For botanists, the common hop is a climbing perennial plant. For Latin scholars, it is Humulus lupulus, the ‘wolf in the woods’. For modern brewers, it is verging on a fetish. Today, 97 per cent of cultivated hops are used in brewing, and millions of pounds are spent every year researching the flavours and stability they can give to beer, and trying to understand their unpredictability. Despite centuries of work and decades of chemical analysis, there is still a huge amount about hops that remains a mystery.
Today, beer and ale have come to mean much the same thing. But there was a time when ‘ale’ meant brews produced from malt without hops – the original drink of the Anglo-Saxons – while in Germany they were drinking ‘beer’ made with them.
Hops, which are closely related to cannabis, weren’t introduced to England until the end of the 15th century when they were used solely as a preservative. Englishmen reluctantly suffered the fact that they made the beer taste bitter but by the 17th century, un-hopped beer was no longer popular and hop cultivation spread throughout Britain. By the 19th century, British hop production had peaked with 77,000 acres dedicated to the crop.
Before they were ever used to enhance beer’s flavour, the use of hops for their anti-bacterial qualities developed as trade grew between Britain and India. Of the beer brought aboard ships for the long voyage to India, that brewed with hops kept well, and that brewed using other bittering herbs spoiled. More hops were added to ensure the beer would survive the trip and the India Pale Ale or IPA style was born.
“As hops were an introduction and not here naturally, historically they are tied up with prejudice and misinformation,” says Dr Peter Darby, a plant geneticist for Wye Hops – a subsidiary of the British Hop Association. He has been breeding hops since 1981, developing a number of new English hop varieties. But, it is the New World varieties that have been credited in recent years with the explosion in the craft brewing scene. “There has been a huge resurgence and interest in hops with people wanting to know more and explore,” Darby says.
In recent years, there has been a lot of experimentation with hops imported from America, New Zealand and mainland Europe, which can offer a more intense flavour thanks to the longer growing days and higher light intensity. Brewers use a huge range of hops and while most beers will use two or three hop varieties, many now use five or more (though single-hop brews showcasing one strain are increasingly popular). However, some brewers are now looking back to the traditional taste associated with IPAs, underlined by some of the 20 varieties of British hops, which tend towards more delicate flavours.
“It’s about trends, and came from the hop race that happened in the States. People’s palate or expectations of a beer now is that they should have a good hop profile”
“Think of it as an orchestra,” says Darby. “Some hops give you the bass notes, some the treble notes. You need a mix of both. If the hop is music, then the US hops tend to be a brass band, whereas the English hops tend to be a string orchestra. They are the same notes but of a different quality: one is much more brash, the other understated.”
A beer’s hop profile has become so central to the marketing of craft brewing that signature beers are mostly all about the hop flavours and new beers, even breweries, are taking their names from hop types. The variation brewers can achieve with different strains and hopping techniques is enormous. Each hop-growing country has its own set of varieties and how they taste will reflect the microenvironment of wherever they were cultivated. Day length, soil, rainfall and light intensity all affect the end product. The same variety grown in two countries will result in completely different flavours; so, the Fuggle grown in Kent and the Styrian Goldings grown in Slovenia may be genetically identical but the levels of oils and acids flavouring the beer will vary hugely.
One of the first UK breweries to really pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the US craft brewers by putting the emphasis on bold, hoppy beers, was Kelso-based Tempest Brewing Co. Chef and publican Gavin Meiklejohn founded the brewery in 2010 when he found he couldn’t get a direct supply of the beers he loved. “Hops are certainly the part of the beer everybody likes talking about,” he says. “It’s about trends, and came from the hop race that happened in the States. People’s palates or expectations of a beer now is that it should have a good hop profile. No one is branding or setting up Facebook pages for malt varieties, that’s for sure.”
Meiklejohn served his brewing apprenticeship in New Zealand and Tempest now keeps around 20 hop styles in stock at any one time, mostly from New Zealand and America. “It’s just the way our beers have evolved. When I learned to brew in New Zealand, I was just using Kiwi hops, so that’s why we use them.
“We brew American-style beers. Our yeast comes from San Diego and it’s a very American style and very different to what an English ale would use. It’s more neutral because we want the flavour to come from the malt and the hops. It’s not that we don’t want to use English hops, it’s just it doesn’t suit the kind of beers we brew.”
The huge demand for hops can present problems for breweries of Tempest’s size. Meiklejohn says: “No one has come out and said this but I personally don’t think the quality is there that used to be. We are using more than we ever used to. It comes down to what is happening on the farms. Some hops, they may have only been in the ground five minutes and then they are pulling cones off. Everyone wants hops and when demand exceeds supply, normally you get production problems.”
“Sometimes we are paying more for hops than for a fillet steak in a restaurant. If that’s not crazy, then I don’t know what is”
Smaller breweries are further down the pecking order when it comes to buying in popular varieties and when the hops run out, they must look to similar varieties and carefully change their brewing regime accordingly. “We calculate what our bitterness is going to be and we use our process control for temperature, volume, things like that, to get it the way we want it. So we are methodical about how we do things to keep it consistent,” says Meiklejohn. “You can get the beer properly analysed by sending it off to a lab but it is very expensive. They can analyse the bitterness by measuring the dissolved alpha acid units in the beer. But, to be honest, when you taste it, that is as good as anything else.”
The unpredictability of hops, which larger brewers go to such lengths to tame, remains a risk for craft brewers, but it’s also part of the appeal. “Sometimes things happen and I have no idea why,” says Meiklejohn. “It’s a batch brew process. You can’t get 100 per cent consistency. You have to accept the unpredictability of your ingredients. The frustration does come in with the price of things. Sometimes we are paying more for hops than for a fillet steak in a restaurant. If that’s not crazy, then I don’t know what is.”
Tempest find themselves constrained at the moment, not by the price or availability of hops, but by the frustrating wait to move to a new brewery. Larger premises are available but the new brew house is delayed and in the meantime they can’t make their beer fast enough for the demand. Despite this, Meiklejohn is excited about what the extra space will allow and it won’t all be about the hops.
“Trying to think of new beers is the best part about it. We want to use different yeasts. I’d like to do a proper lager. We don’t do an English style and that’s something I’d like to do, like an extra-special bitter. And we’d like to do a saison with fruit juice.
“The market in the UK is about hops, but, as a brewer, on a personal level, I don’t want to be a one-trick pony. I don’t want to have a whole lot of beers and the only difference is the hop variety and ABV. That’s just badge swapping. We don’t do that here – we try to make a beer with a narrative to it.”
