For our Faces of Local interview this month, we talked to Greg Garrison, who owns The Hop with his wife, Ashley Garrison. They source local ingredients from several farms, particularly Lee’s One Fortune Farm in McDowell County, one of the farms featured on this year’s Farm Tour. Visit The Hop for peach ice cream at one of their four locations—downtown Asheville, West Asheville, North Asheville, and Black Mountain—and look for more local flavors soon!
What flavors are you making with Lee’s One Fortune Farm?
The relationship started with peaches. In 2019, [Chue and Tou Lee] reached out wanting to have ice cream to sell at markets. We said, “Well, we want peach ice cream too.” We now do three different flavors with their peaches, a straight-up peach, peach-blueberry with blueberries from another local farm, and Southern Comfort, which is a peach-bourbon ice cream. We’ve been making that for years, but now we make it with the Lees’ peaches. All three are available as vegan ice cream as well, made with pepita milk that we make in-house from scratch from pepita seeds.
This is our second year of using strawberries from the Lees. They actually created a new strawberry bed on a plot of land specifically for us. That was amazing because it extends our season for strawberry ice cream. I think 95 percent if not more of our strawberries this year were from Lees. Later in the fall, we’ll use their kabocha squash, which is a Japanese pumpkin, for our pumpkin ice cream.
Tou will often just bring fun stuff for us to play with. We’ve played around with nectarines and purple sweet potato, but we’re more dependent on what Tou has left. We’ve also used their rice for rice milk vegan ice cream. That’s not something we can do all the time. The restaurants and everyone else pretty much gobble that up before it’s even finished growing. If Tou sets some aside, we can make rice milk. Because it’s such a high-quality rice, it’s pretty creamy. It’s really easy to work with. Nuts and seeds take a little extra love. The times we had access to the rice we made mango-matcha-mochi, with fresh mango, and Ashley made matcha mochi.
Tell me about your relationship with the Lees.
One of the reasons why they have built such a reputation around their business is because of how genuine they are as humans. They just care so much about everybody they are talking to and interacting with. They’re always bringing gifts to anyone and everyone on our staff, and going an extra mile to get us produce on a certain day. They’re just slammed all the time. They’re doing all these markets. But they still find time to stop and chat and drop off produce and pick up ice cream. Never once have I heard them complain.
Ashley and I got to go out to the farm—the location that will be on the Farm Tour—with Eva Peterson, who is our business partner with POP Bubble Tea. We got to explore and pick berries, eat peas right of the vine, see the rice fields. Getting to see Tou on the farm—his enthusiasm is just out on his face all the time. He’s so excited about all of it, thinking about what at the farm could be turned into ice cream. Then he and Eva to to talk about cultivars coming from Asia and certain types of berries or produce. Eva was blown away by their ability to grow what they grow. Their produce is unique. It has its own story and they have their own story, which is inspiring and heart-wrenching. The combination of them being such wonderful people, coming from where they come from in their world, and way they approach their community, makes it so easy to support them.
What other local ingredients can we find in The Hop’s ice cream?
We’ve developed relationships with Bountiful Cities and Peace Gardens with Hood Huggers. We’ve been to KT’s Orchard for black raspberries, and we use Holt Orchard for apples. We’re coming into apple season, and we’ll be doing an apple and honey ice cream for Rosh Hashana. Rayburn Farm was the first farm where we developed a really strong relationship directly with the family. Michael has such a sweet tooth! He’s phasing himself into some new directions, but we still play with some things, like hot cocoa ice cream. He always has cool ideas. He has that basil collection that’s fun for one-off flavors.
Why are these community connections and local ingredients important to The Hop?
There’s an overarching philosophy that pretty much drives me and Ashley personally and is amplified by the business, and it’s that we’re part of a community. That’s where these collaborations and relationships come from. Once those relationships start, they go in so many different directions. It’s really cool to see that impact. Maybe it’s that our buying something from the Lees or from another farm makes the difference for them to expand their plot. They do that, and then they’re offering strawberries to other places, and everybody gets a better quality product, and they’re supporting the Lees instead of a farm outside the region. My take on it is that Asheville is the right size for building relationships.