Miracle Brew: Hops, Barley, Water, Yeast and the Nature of Beer by Pete Brown

Author:Pete Brown [Brown, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783523368
Google: HXo4DQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1603587691
Published: 2017-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

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§§§§§§§§ The capital of Slovakia is, of course … hang on, I know this…

7. Hopper’s Morning

Mist fills the low troughs of the Kent Weald, and from the perspective of the road that runs along the top of the high ridge, the hop fields are hidden by dense clouds, even though the sky above is a spotless blue. This is perfect weather for hop picking, and Robert Wicks, a former investment banker who opened the Westerham Brewery in Kent in 2004, is brimming with excitement. I’ve known Robert for years and his authoritative, forceful bearing has always reminded me of an army brigadier. Today, as he picks me up from the station after a painfully early train, he’s more like a small boy on Christmas Day.

This is the second day of hop picking at Little Scotney Farm. Yesterday, the first day, was wet and horrible, so this is already looking like a vast improvement. ‘Wet weather affects the hops,’ explains Robert. ‘The colours fade. It’s not a problem, but the aesthetic isn’t as good, so we sometimes leave them on the vine and wait for better weather. Today, this – this – is a hopper’s morning.’

Robert and Westerham have an intimate relationship with the hop garden at Little Scotney Farm. In the heart of the Weald on the border of Kent and Sussex, the farm is part of the Scotney Castle Estate, near Lamberhurst, which is owned by the National Trust. Ian Strang has been a tenant farmer on the estate since 1990. In 2005 Robert partnered with Ian to launch Little Scotney Ale, a beer marketed by the National Trust to promote the farm as a living, going concern rather than a museum. It’s a wonderful beer, dry and crisp, and always reminds me that hops can have a distinctive character without having to punch you in the face. Robert and Ian are now firm friends as well as business partners, united by – in a theme that’s becoming a constant on my journey through beer’s in­­gredients – a passion for their product that goes way beyond professional interest.

The mist has burned off now and the sun is blazing down. It’s turning into a perfect late English summer’s day, with Battle of Britain skies and a cock crowing somewhere in the distance. The hop garden at Scotney sits in the gentle bowl of a green valley. The Scotney Estate gardens were designed in the Picturesque style, which emerged as a trade-off between two different ideas of nature: the beautiful and the sublime. Sublime is all about greatness and majesty, nature as something to be admired or even feared, while the notion of the beautiful in this comparison is smaller, manicured and controllable. Blend the two ideas, and a hop garden is a perfect addition to the estate.

I’m struck, again, by the fact that, in Kent, people refer to these places as gardens. There’s nothing ornamental about a hop garden (although sometimes hops are grown purely for decorative purposes)

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