Shame they're pulling out Pride of Ringwood to plant other varieties. Not. Couldn't happen to a dodgier hop
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Boutique brews provide a jump for hops
By: Sue Neales, Rural Reporter
March 13, 2013
Veteran hop-picker Brian Butler samples a whiff of the increasingly popular boutique product in Tasmania's Derwent Valley. Picture: Peter Mathew Source: The Australian
THE global boom in "craft" beers has rescued one of Tasmania's most historic rural industries from financial collapse.
Small brewing companies around the world are hopping over each other to secure 10 new niche varieties of speciality hops grown only in Tasmania's fertile Derwent Valley, northwest of Hobart.
After nearly 180 years of hop-growing, Tasmania's traditional hop gardens have gone upmarket and boutique.
The focus of hop growing in Tasmania and Victoria's Ovens Valley has changed in just five years from providing some of the world's biggest brewers with their basic "bittering" agent to growing unusual hops packed with trendy new flavours, aromas and rare essential oil tastes.
Major producer Hop Products Australia, which grows 85 per cent of hops in Australia, has pulled out hectares of its once-prized "Pride of Ringwood" variety used by mass brewers to balance the sweetness of barley malt with a touch of bitterness.
They have been replaced with locally bred and privately owned hop varieties with evocative, sensual names such as Ella, Galaxy, Enigma, Topaz and Summer that impart "lingering overtones" of peach, passionfruit, melon and apricot to their beers.
As one of the oldest hop-pickers in the Derwent Valley, Brian Butler has seen plenty of changes in his 48 years harvesting the dangling hop around the aptly named small towns of Plenty and Bushy Park.
Originally the bines, with their alpha acid-filled cones, or hop flowers he harvested were all destined for the mass brewing kettles of Australia's biggest beer manufacturers such as Foster's, Carlton & United, Castlemaine, Boags and Cascade.
But yesterday, as the Tasmanian hop harvest began in earnest, Mr Butler was slowly handpicking cones worth four times as much from experimental new varieties that enable boutique brewers to create their own unique beers.
Hop Products Australia chief executive Tim Lord said change had been forced on the hop gardens of Australia when, five years ago, it became a case of do something different or go under.
He said Hop Products Australia, owned by German hop trading giant Barth-Haas, was losing more than $1 million a year and was unsustainably selling hops at below their cost of production to compete on world markets.
Mr Lord knew the Tasmanian hop industry was in danger of losing its major source of income if it competed only in the bulk hop market sector with hop growers from Europe and the US, where labour and transport is cheaper.
"People aren't drinking your Foster's, VB, XXXX and Cascade beers like they used to; the growth market even then was clearly in craft beers," he said.
Craft brewers make smaller volumes of beers than the brewing giants, but these small brewers, whose numbers have surged in the past decade -- there are more than 1000 craft beers now available in Britain and 200 small breweries such as Stone & Wood and Little Creatures in Australia -- use dried hop products in several stages of their beer making and in much greater quantities per unit volume of beer produced than mass brewers do.
