Germany Beer Trip

In March 2013, I spent a week traveling around Germany drinking beer. From Hamburg, to Cologne and Dusseldorf, down to Munich, up to Bamberg, then across to Berlin via a lunch stop in Leipzig. I went to try and learn more about the beers of one of the most famous drinking nations in the world. Here's the trip in a few photos.

Groninger brewpub, Hamburg

Ratsherrn Brewery, Hamburg

Ratsherrn beers, including a fantastic Pale Ale

Uerige's brewhouse in Dusseldorf

Uerige's coolship, six floors above street-level

Uerige's fermentation cellar

Altbier in Kurzer

Pouring Kolsch in Cologne

Gaffel Kolsch

Kellerbier for breakfast in Munich

Forschungsbrauerei just outside Munich city centre

A lot of sausages in Weisses Brauhaus (this place rocks - order Tap 5)

Spezial rauchbier in Bamberg

Schlenkerla

Ungespundet in Mahrsbrau

Bamberg is one handsome old town

Gose in Leipzig - delicious!

Berliner Weisse in Berlin

Berliner Weisse with syrup (I prefer it without)

Schalander brewpub and their tiny brewhouse

Eschenbrau, Berlin - this place is excellent

Marcus Brau - the brew kit is behind the small bar

Currywurst!

To Simon

Today we raise our beers to Simon Johnson.

It doesn’t matter what beer we raise as long as we love drinking it. It doesn’t even matter if it’s not a beer – all that matters is that in your glass is a drink which makes you happy.

The beer world has lost a good friend. Someone who was unequivocally liked by all and never failed to put smiles on faces (sometimes quite literally if he had his face paints...). I never saw him without a smile and it was his light-hearted approach to beer which everyone enjoyed.

His was always the blog I went to first, always the one which was capable of being different and interesting and fun, and I loved it for that. It was simultaneously thoughtful yet not over-thought, intelligent yet playful and mischievous. And he was always quick to respond to questions or to give honest advice. I’m very glad to have known him and to have shared a few beers with him.

Today is Simon’s funeral, so this one’s for him (and later it'll be a real one).

Craft Beer World Book Launch!

My book is released next week, which is both extraordinarily exciting and monumentally scary! It’s on national release and available in the UK and US plus a few other English-speaking countries. You can order online or get it in bookstores.

Craft Beer World is a look at the stories behind around 350 different beers. It’s about the more interesting side of world brewing, the more unusual or unexpected beers, which takes a look at some classic beers but then focuses on the way they’ve influenced others and how breweries have evolved beer styles. It’s also, I hope, a bit different to other coffee table beer books in that there are personal stories of when and where I drank some of the beers, adding some important context to the taste.

The official launch is on Thursday 2 May at Camden Town Brewery. It starts around 6.30pm and there’ll be copies available on the night plus lots of beer (including a keg of Tipopils!) on the bar and street food outside. Everyone is welcome, so come along for a beer and grab a copy of the book!

Great beer in Paris

Is there great beer in Paris or just £10 pints of Pelforth?

Matt and I started in Cave à Bulles the day before the Paris marathon (so we didn’t drink anything). I hoped to find a few interesting French beers but I didn’t expect to see this many. Wow. What a shop and what a range of beers. From blondes to brunes to bière de gardes and tripels to pale ales, IPAs, Double IPAs and imperial stouts, they had beers of all styles made by French breweries. It took about an hour to choose the bottles I wanted because there were so many which I wanted. This is a brilliant beer shop. 

After finishing the run we went straight to La Fine Mousse. A beer bar that reminded me of Mikkeller in Copenhagen, it had a large chalkboard of beers and a long line of unmarked taps – stylish and modern. With 12 of the 20 taps pouring French beer, that’s what we drank (though the imports were definitely interesting!). Ninkasi Blanche had good body and spice plus a little coconut cheesecake; Page 24 Reserve Hildegarde Blonde was full of bold (Noble?) orangey hop; Outland’s IPA was bursting with floral and citrus and very nice; Agent Provocateur by Craig Allen had an elegant hop flavour with loads of fruitiness; Brasserie du Pays Flamand Super Nova was a great DIPA, all piney and resinous; and Silvanecte from Brasserie St Rieul was a wonderful tripel, balanced and rich and loaded with hops. Not cheap at around €4.50 for 250ml (in Teku glasses), but compare that to €10 pints of standard lager and it looks a lot better. It’s a very cool bar and somewhere I’d love to be able to drink regularly.

