English hops have rubbish names. Someone had to say it. This doesn’t mean they're poor quality, far from it. It's just that they are severely lacking in the global arena of exotic, flowery hop names.
Cascade (USA): Phwoarrr. This hop name busts open doors with each satisfying consonant like a charismatic, cunning, cocksure cop. It's definitely got a nemesis. You haven't even tasted them yet and you're visibly shaking. That's the OG of craft hops you're talking about. Straighten up.
Motueka (New Zealand): Stop it. That's not even a word. It's just sensual sounds that escape the mouth. You're at the bar and you mistakenly ask what hops are in your tropical pale ale. If you don't know what auto sensory meridian response (ASMR) is, you're about to find out. The bartender leans over and begins to whisper in your ear:
'Mot-'
What's happening?
'-u-'
Please stop.
'-ekaaahhhhhh'
Oh dear God, my toes.
Hallertauer Mittelfrüh (Germany): Ach du meine Güte! Bow down, you einzeller! You're in the presence of nobility. Kiss their hand. Kiss it!
Fuggles (UK): 'Okay, okay. This time we'll get in.'
Beer: 'Sorry mate, at capacity. Move along please.'
Bramling Cross (UK): 'Mate, that's not on. I just saw you let those Yankees, Mosaic and Simcoe, in.'
Beer: 'Look, I'll be honest. They fit our "style". They're hip, you’re hop. You understand.'
East Kent Goldings (UK): 'Come on lads, let's just go. We're too old for this guff. Someone in Belgium might take us.'
‘UK hop names just aren’t inspiring.’
You get the point. UK hop names just aren't as inspiring; they don't arrest the imagination like their New World or Noble counterparts. I know what you're going to say; 'Well these are traditional varieties, Ben. They were named after the farmers that found them and reflect simpler times.' True. How about newer UK varieties, then? 'Erm, Sovereign?' You're joking. 'Okay, okay. What about Archer?' I didn't realise we were live action role-playing - I'll ready the troops, my liege.
I must confess. I am slightly prejudiced against English hops. It's not their fault, though. They didn't decide where my first brewing job was. Without naming names - in this instance, anyway - the first brewery I worked for was a sad affair. The owners were well meaning, good people. They just couldn't run a business. They each had "proper" jobs, this was just a hobby that got out of hand. To quote the head brewer (who I'll call Bob) on my first day, 'earn your stripes here, then leave in six months.' I stayed for eight.
We operated on a tight budget and only produced traditional real ales. They were fine, just by the numbers. I actually loved the work, it just got repetitive after a while;
'What's it today, Bob?'
'Today we're making a pale with EKG and Bramling X.'
'How about today, Bob?'
'Today we're making a pale with Bramling X and EKG.'
We did produce an IPA (by name, not by nature) that had some Styrian Wolf and Citra, but that's about as exciting as it got. Hops in high demand were expensive, and we just couldn't afford them. So I was stuck with cheesy, old, dull-sounding whole hops that over time started to goad me: 'What's that, Ben? You want something more fruity? Something a little less stale? Tough! You throw me in that traditional, authentic, genuine, bonafide real-ale and be less bitter about it. Hahaha!'
‘Our Ordinary Bitter is a banger.’
This isn't to say I hate bitters. I love them. Harvey's Best is one of my all-time favourite beers, much to Paul Anspach's chagrin; 'they use brewer's caramel, mate. Fake beer.' Our own Ordinary Bitter is, dare I say, a banger.
It's also not to say I only like juicy hop bombs. Quite the opposite. If anything, it's about pride. I'm fed up with using Pacific Northwest this, or Antipodean that. I wanted a hop conjured by our maritime climate that somehow stood up to these show-offs. A hop that could both satisfy traditions and still be expressively modern. Oh, and for crying out loud, something with an enticing name that didn’t evoke the Monarchy, Empire or medievalism.
You can’t have everything, Ben.
***
I’m afraid I’m going to have to mention that word. You know the one. Anybody with a sense of humour can’t take it seriously. They certainly can’t pronounce it properly. Your face contorts as ‘terrier' wrestles it's way from your mouth in an inexplicable West Country accent. You tried. Someone overheard you. It was unavoidable. Of course it’s their social duty to correct your embarrassing faux pas (pronounced ‘forks pass’). They hurriedly abandon their vintage Chateau Prétentieux and cured meats for the privilege; ‘I think you’ll find it’s “Teh-wuh”’. That’s right, terroir. I’m so sorry.
