Hop drivers from Isernhagen
North of Hannover, there was once a center of the hop trade
The layout of Isernhagen is a bit special. Actually, there is no “the” place Isernhagen. The municipality with this name consists of seven villages, all of which are quite a distance apart. Their place-name signs have idiosyncratic names such as Isernhagen KB, Isernhagen NB, FB or HB. The abbreviations stand for the Kircher, Niedernhägener, Farster and Hohenhorster farming communities. This in turn indicates that these have long been collections of farms scattered across a wide area.
What the farming communities and the other Isernhagen villages had in common for a long time was hops. Not so much the cultivation of the plants, which never really took root here in the north of Hannover, but the trade in hops, and the storage and transportation of them – all of it. Today, we would call it hop logistics.
Postcard from Isernhagen, around 1950.
It is no longer possible to determine what came first: transportation, storage or sales. The name that the Isernhagen hop logisticians went by suggests that mobility came into play first: hop drivers. Their route often took them hundreds of kilometers away from home, mostly to the east and northeast, wherever good hops grew. To the Braunschweig area, where hops had triggered a real hysteria of cultivation, to the Wendland around Lüchow and Dannenberg, to the Altmark around Gardelegen and even to the Saxon hop areas. The Isernhagen farmers bought up the hops everywhere. They then transported them first of all to their home village and stored them there for a certain period of time. Only when the time was right did they then drive them to where good prices were paid. Sometimes again long distances, if necessary also very long and logically rather in the other direction, to Bremen, Hamburg, Holstein and even to distant Denmark as far as Copenhagen. In Flensburg and in the Danish town of Randers, they had therefore also leased their own storage yards for their goods.
Hop store in Isernhagen, Am Ortfelde, which was used as a private residence for a long time, photo taken in 2023.
We have the former Isernhagen teacher Kurt Griemsmann to thank for the fact that we still know anything at all about them today. He knew the descendants of the last hop drivers personally and asked to see old documents such as account books and diaries. He probably also asked to see many other things, but unfortunately none of them can be found today. In the mid-1950s, Griemsmann published an essay and then, in 1973, a longer chapter on the history of the hop drivers in his chronicle of Isernhagen. Numerous details can be found there, but Griemsmann simply gave the source as “private”. Some of the sources can still be found in archives today, but with much of the local historian’s work, one simply has to trust him.
He doesn’t know exactly when the Isernhageners started the hop business either. The oldest record dates from 1447. Around 1700, around 50 farms were involved in hop-growing, in a place that consisted of only a few farmsteads.
Hop store in Isernhagen, built in 1586, photographed around 1930. The building no longer exists.
The activities of the Isernhagen hop-growers would have been interesting enough. What makes them so special for the inclined hop historian today is the fact that they have left distinctive traces in the landscape that can still be seen today. Some of them are right next to the main road. These are so-called hop stores, half-timbered buildings, the oldest of which date back to around 1550. Even though none of the stores are in their original condition as expected, at least the exterior has often been preserved quite authentically. At least until a few years ago. For a long time, the most famous representative housed a locality that was appropriately named “Hopfenspeicher”. Unfortunately, the inn no longer exists and the old facade has had to endure a somewhat inappropriate new coat of paint. Two other hop stores are hidden away on private property and used as living space. And one is only still standing because a family with close ties to their local area in Isernhagen spent a lot of money and had the store, which was in danger of being demolished, faithfully transported to their own garden. Just like in an open-air museum. In technical jargon, this is called “translocation”. However, because the local office for the preservation of historical monuments did not just react enthusiastically to so much love for the homeland, but believed that the family had to be supported with various conditions, the granary now simply stands empty in the garden and cannot be used as living space. But that is another story.
Eilers-Bätke Hop Store, built in 1563, on the left at its former location in 1997, on the right rebuilt on private property in 2023.
Despite all the buildings that have been preserved, it is no longer possible to reconstruct exactly what happened in these stores. It is known that hops were stored here, but how and for how long? Hops are known to be quite delicate plants, and in times when there were neither pellets nor extract, months of storage did not necessarily increase their value. So why was this done? Because hop merchants have always been speculators, too, watching the hop market as closely as the stock exchange, keeping a close eye on supply and demand, and only striking when the time was right? Or simply to control the hop market better, supply customers just in time, and to better separate purchasing and sales? Maybe. But why the relatively high, always two-storey construction of the storehouses? Carrying heavy sacks of hops to the first floor was hard work. A slightly raised wooden floor on the ground floor would have helped against damp, where the valuable hop goods would not have been exposed to the heat under the roof as much. And what was the difference between a hop storehouse and one used for storing grain? Was there any difference at all, or was a hop storehouse simply a storage building used for storing hops? Without any major structural differences?
Hop store from the inside, photographed in 2023.
Living in the hop store, 1997. The apartment no longer exists today.
We don’t know the answers to any of these questions, and we probably never will. It is fairly safe to say that the hop business was lucrative and brought some prosperity to Isernhagen. Around 1740, the tax revenue of a hop merchant was twice as high as that of the best local craft businesses. Fairytale stories were told everywhere, such as that of the heirs of an Isernhagen hop merchant who, after his death, locked themselves in for three days so that they could count the money he had left behind in peace. Even today, the numerous magnificent farm buildings, adorned with dates from the 17th century onwards, are still striking. In places, Isernhagen really does look like an inhabited open-air museum. Griemsmann went so far as to attribute the wealth of houses in Isernhagen to the former hop business. An appealing argument, which, however, cannot be proven.
Old farmhouse on Isernhagen’s Dorfstraße.
However, the Isernhageners did good business in any case. Which could also arouse certain desires. As is often the case with traveling hop merchants, who inevitably carried some cash with them on the return journey. The chronicle contains many stories about dicey situations with highwaymen, in which either only the faithful sheepdog, chance or pure luck brought salvation. Not least to avoid such dangers, many hop drivers began to reinvest the hop money they had earned in foreign countries, for example in the purchase of horses or wool, which they brought back to Isernhagen to then sell at a profit to customers at home. “Outward and homeward freight – that makes money” was the striking slogan.
For centuries, the hop drivers seem to have thrived with their business model. But the age of industrialization in the 19th century then brought an end to it. The centers of German hop growing had meanwhile shifted to distant Bavaria, to Spalt, Hersbruck and the Hallertau region. The hotspots of the hop trade were now Nuremberg, Bamberg and Fürth, where the hop business was growing on a scale far beyond the Isernhageners’ capabilities. And the means of transport of the future was the railroad, significantly faster, safer and more efficient than the horse-drawn carts of the hop drivers.
Hop store in Isernhagen, Asphalweg, built in the first half of the 17th century, photo taken in 2023.
The last of their guild hung up their hop-driving gear around 1850. One of their descendants, Wilhelm Dusche, whose family had been in the hop business for generations, later even made it into the German Reichstag. It was his family that kept the last traces of the long history of the Isernhagen hop drivers, without whom we would know almost nothing about them today.
Hop store in Isernhagen, built in 1709, on the left still a restaurant of the same name in 1997, on the right in its present state.