Hoppiness breeds success

It was the perfect luminous autumn day. A pale yellow sun slowly burned away the early morning mist while people walking their dogs along a path between fields in Kent looked on in bemusement as a small group of people raised glasses of beer to toast the opening of a hop garden.

The acclaimed Kentish hop farmer Tony Redsell, watched by Dr Peter Darby, the equally-acclaimed hop breeder, clambered up a ladder placed precariously against the framework of a curtain of hops. Tony, with some friendly and less-than-helpful advice from the onlookers, hammered a shrub to a hop pole.

This, we learnt, is an ancient pagan ritual, still carried out in the hop fields of the Czech Republic. The hops growing in Kent need good luck from any source. They have been saved from extinction thanks to the work of Peter Darby and the support of Faversham brewer Shepherd Neame, the National Hop Association and Tony Redsell.

Dr Darby for many years ran the hop breeding department at Wye College in Kent. Thanks to him and the work of his colleagues, England was the first hop-growing country in the world to produce "hedgerow" hops. They grow to half the height of conventional varieties and, as a result, are easier to pick, are less labour intensive and attract fewer pests and diseases. One hedgerow hop, First Gold, is now widely used by British brewers.

Hedgerow hops were followed at Wye College by Boadicea, a new variety bred from other strains. It needs far fewer chemical sprays than older varieties and was the first step to developing organic hops in England.

Then the axe fell. Wye College was part of the University of London. In 2000, the university merged with Imperial College and four years later Imperial closed the agricultural sciences department at Wye.

Then Defra, the Government Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), hammered more nails into the Wye coffin by announcing it would stop funding the hop-breeding programme.

Defra's arguments were laughable. It said funds should not go to hop research, as they were geared to production, but should go instead to research that combats global warming. But growing hops in England is closely related to tackling threats to the environment. Hops raised in Kent and the Midlands have only short journeys to British breweries, unlike hops imported from the United States, central Europe and even China. The bulk of organic hops are imported from New Zealand, which makes a mockery of attempting to save carbon footprints.

Shorn of Government support, the hop industry has rallied round Peter Darby. He is funded by the National Hop Association while Tony Redsell has provided buildings at his China Farm to enable Peter to continue his research into new hop varieties.

Shepherd Neame​

Meanwhile Shepherd Neame has donated several acres of land at its Queen Court farm near Faversham, where Peter Darby has assembled a collection of more than 250 hop varieties. In spite of one of the worst springs and summers on record, he has grown in just one season this large array of hop varieties, some of which would have died out if Shepherd Neame had not made the land available.

Peter Darby will use hops from the collection to help continue his research, as new hop varieties are the result of taking the best elements of one hop and crossing them with other varieties. But the English Hop Collection is also open to visitors, who will be able to admire the beauty of the tall, climbing plants, learn about the contribution they make to the aroma and flavour of beer, and also be able to distinguish between a Fuggle, a Golding, a Challenger and a Northdown.

This explains why we assembled on that autumn morning last week and raised a glass to the collection. We then hurried off to Shepherd Neame's brewery for the annual Goldings hop lecture. This is usually given by an academic but this year the honour fell to me. I traced the history of the hop from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the present day and was able to show that opposition to the plant is not confined to Defra. It was at first fiercely opposed by brewers when it arrived in England in the 15th century. It was outlawed in Norwich and Shrewsbury while Henry VIII forbade his court brewer from using either hops or brimstone in his ales.

As we started the day with a pagan ceremony it was felt necessary to balance this with a Christian one. We ended the morning with a hop blessing at the church of St Peter and St Paul at Boughton. We sang lustily "We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land, but it is fed and watered by God's almighty hand".

Whether or not you believe that hops are the result of the Almighty's intervention, one thing is certain: the future of the English hop owes more to heaven than the fires of damnation represented by the grossly misnamed Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.