Before the Eurostar home I had time for one more stop, so went north to Le Super Coin. A small bar with good music, a few beers on tap and many more in the fridges, it meant I could try a few of the bottles I wish I’d picked up in Cave à Bulles. The first was Brasserie de Mont Saleve’s Sorachi Ace Bitter. A 2.5% ABV beer that’s super pale, massively bitter and exotically aromatic from the unusual hop – it’s very good. Then Volcelest Blonde by Brasserie de La Vallée de Chevreuse which was one of my favourite beers of the trip: classic blonde just better with some soft tropical fruit, sharp bitterness and great body, it’s elegant yet exciting.

I had a few other recommendations which I couldn’t get to, including BrewBerry which in my head is a middle point between Cave à Bulles, La Fine Mousse and Le Super Coin.

My expectations were smashed in Paris. The beers we drank were all excellent and all had a distinct taste to them, something absolutely French, a kind of botanic, bracing bitterness similar to highly-hopped Belgian beers. It’s perhaps not the first choice for a beer trip but if you’re in Paris then there’s definitely great places to drink great French beer.

The top image is from here - it's way better than anything my phone will take. It also shows a lot more images from inside La fine Mousse, which is a lovely-looking place.

Paris Marathon 2013

If I ever taste anything more remarkable than the three pieces of fresh orange and the bottle of Vittel that I had at 40km of the Paris marathon then I will have tasted perfection.

I was fine until 32km into the race. Better than fine, in fact; I only had to complete the final 10km in 60 minutes to break four hours. I was enjoying it, I was feeling fit, I was running well and the training niggles weren’t niggling. Then at 34km my body decided, almost in an instant, that it’d had enough. It just broke down. Every step was agony, both in my legs and my head. My mind went from ‘brilliant, there’s only 10km left, I can smash this!’ to ‘holy shit there’s still 8km to go and that’s gonna take me 45 minutes... HOW CAN I HANDLE ANOTHER 45 MINUTES OF THIS HELL?!’ Running the last 8km was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

But those few quarters of juicy orange, a desperate attempt to get some sweetness and liquid into my dehydrated body, were the most wonderful things I’ve ever eaten. I almost gave up the race to devote myself to eating the whole glorious box of fruit, but somehow they energised me enough to lift one leg, then the next.

In the end I crossed the line in 4:09:09. Considering I didn’t run for a three week block in February and March, plus had a week in Germany which definitely didn’t help the fitness levels, and the longest training run I’d done was 16.5 miles, I’m very pleased with that time.

My mile splits show how it all fell away at the end before those oranges saved me!

And the immediate relief of it being over swelled into huge emotion at achieving something for myself and for the hospital who saved my nephew and it left me weirdly euphoric, in a daze of stumbling agony and joyous happiness.

I was going to run the marathon for fun but then things changed and I decided to raise money for Evelina Children’s Hospital. I raised over £800 in a week and that was incredibly motivating; you can read why I chose to raise for that charity here.

Today I can barely walk. Running a marathon hurts. It also makes me want to do better and try harder and I like that. Within an hour of finishing I was already thinking about where I might like to run another marathon, though within five minutes of finishing I was already thinking about where I could get a beer...  

I was in there somewhere... This image is from DC Rainmaker here and it's a great blog about the whole race with loads of excellent images

Cask and Craft: Time to stop the fight

I’m so utterly, infuriatingly frustrated with the whole cask and craft discussion in the UK right now that it makes me wish I wrote about wine because it’s frankly embarrassing. Why is there this in-fighting in what should be a close industry? Somehow the discussion has evolved into this thing which is a monster of misunderstanding, which like a game of Chinese whispers is turning into a bastard of untruths and assumptions. 

