This April, beer masters at the prestigious Craft Brewers Conference in Indianapolis (IND) had the opportunity to define the aromas and flavors of their 2025 beers by selecting newly harvested New Zealand hops that traveled across the world via our shared Hawaiian Air Cargo-Alaska Air Cargo network.
Yakima Chief Hops, a grower-owned global hops supplier, relied on our new streamlined international airfreight connections to ship 7,000-plus pounds of hops more than 7,000 air miles from Auckland (AKL) to Seattle (SEA) via Honolulu (HNL) on Hawaiian Airlines widebody aircraft. From Seattle, Alaska Air Cargo carried YCH’s core samples of the kiln-dried New Zealand hops to Indianapolis, ensuring the samples arrived at the conference on time and in peak condition.
“The complexities of getting the bales from New Zealand to the event are quite challenging with the timeline of harvest and the need to maintain the quality of the hops through the journey,” said Tyler Shearn, Yakima Chief’s international logistics manager, who has wrestled with the challenge of getting New Zealand hops to the conference for the past three years.
“This new combination of Hawaiian Air Cargo and Alaska Air Cargo provided the opportunity to connect the dots all the way from the growers in New Zealand to the brewers at the event,” Shearn said.
Shearn depended on our cargo teams to preserve the cold-chain integrity for the shipments and keep him updated on the hops’ progress through their journey. “The fact that Alaska has cold storage abilities in each location is critical” to protect the hops’ quality, he said. “For customers selecting these for their needs for a specific brew, the best that we can control the quality of the samples, the better end results for everybody.”
At the conference, the Yakima Chief Hops team was excited to see brewers’ enthusiastic reception for the New Zealand product. “We have some of the most influential brewers from around the globe coming in and it’s amazing to see how genuinely excited they are to smell some of these New Zealand varieties,” said Pascal Fritz, YCH marketing director.
“A lot of times this is the first time they’ve been able to touch and select something from that part of the world. We’re just so enthusiastic to be able to facilitate an experience like that.”
Alaska Air Cargo and Hawaiian Air Cargo: Connections to the world
Together, Alaska Air Cargo and Hawaiian Air Cargo reach 130-plus cargo destinations around the world — including new daily nonstop service between Seattle and Tokyo Narita (NRT). Nonstop service between Seattle and Seoul Incheon (ICN) starts September 12, 2025. With more than 90 years of experience carrying vital shipments to remote communities, our air cargo teams share deep connections to the communities where we live, work and fly.
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NZ hop selection at the Craft Brewers Conference in Indianapolis. (Photos: Yakima Chief Hops)
Yakima Chief Hops is based in central Washington state, with growers throughout the Pacific Northwest, where the majority of U.S. hops are grown. Each fall Yakima Chief Hops collaborates with Alaska Air Cargo, Loftus Ranches and Bale Breaker Brewing Company in “Fresh Hops Fly,” a farm-to-air-to-glass initiative to ship fresh hops from the Yakima Valley to brewery locations around the country the same day they are harvested — allowing beer drinkers in new regions to enjoy the unique taste of fresh hop beers. This fall marks the fourth year of the program, and 2025 brewery collaborations and destinations will be revealed this summer.
Now, the expanded shipping options in the Alaska Air Cargo-Hawaiian Air Cargo global network are inspiring Yakima Chief to explore new options for distributing hops from the Pacific Northwest as well as from New Zealand, Fritz said. Yakima Chief Hops receives and processes hops at their Washington headquarters and distributes their products worldwide.
“We see greater opportunities to get fresh hop products to destinations that we haven’t typically considered,” Fritz said. “We’ve had such a fantastic partnership with Alaska Air Cargo to get fresh hops to new markets throughout the United States, and now this opens up the possibility for us to think bigger and to think globally.”
