Hops are the female flower cones, also known as strobiles, of the hop plant (Humulus lupulus). The hop is part of the family Cannabaceae, which also includes the genus Cannabis (hemp). They are used primarily as a flavoring and stability agent in beer, though hops are also used for various purposes in other beverages and herbal medicine. The first documented use of hops in beer as a bittering agent is from the eleventh century. Prior to this period, brewers used whatever bitter herbs and flowers were around. Dandelion, burdock root, marigold and heather were often used prior to the discovery of hops. Hops are used extensively in brewing today for their many purported benefits, including balancing the sweetness of the malt with bitterness, contributing a variety of desirable flavors and aromas, and having an antibiotic effect that favors the activity of brewer's yeast over less desirable microorganisms.

History

The first recorded reference to hops was by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia. The first documented instance of hop cultivation was in 736, in the Hallertau region of present-day Germany, although the first mention of the use of hops in brewing in that country was 1079. Not until the thirteenth century in Germany did hops begin to start threatening the use of gruit for flavoring. In Britain, hopped beer was first imported from Holland around 1400; however, hops were initially condemned in 1519 as a "wicked and pernicious weed". In 1471, Norwich, England banned the plant from the use in the brewing of beer, and it wasn't until 1524 that hops were first grown in southeast England. It was another century before hop cultivation began in the present-day United States in 1629.

World production

Important production centers are the Hallertau Valley in Germany (which, in 2006, had more hop-growing area than any other country in the world), and the Yakima (Washington) and Willamette (Oregon) valleys in the United States. The principal production centres in the UK are in Kent (which produces Kent Goldings hops) and Worcestershire. Essentially all of the harvested hops are used in beer making.

Methods

Hop bines are a climbing plant, similar to beans and peas in that respect. 'Training' the bines up strings or wires supports plants, allowing the plants significantly greater growth with the same sunlight profile. Energy that would have been required to build structural cells is also freed for crop growth.

Until mechanisation, the need for massed labor at harvest time meant hop-growing had a big social impact. For example, many of those hop picking in Kent, a hop region first mechanised in the 1960s, were Eastenders. For them, the annual migration meant not just money in the family pocket but a welcome break from the grime and smoke of London. Whole families would come down on special trains and live in hoppers' huts and gradients for most of September, even the smallest children helping in the fields.