Fergus, our head of production, has just returned from a hop trip to Australia and has shared tales from his travels. We get a glimpse at what’s brewing down under, and the other side of his brother’s garden fence.
I’ve just returned from a trip to Australia to check out the Australian hop harvest, courtesy of Hop Products Australia (HPA) and Barth Haas.
We’ve been using Aussie hops since 2012, when we dipped our toes in with two varieties called Topaz and Summer, for a beer called Topaz Gold. The following year, we launched Dry Hopped Lager, and we brewed it with Galaxy. It was a beer naming phase we’ll call ‘say what you see.’
I should probably start by saying, ‘we love English hops,’ and we make sure we use English hops in every beer that we brew, but hops grown in Australia, like those grown in America, produce flavours and aromas that we don’t get in UK-grown hops, or at least not to the same intensity.
Galaxy, with its peach and passionfruit flavours, is central to what makes Dry Hopped Lager the beer it is, so it’s very important to us to ensure its as consistent as possible. Brewing is a constant search for control in a sea of uncertainty, so having a hop variety that reliably delivers the flavours we want, gives us another foothold.
For most of the hops we buy, we select particular batches from particular farms to try and actively choose those that best display the characteristics of that variety. However, Australian hop producers have taken a different approach. For Galaxy, they have stopped buyers selecting particular lots. Instead, they have focused their efforts on making that variety as consistent as possible. So that when you buy Galaxy hops, you know what you are getting, with as little deviation from the ideal as possible.
And it’s working. Our experience chimes with the graphs presented by HPA, confirming that over the past few years, the variety has become…. dependable. They have done this by getting the farms to focus their efforts on consistency across all the growing regions and eliminating the crops that sit outside of the norm. This egalitarian approach means that individual brewers have had to relinquish their control of selecting particular lots, and by doing so we all get to reap the reward of consistency, which is what we wanted in the first place.
The trip involved several brewers from across Europe and America. We all convened in Melbourne before setting off for Bright, a town in Northeast Victoria, about 3 ½ hrs drive outside Melbourne. That was the base for the next few days, while we visited the hop farms and HPA’s brand-new pelleting facility, which they were still unwrapping as we arrived!
On the first night in Bright, we visited the original Bright Brewery for a harvest festival, where I ran into Richard Adamson of Young Henrys Brewery in Sydney. He was in town to collect hops for his green hop beer. Richard had brewed with us back in 2017, so it was a delight to see him. Even somewhere as expansive as Australia, brewing is a small world, I thought.
The world got substantially smaller when Rich introduced me to one of his brewing students, who I discovered during conversation, lived right next door to my brother in Sydney. Right next door isn’t an exaggeration, when I visited him at the end of my trip, I peered over the fence into his garden.
At the hop farms we walked amongst the rows of Galaxy, Eclipse, Ella, Topaz, Enigma and Vic Secret. We also got to try the new experimental varieties, which will get some limited release this year. We toured the hop-harvesting facilities, from field through to baling. From here, the bales were sent to the new pelletising facility, which from my admittedly small pool of reference, was by far the most advanced pelleting plant I have seen. The plant is dedicated to ensuring that those hops are packed in a way that preserves the flavours and aromas, whilst delivering on all the food safety and traceability requirements that you’d expect from a modern facility.
After Bright, we headed to Beechworth, a lovely town about an hour outside of Bright. It instantly reminded me of old American western towns, which is perhaps not surprising as much of it was built during the Gold Rush of the 1800’s.
Photo credit: James Davidson
Photo credit: James Davidson
We were there for a Brewing Symposium put together by the Independent Brewers Association of Australia, where I gave a talk about Adnams to the assembled brewers. Australia is our second or third biggest export market, so many brewers there were familiar with the name, if not the complete story of Adnams - which I did my best to rectify. I listened to many of the talks during the day and heard the familiar challenges brewers are facing across the world.
The last full day of the hop trip was to the High-Country Hop Festival organised by Ben at the Bridge Road Brewers in Beechworth. We had sent a few kegs over to serve at the festival, and after some small confusion about which keg connectors were needed (a little Heath Robinson interlude), we finally found the correct equipment and served a few pints of Adnams at what was, a fantastic beer festival in a beautiful setting.
The next day I was going to Sydney to see my brother and peer over his fence, but before that I had time to meet someone who used to live in Southwold. They were living in Australia and had made the trip to the beer festival to drink their favourite beer of ours, Mosaic Pale Ale, which fortunately was one of the three beers we had sent to Australia.
Small world!