Have green-hop beers lost the plot?

I was in Canterbury on Friday, visiting the city’s annual Food & Drink Festival, which also happens to coincide with the launch of Kent Green Hop Beer Fortnight. I’d missed the previous two festivals due to clashes with family holidays, so it was good to renew my acquaintance with the event.

As in previous years the festival was held in Canterbury’s Dane John Gardens, which lie in the shadow of the city’s medieval walls. The event seemed larger than I remember it, occupying the entire length of this historic park, with a huge array of different food stalls, selling all sorts of tasty offerings. There was also the beers of course, along with a selection of Kentish ciders, plus various artisan gins and liqueurs.

As well as a large marque, with a bar featuring all the Green Hop beers available at the festival,  several breweries had stands of their own, offering keg and bottles beers, alongside their cask, Green Hop ales. I noticed stalls from Old Dairy, Goody Ales, plus a large tent for those who enjoy beers from Kent's largest, and Britain's oldest brewery - Shepherd Neame.

The only fly in the ointment was the weather, which was “changeable,” with plenty of passing showers along with the odd longer spell of rain, but the damp conditions didn’t
seem to dampen people’s enthusiasm.

Possibly with an eye to the weather forecast, the organisers had provided an open-sided marquee, which provided shelter for both performers and the audience on the “busker stage” and the Green Hop beers were also housed in a much larger tent than I recall from previous years.

So what about the beers? First, the majority of the cask offerings were Green Hop Beers, and I counted a total of 27 Kentish brewers offering their wares. It was disappointing to discover there had been a problem with local favourite Larkin’s, but it was made up for by the 4.2% Fuggles Bitter from Old Dairy Brewery. This for me, was definitely beer of the festival, and I know that several of my companions felt the same.

Old Dairy will definitely be one to watch in the Green Hop category at my local branch’s Beer Festival, which is run jointly with local Heritage Railway group, the Spa Valley Railway. The Tenterden-based brewery have won the Green Hop Beer competition at the festival, on at least two previous occasions, including last year, and from what we tasted on Friday, it would be no surprise to see them picking up another award.

Although the majority of the GHBs were either bitters or pale ales, there were a couple of green-hoped porters. To my mind anyway, the concept doesn’t work as well with dark beers, as it does with lighter ones. This is because the dry, roast coffee and chocolate flavours in beers such as porter and stout, tend to overwhelm the more delicate floral and fruity bitterness associated with pale coloured ones. In addition, the roasted malts used to provide both flavour and colour in darker beers, often impart a bitterness of their own. This can often be quite harsh and over-whelming.

This brings me onto my final point, which was that whilst all the green-hopped beers I tried on Friday were good, there was little to distinguish them from their normal dry-hop counterparts. Several of my companions said the same thing, and we think this is because over the course of  the decade or so that green hopped beers have been produced, brewers have become more adept at using hops in their natural “wet” state.

We all remembered that many of those initial green-hopped beers had a rich resinous taste, with an almost oily texture to them, (you could actually feel the hops resins coating your tongue and the roof of your mouth). Many brewers now seem to have cut down on the amount of wet hops used. We suspect they were adding them at the same rate to the brew-kettle, as they would the normal dried hops.

So by cutting the amount of green hops used to brew this uniquely seasonal type of beer, they have unwittingly removed the very characteristics that attracted drinkers to green-hopped beers in the first place. Effectively they have turned a unique and very time of year dependent beer, into just a another run of the mill and rather ordinary one.

This doesn’t detract from what was an excellent day out, and from a long weekend which showcases the very best that Kent has to offer in terms of food and drink. Combine this with the normally benign, early autumn weather, and the splendid setting of Canterbury’s Dane John Gardens, and you have a uniquely English experience, which is well worth putting in your diary.

 

Footnote: for details of the process by which Green Hop beers are produced, and the rules governing the times between harvesting and adding to the brew-kettle, please follow this link.

Please also be aware that similar “wet” hop beers are now produced at harvest time, in other hop-growing regions of the world, including Belgium, the Czech Republic and the USA.

It would be interesting to discover whether these beers have suffered a similar loss in the very properties which make them so special, and so unique.