The thing which annoys me the most is creating a distinction between a cask beer (I'm using 'cask' instead of real ale throughout because it's the actual container which seems to be causing the issues here) and a craft beer. Some people seem to think that if it’s in a keg then it’s craft and if it’s on cask then it isn’t. That’s just bullshit (where did that even come from?!) There are some breweries who are frequently mentioned – Thornbridge, Magic Rock, etc – because they make both cask and keg beer. Does that mean cask Jaipur is not craft yet the kegged version is? Where does the bottle then fit? A definition of ‘craft’ based dispense is very, very wrong and totally unnecessary.

There are nanobreweries, microbreweries, regional breweries, national breweries... But that’s largely irrelevant, too, because size doesn’t define craft, especially not at the scale of these UK breweries. Likewise a definition based on style is just stupid. Everything I’ve seen on this recently has mentioned highly hopped beers as if that’s the only type of ‘craft’ brew you’ll find. That’s wrong, too. Craft is just a word that’s been sucked into British beer from America and then been applied poorly because no one seems to know what to do with it, which is a genuine problem, but just because the most visible American craft beers tend to be IPAs and they tend to be kegged doesn’t mean that it’s the only craft beer or that we can use that to define craft in Britain.

Craft beer is just a name. An idea that beer is made by hand from natural ingredients and that there’s more to beer than mass-produced multinational lagers. There are over 1,000 breweries in the UK right now and over 95% of them would probably count as craft, I reckon. And over 95% of those probably only make cask beer. All of them just make beer. Let’s not get hung up on a name.

 

Thanks to @FergusMcIver for sharing it

This piece in the Wandsworth Beer Festival programme typifies the contemptuous crap that is being spouted about beer at the moment and it’s completely wrong and missing the point. I want to rip it apart but it’s just some unbelievably misleading that I don’t know where to even begin with it. It’s like a scared kind of misinformed prejudice, based on dated ideas, which jumps to astonishing conclusions based on assiduous assumptions. And then other people believe that shit.

The simple truth – and the important thing to think about – is that kegged beer made by small breweries isn’t in competition with cask ales; it’s a bonus to sit beside cask on the bar. Pubs aren’t removing cask lines to put in keg lines, they are kicking out the mass-made lagers and to give more kegged choices. And kegged beers aren’t there to dumb down the beer market, they are trying to ignite it with new experiences, new brews (while we’re here: no small brewery pasteurises their beer, few filter it, most use the best ingredients they can find and give the beer a lot longer in tank than their hurried cask counterparts).

Why can’t people see this? Why is there a negative attitude towards it? And why the hell does it matter? It’s about choice and when we get to the bar we can make our own choices; some people will only look at the casks, some will only look at the kegs, others will scan the whole range. Excellent British kegged beer (not flipping ‘Craft Keg’, what a horrific term) is adding extra depth to what we can buy in the bar. That’s a great thing.

I’m writing this as someone who has just written a book with craft beer in the title. I didn’t choose the beers for any other reason than they are interesting and delicious. Craft beer is just a name; I don’t think it’s an actual definable thing and certainly not in any meaningful way. It’s like a farmer’s market. How do you define that when every one you go to is different? You don’t define it but you know what you get when you visit one; some are better than others, some are more commercial, some are more rustic. I simply don’t think we need to define craft but I do think we need to kill the misunderstanding between craft and cask because we need to appreciate that they belong side by side and that one isn’t trying to replace or undermine the other.  

And I genuinely think that spreading false ideas about ‘craft’ is leaving a disjointed and fraying British beer industry which seems to be fighting over a silly detail instead of getting together to support the best tasting British beer.

It’s time to take a modern look at beer, an all-encompassing, open-eyed and open-minded look at beer. Craft beer isn’t just IPA. It’s not just bloody fizzy beer. And cask beer isn’t all boring and brown and flat and warm. Why is there ongoing tension between the two? And how the hell can we get rid of it?

Top image from here

For a good cause

On Sunday 7 April I’m running the Paris Marathon. You don’t need to collect sponsorship to run it but my intention was always to try and raise a bit of money by doing it. Scared I might not be able to complete the race, I was going to call for sponsors after I’d actually finished. But things changed last week.

On Sunday 17 March my sister Vicki gave birth to Lucas Charlie Hubbard. He was four weeks early and weighed 4lb 15oz but he was healthy and came home the next day. A week later Vicki thought something was wrong so she took him to hospital for a check. Soon after getting there he stopped breathing.

