‘ * THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, TUESDAY, AUGUST 7, 1990 15 P Bitter summer of the fuggle LESLIE GEDDES-BROWN discovers why Britain’s hop growers have good reason to cry into their beer ITH the current hot weather prompting a raging national thirst, it would be forgivable to assume that the hop growers of England are raising their glasses in anticipation of increased commercial gain. Not so. When 210 delegates from 16 countries met for the Interna- tional Hop Growers’ Congress in Hereford town hall yester- day, it was in an atmosphere outwardly convivial. But tensions abound among this jolly band of farmers, who come from Australia and Bul- garia, Russia and America, to “swap lies”, as one delegate put it. For hop-growing has become a world-wide cut-throat busi- ness and one in which the Eng- lish hop grower is at an increasing disad- took advantage and, in the case of the Germans, even renamed the varieties to sound local. Hops come in two basic kinds —— those which are rich in alpha acids and give the bitter flavour to beer and those bred for aroma, called the aroma varieties. Salesof aromas are holding up, say the growers, because many brewers — and Bass is singled out for praise — support their fellow-country- men in buying hops for lager. But growers who have specialised in alpha-rich vari- eties are hit by a downturn in bitter-drinking and by over- seas growers who can farm the hops more cheaply. And where once a brewer would buy his hops in sacks and by the hun- dredweight, pick them up and . sniif them for quality, today, says Redsell, hop extract comes in tins like vantage. As Stu- art Adamson, marketing man- ager of Kent- based English V ,_ Hops Ltd—afirm ~ :.- which buys from the growers and green treacle. There are, how- ever, encouraging signs, even if Adamson worries that the English hop industry will become extinct. sells to the brew- Traditional ers — explains, brewers, such as sales of lager have Timothy Taylor of increased in 10 years from about seven per cent of all beer drunk in Britain toivan ast- onishing 50 per cent. And English hops — grown I mainly in Kent and Herefordshire — have shrunk from a high of 20,000 acres in 1969 to only 6,000 today. In Kent alone last year, 100acres were grubbed up. It is not only to do with the fact that lager uses only two- thirds of the hops used in bit- ter. With the dramatic growth of foreign lager-drinking in Britain hitting home-grown brands, a large part of the problem is the foreign brew- ers’ insistence that their native hops be used in their-products, whether imported or made on licence in the UK. This, says another English grower, is sheer protectionism, as was i the German “purity” law, thrown out by the EC, which meant that no non-Teutonic beer was acceptable in the fatherland. ‘ A Could itsimolv be that the Keighly in West Yorkshire, still buy real hops with pride and search especially for varieties like the fuggle which in the 1940s made up 60 per cent of the crop and now is hardly grown-. _“We may be fourth div- ision in size,” says brewer Peter Eels, “but we're first div- ision for taste.” And beer buffs travel miles to sample their milds and hitters. Timothy Taylor, unlike the major brewers, ignored the big-business techniques of the Sixties and Seventies which led to the abandonment of tra- ditional bitter for keg beer and which, inturn, made drinkers turn away from UK beer in favour of foreign lager. So lit- tle-known has traditional Brit- ish beer become that Barry Clarke, Whitbread’s consumer affairs manager, felt it neces- sary to explain to me that it is darker than lager and served much warmer. , Whirbread. however, detects a move hack to “r~a.<:k-(vindi- great HOP 15 not up IQ making foreign beer? Though UK brewers insist that their ‘lagers —— made for big names like Budweiser and Fosters — could not be the same without the secret recipes of hop blends insited upon by the overseas companies, the grow- ers growl that this is rubbish. - Anthony Redsell, the doyen of English hop farmers, exp- lains that the taste and type of the water used is as vital as the variety of hop — “and anyway it’s extraordinary how, when hops are scarce, the brewers soon throw secret ‘local’ recipes out of the window". Ironically, the hop varieties that look like putting so many English farmers out of busi- nesswere bred at Wye College in a programme sponsored by the Thatcher Government, the farmers, and the British brew- ers. Farmers all over the world IIOIIX D661‘, WIHCII means beer kept ingbarrels and using good English hops. “There is a real demand,” says Clarke. “In the last few years we’-ve doubled the distribution.” But what hop growers here really need is for British bitter to conquer the Continent in the way its lager has conquered_us. While the jolly band of British hop growers, 250 in all, are determined that the English hop will never die, what they would really like is to have the brewers over a barrel. ' Until prices paid for hops keep pace with inflation — cur- rently growers get 1984 rates — hop fields will continue to be grubbed up. 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