoptional requires him to loosen the reins on his perfectionism, a skill usually needed when brewing multiple batches of Top of Main’s top sellers. But when working with a dozen of unknown hops varieties, with flavors that can range from citrus to straw to hay to floral, the outcome is often a surprise.
“Honestly, this batch turned out really well. I’m quite happy with it,” he said. “This is definitely up there with one of my favorite batches of this that we did.”
While the beer was the evening’s centerpiece, the broader purpose of Hoppy Hour was to raise awareness for Summit Land Conservancy’s work protecting land across the Wasatch Back. The organization is running a campaign called For the Future Fund, which launched in May 2023 as part of the larger $100 million Utah Headwaters Initiative and aims to preserve 36,000 acres from Weber County to Wasatch County within five years.
“We’re saving land and water for our communities here across the Wasatch Back, but we can’t do it without individual support as well,” Willard said.
The organization purchases land development rights from landowners, and then sets up conservation easements on those properties. Support for the group can be financial but also communal, as most of their projects are found via word of mouth, landowner talking to landowner, Willard said. Though proceeds from Hoppy Hour aren’t tied to a single conservation project, they help fund the organization’s daily operations.
“We are so busy. Our phones are ringing off the hook pretty consistently,” Willard said. “What these dollars do is they help keep the lights on in the organization, so that way we can keep working on those other big projects.”
The group’s recent successes include securing conservation easements on five properties this year, totaling 5,120 acres of saved land, among them the iconic Treasure Hill — visible from Top of Main.
For Imboden, the collaboration is always something to look forward to: “It’s a good event for them, and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, like I’m doing my local part,” he said.
Clothing Hoptional will be available on tap or in cans at Top of Main until sold out, likely for the next few weeks, the brewer said. To learn about future Summit Land Conservancy events, and to learn more about the nonprofit, follow them on social media or visit their website, wesaveland.org.