A team of doctors managed to stabilise him before he was rushed to St Thomas’ Hospital in London. No one knew what was happening. No one knew what was wrong. All we knew was that Lucas was really ill.

While all this was happening I was sitting at home alone and had no idea what to do, so I went for a run. I had no idea what news I’d get home to so I just kept on running, wiping away the tears. A lot of miles later I returned and the news was no better: he was in intensive care and they were doing all they could.

The next day there was no more news. Vicki and husband Daryl were with Lucas the whole time. The day after we got news that he was improving. He slowly came off ventilation, slowly started feeding and after four days in ICU at Evelina Children’s Hospital he was opening his eyes and breathing and feeding on his own. By the end of the week he was well enough to be transferred to a hospital near his home.

We still don’t know what was wrong, all we know is that we came terrifyingly, heartbreakingly close to losing little Lucas.

On the long run that night all I could think about was Lucas, so I’ve decided to run the Paris Marathon to raise money to say thank you to the doctors and nurses at the intensive care unit at Evelina Children’s Hospital. Every day they do this for families all around Britain (though especially those in the south east) and any day it could be someone in our family. They treated Lucas and my family so well and we’re so grateful.

Yesterday Lucas was allowed home. Hearing that news is the reason I’m doing this.

Now I just need to haul my undertrained body around the streets of Paris for four hours... If you would like to donate to the hospital then the link is here. 

This is Lucas on his first day home after over a week in hospital

The Social Appropriateness of Alcohol Free Beer

In Weiss Bräu, a cool brewpub in Cologne, I ordered a beer, sat back and took out my notebook and pencil to write some stuff down: behind me was a large table of students, happy, celebrating something; a businessman sat alone in front of me drinking a wheat beer and eating chips; two chaps shared a huge pizza to my right; and relaxing all around were couples sat in booths eating and drinking.

But one of those couples freaked me out.

He was necking small glasses of kolsch as if he hadn’t had a drink for a week, which was easily done because the beer was very good – served in the wiess style, it was unfiltered (meaning it technically doesn’t count as a kolsch according to the Convention). She was drinking a pint of wheat beer; a large vase glass, hazy amber with a thick foam.

She was also very heavily pregnant. Like beach-ball-under-a-vest pregnant.  

I’m pretty sure I did one of those comedy double takes followed by my eyes bulging out of my head and my chin hitting the table. She was drinking as fast as he was and soon her half-litre was gone and she ordered another. I couldn’t believe it and I didn’t know how to react: Is this behaviour ok in Germany? Is she crazy? Why is no one doing anything?

I watched the server return to the bar and pour another kolsch for the guy and grab a bottle from the fridge for the girl, meaning she wasn’t drinking the draft hefeweizen (probably for the best as I thought it tasted like toilet cleaner because of a massively oppressive clove dominance). I checked the menu to see what it could be and the only bottle on there was enough to calm my frantic thoughts: it was an alcohol-free hefeweizen.

Phew.

Brow mopped and sigh exhaled, I could now go back to my beer free of worries.

Only I couldn’t.

The sight of her drinking it left me feeling strange and uncomfortable and over the next few stangen I couldn’t stop thinking about alcohol-free beers...

In every bar in Germany you’ll find an alcohol-free beer option. It’s typically a wheat beer, though not always, and many are good drinks, certainly valid replacements for someone who doesn’t fancy water or lemonade (plus in German bars, where they think differently about these drinks to Britain, it's probably more acceptable for an adult to have an alcohol-free beer than a soft drink). But I was thinking about the social appropriateness of alcohol-free beer, not the taste.

What if the person sitting next to you at work opened a bottle of alcohol-free beer at their desk. It’s in a glass bottle and looks exactly the same as an alcoholic version, only it’s not going to get you drunk. Would the boss look upon them and their bottle suspiciously? Would they wonder what was going on? On seeing that it was alcohol-free would they mind it being drunk or would they be concerned?

If my colleague opened a bottle and drank it at their desk, I’d wonder what was going on in a reaction that would be very different to them opening a Red Bull, Coke or even one of those old school cans of Shandy, even though they are all non-alcoholic drinks (the 0.5% ABV in the shandy can probably be overlooked...).