‘Terrior is important.’
‘We’re still talking about humble, everyday, knock-it-back-son beer though? Right, Ben?’ Yes, we are. It just so happens that when discussing hops specifically, terroir is pretty important. If you really don't know the term, think of it as meaning a crop's environment; all the location specific conditions that give Californian grapes, for instance, their unique characteristics. Campania in southwestern Italy has exceptional tomatoes. It also has Mount Vesuvius. Transplant those tomatoes elsewhere bereft of volcanic soils and you're looking at a lesser product. (On a side note: the Roman author, Pliny the Elder, fell victim to the Vesuvian volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii in AD79. He's also thought to have written the first reference of hops in his Naturalis Historia. How about that?).
Hops are no different. You can find them wild all over the shop, but cultivators stick between the 35th and 50th parallels where climates are moist and temperate - think Washington and Oregon state, the south of England, Bavaria, Tasmania and the north of New Zealand’s south island. However, differences in soil, temperature, rainfall, day length, terrain and agricultural practices between each location (to say nothing of what breed they’ve planted) make their crops unique. In short, you can’t just take Fuggles, which is an English landrace variety, plant it in the US and expect the same profile. If you did that, maybe mating it with a Russian variety first, you’d get - no, not a wartime alliance - but Cascade, a very different hop. Likewise, you can’t take Cascade, plant it in the English midlands and not expect our tepid weather to piss all over your fruity flavour parade. Or so I thought.
‘Enter Jester.’
Enter Jester. Jester, Jester, Jester, Jester. What horticultural Gods must I thank for your existence? For they must be Gods if your existence is to defy science as it so clearly does. Mangos? Lychees? Grapefruits? Twenty-odd miles south of Birmingham? Don’t be ridiculous. No, but they are flavours found in Newland based hop supplier Charles Faram’s wunderkind hop, Jester, which we used recently in our smashing single hop English Pale Ale.
Jester is the product of Charles Faram’s hop development programme, and was first planted in 2009, released commercially in 2013. It’s a seedling of Cascade and was selected on the basis of its aroma and subsequently marketed as a substitute for its American parent. Aromatics is still a fuzzy subject, but on the surface the two hops are rather comparable.
‘That’s where the flavour lies.’
With hops you have your acids, α-acids (humulones) and β-acids (lupulones), located in the powdery, yellowish resin called lupulin. It’s predominantly the alpha-acids that convert, or isomerise, into bitterness during the brewing process - but we’re not interested in that. What we’re interested in is our essential oils. That’s where the flavour and aroma lies, in about 0.1-2.0% of the actual plant by dry weight, depending on the variety.
Hop oils are divided three ways and again vary proportionally between plants: hydrocarbons (50-80%), oxygenated hydrocarbon compounds (20-50%) and sulfur compounds (<1%). Cascade and Jester share the extremely volatile hydrocarbons myrcene, farnesene and humulene, which are perceived as herby, resinous, piney and spicy. But then so do all hops as far as I can tell.
‘The ‘New World Odour’.’
Cascade, amongst many other New World hops, also has the oxygenated hydrocarbons linalool and geranial, and the sulfur compound 4-mercapto-4-me[breath]thyl-pentan-2-one (or 4MMP for short). Don’t for one second think I know the ins-and-outs of all this scientific gobbledygook. What I do know, however, is that it’s these compounds that mingle and transform into all sorts of fruity, floral and tropical vacations for the senses. Jester must have these, or similar enough compounds, if it is to legitimately join what I’m terming the ‘New World odour.’
‘The following day, my phone rang.’
There was nothing listed on Faram’s website to suggest Jester does. This called for my new favourite pastime: sending emails to busy people with arguably obvious questions revolving around beer and waiting however long for a reply. Except this time, early in the afternoon the following day, my phone rang.
‘Hi, is this Ben?’ a low, disarmingly genial voice opened.
‘Um, yes?’ unrecognised numbers still terrify me.
‘This is Will Rogers from Charles Faram. I was going to write a reply to your email but thought it better to call.’
