T hink about the history of of England. Up until the 1950s, East End families (usually women and children) would decamp from London every autumn to the countryside to work for the next few weeks in the hop gardens. This was valuable work, which often helped pay for necessities over the winter months, and when the ‘hop cards’ which allocated a family a place on a particular farm were delivered they were so prized that a black market developed in London of stolen and forged cards – perhaps an early form of identity theft! The days of such intensive manual labour have long gone. Of the 72,000 acres of hops that grew across southern England at the end of the nineteenth century, only 2,650 now remain. But the taste for beer is stronger than ever – so where do all the hops come from, and how does the harvest now happen? Where do the hops for British beers now come from, and is there a terroir for hops as there is for grapes? Growing of hops is now primarily restricted to Kent and the West Midlands with acreage split evenly between the two locations. We believe that terroir does play an important part in hops. To give an example: the parentage of many hops grown in Germany, US and around the world is English (such as the Goldings hop variety which was first reported in Surrey in the 1750s). These hops however express themselves differently when grown on different soils with different temperatures and latitude (as day length is extremely import for hop growing). hops in this country and you probably have a somewhat idealised picture of the historic hop harvests in the south
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