My questions are more rhetorical than direct; I’m throwing out my thoughts because I’m still unsure about them. The thing is, it looks just like beer and is, in a way, a pseudo-beer, something to make you think you’ve got a delicious, intoxicating drink when in fact it’s just a taste-a-like. 

So is an alcohol-free ‘beer’ a drink you can open at any time? Could you have it with breakfast (or before), in a meeting at work, during a game of football or should it be kept in the same situations as alcoholic beer and therefore does it come attached to beer’s social prejudices? And what about seeing a pregnant woman drinking it: ok or unnerving?

Top image from here

Berlin Brewpubs

I wasn’t prepared for the snow that blanketed Berlin the night before I arrived. Getting off the train, into the shock of the cold, trying to drag a suitcase while slipping over in my Converse every few steps, was an unexpected introduction to what was already going to be an unknown beer stop.

Where Munich has its big old beer halls and Cologne has its little glasses of kolsch, Berlin doesn’t have a beer-thing other than the touristy syrup-and-straw glasses of Berliner Weisse. As a bigger, broader, more progressive and modern city than others in Germany I had no idea what it’d be like as a beer destination, so it was brilliantly exciting to find some of the best brewpubs I’ve drunk in.

Hops & Barley is a simple glass-fronted space surrounded by bars, shops and houses. It’s warm inside with the small brewkit to the right of the central bar – it has the feel of a late-night cafe with a cool crowd. Five brews are available so I ordered a 0.1l taster of each. The unfiltered pilsner was creamy and smooth, lemony and bitter with a pithy aroma; the weizen was bubblegum and spice; somewhere between a dunkel and schwarzbier, the dark lager was smooth with a hint of chocolate and a background char-like roastiness; there’s a cider which was deliciously tart and dry yet still sweet and tasted like crunching into a fresh apple; and there’s always a seasonal beer which was a Bohemian pilsner when I was there, though it was chubby compared to the house pilsner, which was so good I couldn’t leave without drinking a pint.

Out of Hops & Barley and Schalander is about a 15 minute walk. A bold and bright corner bar, the 150l kit sits in the middle of the modern space. They brew a pils, dunkel and weiss plus specials, usually classic German styles. The unfiltered pils was smooth with a hint of apple-like sweetness before a long, dry bitterness which demanded you drank more. The dunkel was full of floral aromas backed with a charred savouriness, which was kind-of odd in an interesting way – I preferred the pils. To go with the beer, they serve delicious flammkuchen.

Eschenbrau is on the opposite side of the city but a direct train from Schalander made it an easy journey. Less easy is finding the brewery when you arrive... Near the station, a couple of left turns and then you enter what looks like some green space between a block of student flats and from there it’s on your left. The copper brewkit is upstairs and glows bright while downstairs it’s cosy and friendly with a young student crowd and bright illustrations on the walls. The unfiltered pilsner is really excellent: creamy, smooth and fruity, then a big bite of bitterness that’s like chewing on lemon pith. The dunkel is equally good: toasty caramel, roasted stone fruit but very little dark malt flavour making it smooth and gulpable. This is a cool place to sit and drink a few fresh beers.

Not far from Eschenbrau is BrewBaker which isn’t quite a brewpub, but it’s close – the beer is brewed in the same space as a beer bar, though brewery and bar have different owners... In a covered market area, the brewery is soon to shift a couple of stalls over but the beers will still be available at the bar where you can expect a modern mix of beers including an IPA, stout, red lager, bocks, a ginger beer, Berliner weisse, specials and a pilsner. This is the craft side of Berlin brewing where you’re just as likely to find a double IPA as a dunkel.

Back in the centre of the city, Marcus Brau is a tiny brewpub with its little kit neatly placed behind the bar. They make a pilsner and a dunkel and both are excellent. The pils is very pale with a waving hint of sweetness cut by the lasting dry bitterness. The dunkel is smooth and creamy with subtle chocolate biscuit notes. Inconspicuous from the outside, you’ll be really glad you stopped for a beer.

