Hop to it
Kent was once the heartland of British hop production. Andrew Catchpole visits the Faversham Hop Festival to report on the future of this vital beer ingredient
There was a nice spot of irony at work as the 8.20 Spitfire Hop Pickers Steam Special chugged into life and pulled out of London Victoria on route for the September hop festival at Faversham in Kent.
A modern diesel employed to help push-start our 70-year-old Black Fives locomotive had broken down. No matter.
With billowing clouds of steam and a jaunty pwee-oop! on the whistle, our train eased out of the station and gathered pace.
In many ways this seemed a fitting start to a festival that celebrates the English hop industry, along with the quality, character and diversity that traditional hop varieties deliver in a world flooded with identikit big brand lagers and smooth nitro-keg beers. Modern methods, it seems, are not always best.
By any measure British hops have been in serious decline. According to National Hop Association (NHA) figures, 79,000 hectares of hops were grown across 53 counties in the 1870s. Twenty years ago this had reduced to 500 growers, primarily in Kent, Sussex, Hereford and Worcestershire, further declining to just 150 hop farmers by the new millennium with a little under 2,000ha of hops surviving mainly in Kent.
Another blow was dealt by DEFRA (the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) earlier this year when it withdrew funding to the British Hop Research Centre at Wye College in Kent exactly 100 years after the programme began. This endangered both the future of the (living) national hop archive and the breeding programme overseen .....
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By Andrew Catchpole
Section : Spotlight
Page number : 64
