A nursery is born

Saul and I have been juggling multiple projects since touching down at JFK on April 30th and hightailing it to Syracuse to settle up with our tenant, move into our house, and get our enterprise off the ground. One of our first endeavors was building a hops nursery, which we accomplished with much help from Saul's parents, Fran and Bob, who are also our neighbors now. Fran, a plant scientist by profession, is our agricultural consultant.

Witness the transformation.

The cleared site located in Fran and Bob's backyard. Also where Saul and I camped the first two weeks of May as we scrubbed our house.

Spring has sprung and we are tilling in compost. Tent gone. We moved in (somewhat).

Finally, the soil is nice and dry. Saul works the auger like a pro. Time to get our hops out of the hoop house and into the ground.

Our open-air hoop house was great in early May. Here are Saul and Fran stringing the hops up with coconut coir.

But just a few weeks later, it was getting pretty crowded. These fast-growing hops are more than ready for a new home!

The posts. 32 ten-foot black locust posts from our land. Cut by Bob.

A couple hours later... posts are up!

One very busy day later, fence is up, top wire is up, beds are raised, and 65 plants occupying the first three rows are in the ground! Magnum, Chinook, Sterling, Perle, Columbus, Fuggle, East Kent Golding, and a NY "mystery" variety from a friend of a friend's farm. Another 120 plants coming mid-June will fill the last five rows.

Our hops jungle! The plants are loving their new home, and so are we.

There we have it. Our sweet little hops nursery. It really is a pleasure to stroll down the alleyways and scout our hops.

Just why are we bothering with a hops nursery? Isn't it extra work to start plants in a nursery then move them somewhere else? It is indeed, but this hops nursery holds many advantages for us.

First of all, it buys us some time. We really wanted to get plants in the ground this year because hops take several years to get a real yield. However, our permanent yard is far from ready. A nursery allows us to get our hops going at the same time as we prepare our yard. Right now, as our baby hops are thriving in our nursery, our first half-acre permanent yard is enjoying a buckwheat cover crop that is smothering out weeds and will act as a green manure. By the time we are done with soil preparations, our baby plants will have a worthy home to move into next year.

A second advantage has to do with trialing. This year, we are growing fifteen different varieties of hops in our nursery. We don't necessarily expect all these varieties to make it into our permanent yard. Though a true trial takes several years, we'll have a sense of how the different varieties do on our land after this growing season. This connects to one of my main takeaways from my time with Peter Darby in the UK: It's all about how specific varieties do on your specific land. The only way to really find out what varieties grow well here is to grow them. This is especially true in our area considering that the old New York hops industry was basically a Cluster monoculture. NY growers are just beginning to figure out what grows well here. And since NY is such a big and varied state, what grows well in one part may not in another. A nursery is a good place for local trial and error to start.

Also, disease prevention is on our minds. We do not want to put infected plants into our permanent yard. Our nursery will act as a buffer, giving us a year to scout and spot potential problems with plants before they graduate to our big yard. In addition, our nursery gives us potential for in-house propagation. If our plants are good and robust, we can divide them to stock our hop yard. This year, we are growing about 185 plants. Next year, our half-acre will hold about 400 plants. We may be able to make up some of this difference without spending money on more plants. Sounds good to us! 

Another great thing about the nursery is how it gave us the first-hand experience of building a hop trellis system on a small scale. Good preparation for the 18-foot poles that await us this fall! 

Chiltern Brewery

Chiltern Brewery is the brewery where David Smith arranged for me to work in order to gain some professional experience after taking his course.  It's in a region of England called the Chilterns, which are rolling hills northwest of London.  Beautiful scenery, and a major metropolitan area to provide plenty of weekenders, make for a good location for a brewery.

David made a thoughtful choice when he arranged for me to work at Chiltern.  There are a lot of parallels between our plans, and what they've accomplished since their founding way back in 1980.  Richard and Lesley Jenkinson founded the brewery, turning their backs on their urban London existence, embracing their love of beer and converting an old farm into a brewery.  Their mission was to brew delicious, interesting beers using only English ingredients.  33 years later, and that's what they are doing at Chiltern every day.  These guys are craft beer pioneers.  Richard and Lesley's son Tom grew up running around the brewery and today he runs it.  The beers he creates are by and large traditional English fare, but they are anything but boring.

Starting a brewery under the Farm Brewery license here in New York gives us similar self-imposed limitations to the all English ingredients mantra at Chiltern.  The brewers in the UK are blessed by having what many consider to be the world's best malt at their fingertips.  English hops are great too, but a lot of British brewers are currently tantalizing their customers' taste buds with real ale recipes spiced up with loads of new world hops.  To compete with the exotic flavors of New Zealand and Washington State the brewers at Chiltern rely on their unique yeast strain to build balanced and creative beers using time tested, traditional English ingredients.  It works.  They also have a really unique barrel program that I'll write about in a future post. 

I learned a lot and gained a lot of inspiration working at Chiltern.  After almost a month of working back here in the USA, reclaiming the old farm that will house Griffin Hill, and getting our hop yard going, I miss having a delicious pint of cask-conditioned Chiltern Ale at the end of a long day of work.  That's why the first beer I brewed since we got back was a traditional English Mild...brewed with all New York State grown ingredients!*

Cheers!

