Hops have for many years now been a very uncertain investment for those who, in England, devote capital to the growing, drying, and marketing of this crop. In some years a fortune may be made, in some years a dead loss, in many a bare return of expenditure. Hence, it is not surprising that English hop-growers should wish for legislation which shall make their business more secure by taxing the hops produced in other countries, and imported by our brewers. The whole subject of “hops” is a very complicated one. It is the fact that every plant and animal cultivated by civilised man has led to the accumulation of an astonishing amount of detailed knowledge and experience in each case, and that there are increasing difficulties and surprises in regard to varieties, and the competition of new supplies brought from all quarters of the globe. New areas of cultivation, new methods of transport, new fashion and taste continually disturb, and even destroy, old-established industries. It is for statesmen to consider how far the remorseless current of unforeseen changes should be checked and manipulated, so as to prevent disaster in the old-established and flourishing industries of the countryside.

The hop (called Humulus lupulus by botanists) is a native of this country, and of the more temperate parts of Europe. The Greeks and Romans never made “beer,” and were unacquainted with the use of the hop. More than a thousand years ago the German and Scandinavian peoples made use of various fragrant herbs (sweet gale, bark of tamarisk and oak) to flavour the sweet beer which they brewed from malted grain, just as borage, cucumber, and other plants are still used to flavour “cups.” Wild hops were used, amongst other herbs, for this purpose, and gradually—but only gradually—became the favourite source of flavour. The hop owes its selection not merely to its bitter tonic quality, but also to its wonderful and most delicate perfume. Not only that, but the hop is found to be effective in checking continued fermentation and souring—and also to have a narcotic sleep-producing quality, for which it is still used medicinally. Distinct chemical compounds are found in hops to which these several properties are due. A warm “hop-pillow”—a pillow stuffed with dried hop-flowers—has given, and still gives, sleep to many a wakeful countryman. The older use of other fragrant plants in the making of beer survives in some foreign beers, such as the Norwegian ale, the beer of Louvain, and the “green” spruce-beer of Jena.

Hops were first cultivated with a view to obtaining varieties which would furnish abundant and large, well-flavoured flower-heads. The flower-heads are “cones,” consisting of numerous minute flowers, protected by overlapping green-coloured scales or bracts. The cultivated hop was brought to this country in the time of Henry VIII, and the cultivation of hops in hop-gardens and the skilful drying of the flower-heads in large bulk was commenced, and regulated by law. The male or pollen-producing hop-vine is distinct from the female seed-bearing hop-vine; it is the female flower-cone which carries the valuable fragrant and resinous products which the brewer desires. Hops are artificially propagated by root-cuttings, and it is interesting to note that the hop-grower finds that it is not desirable to allow the female flowers to be fertilised, since, although the hops weigh more after the setting of the seed, the valuable extractive substances contained in the flower are diminished, used up in the growth of the seed. Hence, often only one male hop-vine to every 200 female hop-vines is allowed in a hop-garden.

It does not follow because a plant is a native of a given country that it can be easily cultivated anywhere in that country, or that its finest cultivated varieties will be hardy. Only a few limited territories (owing to the nature of the soil, climate, and exposure) in Germany (chiefly in Bavaria), and in Kent, Sussex, Worcestershire, and Herefordshire, seem to be really favourable to hop-growing in Europe. Certain parts of the Pacific coast of the United States have of late years proved a very successful ground, although hops were introduced from Europe and first cultivated with considerable success in the State of New York. The same dangers and troubles attend the hop-crop in all these regions. These are blight, red-spider, mildew and mould, besides several less important insect pests. The hop-blight, or “black-blight,” is a plant-louse or aphis (Fig. 55) like the rose-aphis, and does great and increasing damage to the hop-crop in England, destroying the young and tender shoots in the months of June and July. In 1882 the hop-crop was reduced from 459,000 cwt. (of the preceding year) to 115,000 cwt. by this insect, and the wages paid for hop-picking from £350,000 to £150,000. These figures give an idea both of the damage done by blight and of the amount and value of the annual crop, for the mere picking of which so large a payment is made. Red-spider is a small mite or acarid which has done a good deal of damage in Kent. But mildew and mould are more serious. These are due to a delicate, thread-like kind of fungus, which spreads on the leaf. Many kinds are known in various parts of the world and on various plants. They may grow on one kind of plant without doing injury to it, but if they get on to another, cause deadly destruction of the foliage. It was an otherwise harmless mould, or leaf-fungus, which destroyed the coffee plantations of Ceylon. It had lived in the Ceylon forests on other plants without attracting notice; but when the coffee tree was introduced and cultivated in large areas, this little fungus seized on it, grew with terrible activity, and received the name “vastatrix” from the botanists who traced its history, and showed that it was the destroyer of the coffee plantations.