Will proceeded to explain that he’s Charles Faram’s group technical director. He’s in charge of technical improvements across the company, amongst other things, and works closely with their hop development programme. He seemed to know everything there is to know about hops. Funnily enough, he really likes hops.
‘I really like hops,’ he continued excitedly, ‘and I was glad to read an email from a fellow hop enthusiast.’
‘Oh-oh!’ went my inner voice. ‘He thinks you actually know what you’re talking about. You’re in too deep, Ben. Get out. Get out now!’
Instead I asked Will to elaborate a bit on Jester’s background and composition, and how on earth it seems to defy expectations of what English hops can achieve. I’d hit the right nerve, as if Will had been patiently waiting phoneside for someone to tell. But first, if you ever receive an unsuspected call from a specialist, brush-up on your terminology beforehand.
Terroir, it turns out, isn’t the correct word to use with hops - which is fantastic news. Really, it’s epigenetics.
‘Think of it this way,' Will elaborated. 'Two hops might be genetically identical, it’s just that environmental factors will turn some genes on and others off. We’ve planted Cascade in the UK many times before, but it always turns out milder. No matter what you do.’
That made perfect sense. If it were otherwise, we’d have planted Cascade in the UK years ago and fobbed-off our American competitors then and there. So why on Earth does Jester, which is Cascade in a way, taste and smell so different? Where is that defiant flavour coming from? Will continued;
‘It has relatively high proportions of Pinene, Myrcene, and Geraniol, which combine to give the deep citrus that we love about it. As you know its mother is Cascade, but its father is a wild, dwarf, aphid resistant variety picked locally. We think a lot of its flavour actually derives from the father.’
‘Jester wasn’t the nemesis of Cascade.’
That’s it. There was no ‘New World’ compound Jester miraculously developed. Aroma is substantially more nuanced than that. It also wasn’t conceived in a lab by conspiring scientists; Jester wasn’t the manufactured nemesis of Cascade I had dreamt up in my weird, botanical DC Universe. Instead, it was the product of feel, sound judgement, open-minds and as with most things, a little bit of luck.
‘We plant 10-15,000 seeds annually,’ continued Will, ‘prioritising yields, disease resistance and growth habit. Out of those thousands only a few hundred will make it as crops.’
It takes two years before Will and his team can even test a hop’s characteristics, and substantially longer before it's ready to be released commercially. Jester immediately stood out, demanding attention as its name would suggest. More importantly, it did so at the right time.
‘In the past,’ Will explained, ‘English hops were bred to be like Noble varieties, but high in alpha-acids for eventual bitterness, as opposed to aromatics.’
‘British drinking habits have shifted.’
Now brewers, such as myself, pay substantial attention to aroma, and hop breeders are acting accordingly. Environment clearly plays a huge role with hops (and Jester certainly retains some Old World traits), but it’s their cultural, as well as their physical, surroundings that define them. British drinking habits have shifted, our hops just need a little more time to catch up.
Does this mean we can produce whatever flavours we want from our hops? No, of course not. We live on a dreary, old, leaden-skied island, and there’s no escaping that. That doesn’t mean, however, our future hops won’t be different, challenging and exciting, but in their own uniquely English way. Will and Charles Faram certainly believe so, and are doing their part to achieve this eventuality;
‘It’s not about trying to find El Dorado,' Will confessed. 'We just want to find our own niche. We had this one hop, for instance, that wasn’t quite right for commercial purposes, but tasted exactly like strawberry jam! Seriously. What’s more English than that?’
Before I thanked Will for taking the time to call and patiently explain things to me, I had to ask one last question. Something that had been bugging me for a while:
‘Why do English hops have rubbish names?’
‘Ha!’ he laughed before pausing to ponder. ‘You know, it’s actually a contentious subject. We argue all the time over names. It’s hard thinking of a name that’s both identifiably English and exciting.’
‘So what about Jester?’
‘It’s a good story actually. Peter Glendinning, who is the head of our hop development programme, was bringing some dried hop cones to Faram’s HQ. He showed them to Paul Corbett [Managing Director] and myself. Paul was sure Peter had grabbed something American and was winding us up! They were, of course, Jester cones.’
You know what, I’ve changed my mind. I quite like the name. In fact, I’ll tell you something more English than strawberry jam, Will: taking the piss. Turns out Jester couldn’t be a better name for an English hop.
Drop Ben a line on ben@anspachandhobday.com.