*Well, almost all .  The US grown Fuggles hops I used were grown out west.  Our Fuggle plants are looking great though.  Oh yeah, and I tossed in a little bit of Crystal Malt from out west too.

A Canterbury Tale

 Saul recently shared his thinking on malt. I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about another essential ingredient in beer. Hops. While in the UK, I had the opportunity to visit four hop farms, a hop research facility, and a hop merchant- all within a week! My head is still spinning.

My tour de hops started in Canterbury, Kent. This was an appropriate place to begin because it is not only a historic hop growing region, but also the home of Wye Hops, Ltd., a hop research center and subsidiary of the British Hop Association. Wye Hops carries on the pioneering hop breeding program of Wye College, an agricultural school that sadly closed in 2006.

If you love hops, beer, or most especially hoppy beer, you should know about Wye College. It's highly likely that you have enjoyed a brew made with hops that owe at least partial parentage to varieties developed at Wye. Without Wye College, there would be no Centennial, Citra, Crystal, Sorachi Ace, Nugget, Galena, Magnum, and many others. The list goes on and on.

The influence of Wye College's breeding program extends far beyond their specific varietal legacy. Why? Because Wye College, specifically Professor E. S. Salmon, the scientist who founded its breeding program in 1906, revolutionized modern hop breeding. It is not a stretch to say that Salmon lay the groundwork for all 20th century hop breeding. I had the chance to learn more directly from Dr. Peter Darby, head of Wye Hops, Ltd. and, from 1984 until its closing, the third and final head of the breeding program at Wye College. He carries on the torch!

The morning I arrived at Wye Hops, Dr. Darby gave me a simplified botanical history of hops to contextualize Salmon's achievement. I'll do the same here.

Hops, humulus lupulus, come from central China. Some spread west to Europe. Some spread east to Japan and North America. The Asian and North American hops tended to split and split. They had huge genetic diversity. The European hops were more stable with far less diversity. Now, fast forward to Kent at the start of the 20th Century. Hops had already been cultivated here for over 350 years! It had long been understood that some individual hop plants had better qualities for brewing than others. Growers practiced methods of selecting and propagating superior plants. As a result, many grower-selected varieties were established, such as Mr. Fuggle's hop and Mr. Golding's hop, later called Fuggles and Goldings. At the same time, breeding programs utilizing the "new" science of genetics were popping up in hop-growing countries in response to demands from growers and brewers.

The conventional breeding practice at the time was to cross the best individuals from established varieties. The thinking was that crossing the best with the best would lead to something even better. Salmon, however, bucked this orthodoxy and did something revolutionary that took hop breeding in a whole new direction. He crossed an open pollinated British hop with a wild North American hop. In the scientific community, this was practically heresy! How could a wild hop, from North America no less, produce a superior offspring? Salmon was doing something completely new in hop breeding. Brilliantly, he reunited the genetic material of the western and eastern split-offs. Salmon realized that more genetic material meant more opportunities to breed for higher alpha acid content, desirable aromas, increased yield, and pest and disease resistance.

Diversity is a beautiful thing!   

Using his innovative techniques, Salmon went on to develop three principal varieties: Brewer's Gold (1934), Bullion (1938), and Northern Brewer (1944). It can be estimated that over 50% of today's world hop acreage comprises varieties derived from these three varieties. Professor Salmon was clearly onto something! Today, crossing commercial varieties with wild varieties is a standard hop breeding practice.

An interesting side note. A similar reunion of the western and eastern genetics occurred by chance early in US hop growing history with Cluster, the historic hop of New York State back when we were the center of US hop production. Cluster came about when European hops brought over in the 17th century crossed with native North American wild hops. Another successful genetic reunion, until powdery mildew hit!

Digesting Salmon's fascinating story and marveling at the history of British hop breeding and its lasting impact on hops and beer worldwide was how my day in Canterbury began.  This story was covered in just the first half hour of two days with Peter Darby, an absolute wealth of information. The day continued with a tour of China Farm, the commercial hop farm which houses Wye Hops and its experimental hop garden. I saw Dr. Darby's 2009-2011 crosses in the field. I saw the official National Hop Collection, also located on China Farm. It contains over 120 named varieties and represents 200-300 years of British hop growing history. Just the beginnings of shoots were visible in the fields, but it was still impressive to see.

Next, we visited the greenhouse where Wye Hops starts its experimental crosses. Currently, there are 18,000 genetically unique seedlings in the greenhouse. In their quest for disease-resistant varieties, Dr. Darby and his team systematically expose the seedlings to downy mildew. This brings their numbers down to 3000 healthy seedlings. Next, the remaining seedlings get a powdery mildew treatment, which further reduces their numbers to 1400 viable seedlings. As we inspected the seedlings, Dr. Darby mentioned how "inbreeding" is common in hop breeding. Mother-son crosses and brother-sister crosses can produce odd but desirable results. Citra is an example of a successful brother-sister cross. Dr. Darby had employed this technique with some of the crosses in front of us.

Touring the Wye Hops enterprise that morning, I felt like the luckiest novice hop grower in the world! It was the beginning of many fruitful days of learning about this alluring climbing plant. My hope is to gradually translate all the information I amassed into useful bites for the (re)emerging New York hop industry, including our own little Onondaga County hop farm currently in the making.

Stay tuned!

A rainbow in Canterbury