There are others: Mitte and Lemke have the same owners and are minutes from each other (Marcus Brau is about two-minutes from both, also), though the spaces they are in are very different: one dominates a shopping centre while the other is cosy in a railway arch. I didn’t love any of their beers, though Lemke’s seasonal Marzen was pretty good. And there are ones which I didn’t get to visit, like Heiden Peters and Sudstern, as both were closed while I was there.

As the last stop on a week-long trip around Germany, I’d already drunk a lot of very good beer. Without the traditions of other places, Berlin is where you can find some classic beers brewed in a modern way by some excellent small breweries. I already want to return. 

Hop OZ97a: Rejected in 1960, Rejoiced in 2015?

For the Spring issue of CAMRA’s BEER magazine I wrote a feature on English hops. It looked at how the industry has shrunk to a size which threatens its ongoing existence but shows an interesting future through the research, development and breeding which takes place at Wye Hops in Kent.

Through Wye Hops, and its previous incarnation Wye College, seven new English hop varieties have become commercially available in the last 12 years. These new varieties have arrived thanks to cross-breeding and the application of new research into pest resistance and growing systems (hedgerow hops, for example, which grow lower to the ground than the typical climbing bines).

Through this breeding, around 1,400 unique seedlings a year are produced, each with potential to eventually become a variety. The vast majority don’t make it, of course, but each year a few progress to further testing – the whole process of picking the parent hops to breed with to picking a decent harvest to brew with takes 10 years. Endeavour has just come through that process and others are close behind.

There’s also the National Hop Collection (NHC), which holds 780 different varieties; some are female (it’s the female hops which are used by brewers) and some are male (just used for breeding). Some of the hops in the NHC were bred and developed years ago only to be rejected as being undesirable to brewers, others have simply been used as breeding hops because of positive qualities they give in the process without being tested for their own brewing characteristics.

Now Dr Peter Darby and his small team at Wye Hops are exploring the NHC to see what they can find, looking at rejected old varieties and testing ‘breeding’ hops for their brewing potential. One of those hops is currently known as ‘GP75’. It was used as a breeding hop years ago because of its high resistance to powdery mildew without ever having an oil analysis or flavour assessment made on it. When Dr Darby tested it he found a grapefruit-like citrus depth. Growers in the British Hop Association liked it, there was a successful pilot brew with the hop and it’s now close to farm-scale propagation.

This brings us to OZ97a.

As the issue of BEER was published, Pressure Drop Brewery in North London released a beer with the 2012 harvest of an English hop called OZ97a, or the mystery ‘Hop X’ as the brewery were calling it. Sean Ayling of Pig & Porter has also brewed a beer with the 2011 batch of this hop, as has a homebrewer in Kent. Those breweries got the hops from Kent Brewery who, in 2011, were invited to the NHC and to see the British Hop Association’s breeding programme. Being a local brewery they were interested in the local hops; being a brewery who like American-style IPAs, they were especially interested in punchy, fruity flavours from local hops.

“It is our firm belief that there is nothing to stop UK hops equalling or even surpassing the qualities of [hop varieties from US, Australia and New Zealand], and that if only we could help to encourage experimentation and development we could see a revival in the hop industry in Kent and beyond,” says Paul Herbert of Kent Brewery.

“While walking around the fields [of the National Hop Collection] I had a eureka! moment when I smelt one of the cones. Peter made a note of this and a few months later asked if we would like to take the remainder from that harvest for brewing.” With just two plants of each variety in the collection, some went for further analysis while the rest went to Kent Brewery. A little while later Paul gave some to a local homebrewer but by this time the hops were “quite old and dry” and the results weren’t as expected.  When he was also offered the 2012 harvest, “it was immediately obvious that these had much greater potential.”

As there was such a small volume of hops, Paul passed them on to Pressure Drop who used them in a simple pale ale recipes on their compact 50 litre system. “The results were exactly as we hoped, producing a taste and aroma that could stand up to the very best that the New World can throw at us.” Different batches – from the homebrew to Sean Ayling to Pressure Drop – have given apricot, pineapple, lychee, grapefruit, melon and tangerine. When I tried beers brewed by Sean and Pressure Drop I tasted all of those things and more. It’s delicate, elegant, wonderfully fragrant, fruity and utterly intriguing.   

