Hop to it – the brewers who say British is best
CRAFT CROPS
Drinkers are raising a glass to home-grown ingredients, as Neil Armstrong discovers
With more breweries per capita than any other nation – around 2,100 at the last count – even the most ardent beer-lover might wonder whether Britain really needs another.
Pubs and off-licences are awash with exotic craft beer, from highalcohol double-brewed American IPAS to triple-fruited goses. But a new microbrewery is doing something different. Cellar Head is one of only a handful of craft beer makers to use exclusively English ingredients and is championing the revival of heritage hops.
Hops give beer most of its flavour. The hop plant is a tall, climbing perennial, commercially grown to a height of around 17ft on structures of wooden poles and wirework. Grouped in the same plant family as cannabis, it flowers into resinous, pungently aromatic cones. Different varieties impart markedly different flavours but the craft beer explosion of recent years has been driven by the use of New World hops.
“As a hangover from Prohibition, home brewing of beer was illegal in America until 1979 when Jimmy Carter made it legal,” explains beer writer Pete Brown, whose latest book, Miracle Brew: Adventures in the Nature of Beer, plots the history of beer and its four ingredients: hops, yeast, barley and water. “When that happened, Americans who had been to Europe started brewing British, Czech and Belgianstyle beers in their garages but with none of the constraints that the Brits had in terms of following tradition.
“They were taking recipes and mixing and matching them with local hops,” Brown goes on. “Hops are very sensitive to terroir and American hops tend to have different flavours. They are citrusy, tropical fruity, floral. British hops are more subtle – earthy, spicy, peppery.
“The American beers were seen as new and exciting, and a lot of craft brewers here decided that British hops were boring, and so started using the same hops that their American counterparts were using.”
Of course, the bigger British brewers have continued to use the hops they always have for their long-established brands. There are currently 31 commerciallygrown British hop varieties, some of which are new, developed to address the taste for New World flavours.
But the British Hop Association also manages a historic collection of hundreds of varieties which changing tastes have rendered obsolete. BHA members can choose to grow these and a number of hop farmers have turned over small plots of land to grow supposedly non-commercial varieties in the hope that they might come back into fashion.
Enter Cellar Head, which is taking a stand against the American invasion. “We are one of the few British microbreweries using 100 per cent British ingredients,” says founder Chris Mackenzie. “Most use American and other foreign hops in their brews.”
Mackenzie founded the East Sussex brewery having spent 27 years working all over the world in the oil business. Named after an oil industry term, Cellar Head produces a core range of six beers including, unusually, a low-alcohol brew that weighs in at just 2.7 per cent alcohol by volume (abv). It also makes a small batch of specials and a monthlychanging single hop pale series (where most beers use a blend of hops, the single hop pale ales are, as the name suggests, brewed using a single variety).
The small batch specials allow brewer David Berry to experiment with long-forgotten hops, producing unusual beers in tiny quantities. When researching old records Berry came across references to a hop that was trialled during the Second World War but never took off because brewers didn’t think it measured up to Fuggle – the gold-standard hop according to the tastes of the day.
Unlike most test varieties, the failed hop was at least thought to be of sufficient interest to be awarded a name, Concord. Berry persuaded East Sussex hop farmer Dorothy Hollamby to grow some, and brewed a batch of just 50 bottles of beer with it. Berry has also acquired seven as-yet-unnamed hop varieties from a farmer on the National Trust’s Scotney estate in Kent, and plans to use them in Cellar Head’s single hop series.
But if craft beer aficionados have a taste for the bold, brash brews made with New World hops, why not just go with the flow?
“Why follow the crowd?” counters Berry. “My grandparents were hop pickers, I’ve been a hop picker and, in my opinion, English hops are better than American ones. They’re not as in-your-face. You’ll have a beer with American hops sometimes and think, ‘ Yeah, that’s nice but I don’t really want another.’ English hops are more drinkable.”
Sales seem to be proving him right. Cellar Head sold its first cask of beer at the end of May last year and has now sold more than 1,500 casks and 14,000 bottles; roughly around 125,000 pints. Its beer is sold in more than 160 pubs throughout the South East. It is in the process of moving premises and acquiring new brewing kit in order to meet demand.
“April, May and June of this year have been off the chart in terms of sales,” says Mackenzie. “I think that’s due to the fact that we’re becoming recognised and customers now know that our beer is good. We’re proving that home-grown varieties of hop match, and often surpass, those New World flavour profiles in a very refined manner.”
But English hops are about more than just taste. There is a culture, almost a mystique, surrounding them. Grown in the South East and the West Midlands, they are notoriously tricky to manage. “They are the most difficult commercial crops to grow in the world,’” says Brown. “Before you even start thinking about planting, you’ve got to build the framework of poles and wires to support them. That costs £10,000 an acre, and that’s before you’ve even put in a single plant. And hops are incredibly susceptible to rain, to wilt, to red spider mites – they are so vulnerable.
“Farmers could make more money by growing pretty much any other crop. The only reason people grow hops is because they love the industry and the plants.”
Ali Capper, who farms hops in Worcestershire and is director of the BHA, agrees. “Hop growers are very passionate about what they do. They live and breathe it. We talk about the ‘scratch of the hop’ and that’s a literal and metaphorical thing. Hops are in your blood.”
But can that passion be passed on to the punters? “The average drinker might not know much about hops and the importance of different hops but consumers are interested in the provenance of what they eat and drink,” says Mackenzie. “There’s a genuine interest in local produce. People don’t want something that has come from the other side of the world if the same or better can be sourced on their doorstep.”
So, you can enjoy a pint of excellent beer while congratulating yourself on the sophistication of your palate and feeling smug about food miles. Cheers!
‘Growers are very passionate. They live and breathe it’