Hop-growers are constantly contending with these pests in the same way as other growers of crops have to contend with similar pests, but the hop-growers have the more difficult and delicate “patient” to steer through its diseases. The finest kinds of hops are not robust; it is a chance whether or no they will suffer from a wet and cold season, or other irregularity of climate, to such a degree as to fall ready victims to blight and mildew. Yet they pay better, provided the season is favourable, and so the grower risks planting the fine, delicate variety instead of being content with the more certain but smaller profits yielded by a more robust variety of hop. The hop-lice, or blight insects, are destroyed by washing with soft soap and quassia—a process requiring, even when a machine is used, a good deal of care and labour. Mildew and mould are destroyed and also prevented by dusting the hop-vines in hot summer weather with finely powdered sulphur. But both diseases can be combated by keeping the source of infection away from the hop-garden. The mould-fungus can be checked by burning all leaves and plants attacked by it within the hop-garden. If the infected leaves are left to rot they carry on the parasitic fungus to a new season.

An interesting fact has been discovered about the hop-blight aphis (called by zoologists Phorodon humuli). It appears that the winter brood of this little insect (when the hop-vine has died down) deposit their eggs on the bark of the sloe (the wild plum), and also that any cultivated plum trees serve them for the same purpose. When the hop is dead they must of necessity get nourishment and shelter from the plum tree. Clearly, then, if you can keep all plum trees at a distance of half a mile from your hop-garden you will render it very difficult, if not impossible, for the blight aphis to carry on from season to season. It will rarely, if ever, travel half a mile, and not in any number. But hop-growers have not always the control of the cultivation for half a mile around their hop-fields, though large growers should be able to acquire it. The skilful grower even finds it useful to leave one or two plum trees in the hop-field, so as to attract the winter brood of the blight aphis to them, and then he falls upon the devastating but minute rascals with quassia and other poisons, and ensures their destruction. The increase of plum orchards in the neighbourhood of hop-gardens is probably a chief cause of the increased loss by hop-blight of late years in Kent.

The hop-louse has other enemies besides the grower. These are the lady-birds (less prettily called “lady-bugs”), which feed greedily on the parasites, so that when the hop-grower sees plenty of them on a hop-vine he does not trouble to wash it. And there are other predaceous insects which tend to keep the hop-lice down. Cultivation and excessive production have resulted in putting, as it were, too heavy a task upon the natural enemies of the pest, whilst the more delicate but valuable varieties of hop cannot withstand the attacks of blight, which less valuable varieties would tolerate without fatal injury.

Another complicated and difficult problem for the hop-grower is the “curing” of the hops when gathered. He has to arrange to grow a number of varieties which will not be all ready for picking at the same moment, so that the hop-pickers may be employed for some six weeks, and gather each kind at the exact time of ripeness. Then the gathered hops have to be “dried” and “cured.” In Germany (where the highest-priced hops are produced) small cultivators dry them in the sun, and they are “cured” by the purchaser, but in England they are dried in kilns (called “oasts” in Kent) near the hop-grounds. They are cured with sulphur fumes on the spot as soon as dried. The object of the drying and curing is quickly to get rid of the water, which forms 75 per cent. of the weight of the green flower-heads, but is reduced by drying to 10 per cent., and to destroy the “mould” (fungus) which may be present, and to keep the hops free from new access of mould by the slight deposit of sulphur fumes on their surface. The drying and fumigating require a great deal of skill, and a fine crop may be injured or even rendered worthless by want of care, rapidity, and judgment in treating the freshly gathered flower-cones. It is said that it takes years to acquire the art, and that skilled hop-curers are more difficult to obtain than formerly.

The natural difficulties and fluctuations with which the English hop-grower has to contend are made far more serious by the fact that he does not know what will be the yield of the American and German hop-plantations, and so cannot prepare beforehand for the demands of the market. It appears that ice-storage is now being made use of in some districts to hold over any excess of produce of particular kinds of hop beyond the special demand for those kinds. But a formidable source of trouble exists (and, it appears, must always exist) in the enormous changes and expansion of the brewing industry in all parts of the globe. It is actually the case that there has been a greatly increased and unforeseen demand for hops of less highly developed aroma, for the purpose of brewing light ales with little of the perfume given by the finest and hitherto most highly priced hops. So that, having expended skill and money to produce the finest hops, and having been favoured by the weather, a grower may find that his pains have been thrown away, and that there is a sudden falling-off in the demand for the beautiful high-priced crop which he has gathered in. There is no remedy for these world-wide fluctuations in the market, and the only way in which the grower can protect himself is by combining with others to procure information from every part of the world as to the probable production and the probable demand of the various qualities of hops a year or more in advance of his planting. More has been done in America and in Germany in this way than in England, and it is probable that the future success or failure of hop-growing in this country depends more on the possibility of obtaining correct information in regard to the tendencies of production in all hop-growing countries, and in regard to the demand in all the brewing industries of the world, than on anything else.

This brief sketch of the hop-growing industry is sufficient to show what a very difficult problem is before those who desire to take legislative measures for the preservation of the old industry of the hop-garden in this country. But it must not be at once assumed, because the case is a difficult and complicated one, that nothing can be done, and that the beautiful hop-vines and the finest hops are necessarily to be banished from the English soil.