So what’s the story behind OZ97a?

Professor Salmon ran the breeding programme at Wye College from 1906 to 1953. His work “laid the foundations for all hop breeding during the twentieth century,” writes Dr Darby in Brewery History. Prof Salmon gave us Brewers Gold, Northern Brewer, Bullion, Bramling Cross and others. Dr Darby explains: “OZ97a is a selection from Professor Salmon’s breeding programme. It was a seedling growing at position OZ97 but it was the second interesting seedling to be planted at that position over the period of his programme and so he added the letter ‘a’ to the code to distinguish it.” By the time Dr Ray Neve took over the breeding programme (he gave us Target, Challenger, Northdown and others) from Prof Salmon in 1953, OZ97a had already progressed to farm trials, which is lucky because Dr Neve re-organised the whole breeding garden and numbering system and the hop could’ve been lost. OZ97a was assessed in 1957 and 1958 and reached commercialisation stage in 1959, when it was sent for brewing trials.

Dr Darby, via British Hops

The report for this trial, published in 1960, a year after Prof Salmon died, considered three potential new varieties for their brewing qualities: one of these was released as Early Choice; another was “considered acceptable but, being sensitive to wilt disease and mosaic virus, found little favour with growers”; while OZ97a was “considered unacceptable to brewers in 1960 and it was concluded that ‘these brewing trials indicate that a number of brewers would not be willing to use this hop even at 25% replacement of their normal grist’ because ‘it has strong American flavour.’”

(Dr Darby doesn’t yet know the heritage of OZ97a but will be visiting the Wye College archives in May to find out when the original crossbreed was made and to read any of Prof Salmon’s notes on the variety. After this he’ll know more about the hops used to produce it)

“With such a damning report and without Salmon to champion his variety, it was put in the germplasm collection,” leaving just two plants. From there it’s been a fortunate survivor, making it through an outbreak of wilt disease in 1978 and a major cull of breeding materials that Dr Darby was forced to make in 2006 when Wye College was closed and Wye Hops Ltd was set up (there’s too much history to go into here but it involves government funding being dropped for Wye College and the British hop breeding industry effectively becoming self-funded as a new company, Wye Hops Ltd).

This is where it loops back into the work of Dr Darby, Wye Hops and the British Hop Association because “the hop collection is being systematically re-assessed by the British Hop Association [and] there are many hops in the collection which have never been assessed for their aroma or whose aroma was rejected in the past but where modern craft brewing might find more interest.” In 2012, the part of the collection housing OZ97a was part of the re-assessment and it was picked out blind as being suitable for tests as a dried hop, along with 12 others. “Dried samples of this hop were submitted to a panel of assessors at Charles Faram and the verdict was that it had intense pineapple and citrus notes: it was highlighted as one of the hops to consider further.” It was also selected independently by a group assessing the aroma potential of hops in the collection. Along with Paul at Kent Brewery, that makes three groups who have all selected the same hop from blind tests. “This cannot be a coincidence,” says Dr Darby.

OZ97a was rejected by the standards of 1960 but could be of considerable interest to brewers now and it will be discussed by the British Hop Association in April. “I would be quietly confident that they will arrange for OZ97a to be propagated for planting on a farm or two,” says Dr Darby. “If they do go ahead with it then it will be propagated during 2013 from our two plants in the collection and planted in 2014. Cropping will be from 2015 onwards. Until then, all that can be available is the small amount from the two mature plants in our collection.”

How many other hops were rejected 50 years ago which might be appealing to brewers today? How many wonderful varieties simply haven’t been tested for their flavour or aroma yet? Add to this the potential to then use these varieties in the breeding programme and it’s an exciting prospect. As brewers and drinkers get enticed by the juicy, fruity flavours of American and New Zealand hops, OZ97a lets us know that we can also grow them here in Britain.

The conclusion of my story in BEER was that British brewers need to use British hops or face losing them. There’s a lot being done in the industry to develop exciting new varieties and OZ97a and GP75 aren’t the only ones that we should be looking at. Hopefully the next few years are going to be very interesting and produce some wonderful new British hops with flavour profiles we haven’t tasted before, complimenting the traditional varieties we’re rightly famous for.