Beer and Brewer Magazine

A pilgrimage to the beer flavour frontline makes Willie Simpson a hoppy man.

If barley is the beating heart of beer, then hops, surely, represent the soul. And it's not quite right to say that beer is made from hops, because their contribution is far more subtle. Hops are the seasoning in the amber nectar, providing the counterpoint, the X-factor, the pizzazz, and, well... hops are downright sexy.

Some mainstream brewers use a mere whiff of the stuff and it is possible, even, to make beer entirely without hops - it would still be refreshing and nourishing, just a bit boring. In Shakespeare's time, English ale was unhopped and, indeed, there was great suspicion when this new-fangled beer ingredient was first introduced to the Brits by the Flemish.

But the Poms soon climbed aboard the hop bandwagon and it became an integral part of traditional "real ale" styles like bitter and pale ale which evolved in more recent times. At one point, hops were grown in some 40 different English counties.

Hops, in fact, can be grown in just about any sub-tropical region but, over time, their optimum flavour and bittering potential was found within a narrow band of cooler climate latitudes. Famous hop-growing areas evolved in such locations - East Kent, Zatec in Bohemia, Hallertau (Bavaria), the USA's Yakima Valley, Nelson (New Zealand) and the Derwent Valley in southern Tasmania, among them.

Soon after I moved to Tasmania a decade or so ago, I made a bee-line out to Bushy Park Hop Estates in the Derwent Valley on the first day of the annual hop harvest. I expected colour and excitement - something like the frenzy of winemaking at the beginning of vintage - but there was nothing frenetic about it, at all. The hop vines were cut down, tractored into a huge shed where the flowers were stripped, then kiln-dried and baled up. The whole thing seemed to go like clockwork which is, basically, what happens every year, because the hardy hop plant is not as susceptible to whims of climate and terroir as the fickle grape.

Tassie being a rather small place, I soon met a woman called Rose who turned out to be a neighbour of some new friends of mine. "Oh, you must meet my husband," Rose said, after learning that I wrote about beer for a living, "he's a hop breeder."

And, sure enough, it wasn't long before I crossed paths with Grey Leggett, whose job involved creating new hop strains for the brewing industry. What Grey didn't know about hops probably wasn't worth knowing and, as research manager at Bushy Park, he spent a great deal of time in their "living museum" of every hop variety that has ever been grown in Tasmania.

Grey even knew how to grow hop shoots which the Belgians, in particular, prize as a great delicacy when they are briefly available each year. Once, I sat next to him at a memorable lunch hosted by Lion Nathan chief brewer Bill Taylor at the exclusive Claude's restaurant in Sydney. Master chef Tim Pak Poy had designed a whole menu around the humble hop shoot and that afternoon we ate buttered hops, abalone and hops, sweet and spiced hops.... all washed with different beers, naturally enough.

A couple of years later, I bought a patch of dirt and a few sheds in a sleepy one-pub town in northern Tasmania and thought it would be fun to grow some hops of my own. I rang Grey Leggett in Hobart and he ensured a handful of Cascade, Golding and Fuggle plants soon lobbed onto my doorstep.

Each spring I watch the first shoots punch up out of the ground. A few weeks later I entwine around strings three of the strongest ones, which commence to climb at an alarming rate right up until Christmas Day. At this point they stop reaching for the sun and concentrate their energies into producing flowers (or cones) full of sticky resins. Around March, I snip off the plump cones, air-dry them and whack a bunch into a batch of hoppy "harvest festival" home-brewed ale (the rest are stored in my freezer for later use).

Of course, Cascade Brewery has cottoned on to the marketing possibilities of such a beer with their annual First Harvest Ale, out now, brewed with the first of the new season's Tasmanian-grown hops and barley. This year, I was back down at Bushy Park's hopfields with Cascade head brewer Max Burslem for the first day of the harvest, which had a poignant twist for Grey Leggett had passed away last year, aged 53 years.

Significantly, Cascade recognised his contribution to the hop growing and brewing industries by selecting three new strains - all developed by Grey - for the 2007 Cascade First Harvest Ale. Hop Products Australia then named one of the varieties Leggett.

Rose Leggett and her teenage children, Miles and Diana, were on hand this year to witness the harvesting of Leggett hops and to tip the first sackful of flowers into the brewing kettle at Cascade. I look forward to tasting this year's Cascade First Harvest Ale and knowing that Grey Leggett's distinguished legacy lives on.

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